Letters From Iwo Jima

Just watched it.  Good stuff.  (I'm trying to remember the last Clint Eastwood-directed film that I saw... could it actually have been In The Line Of Fire, 20 years ago?  Time flies.)

Could I comprehend much?  Not really; caught a few simple verbs, nouns, particles and numbers.  I seem to be getting into the habit of forgetting to listen very carefully to the dialogue and looking at the scenery to see which kanji I recognise; eg, the 兵 on the armband of the Kempeitai which I sort-of-recognised but couldn't quite place.

Heisig seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit this week; I'm getting less neurotic about trying to do some Japanese every day since it's now pretty clear that I won't have got my act together enough by December to attempt one of the highish levels of the JLPT, so that will have to wait until next July, or maybe later, so the JLPT-in-five-months strapline at the top of the blog might get sheepishly removed or amusingly subverted soon.  I do want to sit JLPT at some stage but I don't want it to become an end in itself; I don't want to be spending most of my learning time specifically targetting the sorts of vocabulary and grammatical issues that turn up in JLPT.  I want a good reading ability in Japanese and good listening comprehension, but I'm primarily judging myself against my ability with authentic Japanese material rather than exam materials.