Stuff

Have been doing very little on the Japanese front in the second half of this year, though have occasionally been playing the tapes of OUP's Take Off In Japanese (published in 2000), which I picked up from a charity shop for about £2.  Listening to audio always taxes my patience but it's a habit I need to get into, and it's actually a nicely-prepared course.

Have also tried going back to Obenkyo on my Android phone to see if any of the kanji I crammed about a year ago have stuck.  Some of them have...

Also still dabbling with O'Neill and Yanada's An Introduction to Written Japanese, which I periodically start studying again, always running into difficulty around chapters 5 or 6 (of 20).  I suppose Japanese is a language that isn't really suited to a single-volume graded reader—you just can't drill and repeat all the kanji enough in a single book—but I ought to stick at it, and I'm sort of planning to throw myself at it yet again in spare moments over Christmas and the New Year.