Instead of NaNoWriMo

Another of my periodic attempts to reboot my interest in Japanese: everyone else seems to be doing NaNoWriMo so instead I'm going to try (again) to work my way through the 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese.  There are 30 lessons in it, and 30 days in the month.  I've done the first seven or so lessons several times but always got bogged down.

There are some good reasons not to keep banging my head against this book: it's rather dated, even in the early stages clearly tries to explain too much at once and gets into a muddle, and uses the old romanization.  But I still rather like it since it uses a large vocabulary and seems to cover most of the grammar.  I might have a go at the accompanying volume An Introduction To Written Japanese if I fancy something different (I tend to get about 5 or 6 lessons into this, then lose the thread).  I suppose I should fiddle with the Obenkyo kanji-flashcard app too when I have the time.

Obenkyo

Have been drilling kanji with the Obenkyo Android app and am very impressed; started with the easiest JLPT level 5 kanji and have made it up to working through level 2 at the moment.  This has only taken about 4 days of a couple of hours' work a day.  Levels 5 to 1 contain 79/166/367/367/1231 kanji and there's an Additional Kanji list of 130 (mainly recent additions to the Joyo list, I think).  In kanji-drilling mode, the app shows you an English definition, say "study, learning, science", and you have to choose the correct kanji 学 from the 6 shown.  Or you can do it the other way around and given a kanji, choose the definition from a list of 6.  The 'definitions' usually include something very close to a Heisig keyword, but as seen in the example above, are a bit longer and woolier and wordier.  This means there's often some overlap between definitions for different kanji, which is something that you just have to deal with.  On and Kun readings are also given.  There's even a draw-the-kanji challenge; the AI that judges whether or not you've done it properly is imperfect but frankly it's amazing that it works as well as it does.  For the 79 level 1 kanji I drilled the drawing of the kanji, but on the later levels I didn't bother; I just wanted to fix the kanji in visual memory.

There are a few imperfections: in particular there seems to be a fixed internal ordering to the kanji and the 6 kanji (1 correct, 5 incorrect) to choose from appear in that order, so you subconsciously learn that such-and-such a difficult definition is likely to be at the beginning of the kanji selection list, or at the end.  The weighted-random selection of kanji gives pretty good spaced repetition, but it might be useful to have the option for extra-hard kanji selection: select the defined kanji from among deliberately-chosen almost-but-not-quite-right ones.

I worked through about a quarter or a third of Heisig several times over the past three years and always got bored.  The knowledge has proved useful for drilling with Obenkyo, though I can't remember all of the Heisig names for radicals and have had to resort to making up my own.  Perhaps a revisit to Heisig will be necessary before I move onto the big final block of 1231 kanji and then the additional ones.

Readings will have to follow later!