Corpora

This 280KB text file at Leeds University gives the 15,000 commonest words from a corpus of Japanese text, for a vague value of 'words' (there are some odd symbols and punctuation quite high up the list).  Might be useful.  It'd be mildly interesting to do statistical crunches of the range of kanji used in the list.  Many more corpora for various languages here.

Vague plan...

Try to work through approximately the first half of the 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese with reasonable diligence and not get bogged down round chapters 8 or 9 as I usually do.  Keep notes and try to remember vocabulary and grammar nuggets; also try to keep translating in head from TYJ's transliteration to Hepburn and vice versa.  When I'm confident enough, start alternating study of later chapters of TYJ with chapters of the O'Neill and Yanada An Introduction to Written Japanese.  Keep drilling the kana so they don't slip away from me as they usually do.  Learn the kanji as O'Neill and Yanada introduce them, but use Heisig for review and to peek ahead and learn meanings (though not readings) of kanji in advance.  Once I've finished both books, err, do something else.  Might throw Jorden and Chaplin's Reading Japanese into the mix too.  Then maybe the Miller A Japanese Reader?

I do need to throw myself at Japanese a bit, if only because I'm finding reading the news these days pretty depressing and want to steer myself away from it.  Reading a newspaper once a day or listening to the radio news ought to be enough to keep me informed without wallowing in awfulness.  Burying myself in language textbooks from the 50s and 60s is one way out of it.

I'd like to have seen some sort of solid achievement by, say, the end of August.

Stopping and starting

Have been stopping and starting a lot of things this year without actually completing very much.  Japanese, Chinese, French, German.  All stuff that I've tinkered with many times in the past.  It's a destructive habit as it means I'm surrounded with reminders of unfinished projects, and re-starting is always a dismal reminder of a previous failure.  I get very enthusiastic about things for about three days—I'm a classic three-day monk—then it tails off rather rapidly.  I was really keen on getting my French up to scratch a week or two ago, wasn't I?

Jana Fadness has recently posted on the subject of Just Do Something; ie, don't be paralysed by choices.  Paralysis by choices seems a particular danger for Japanese learners, as there are several different and apparently legitimate ways to go about it.  Work through a romanised introductory book, or use a kana text?  Learn all the kanji first of all using Heisig?  Perhaps go further and even do the readings of the kanji too before doing anything else?  Stick to audio until the conversational language is mastered?  Try to do everything at once?  A lot of choices.

Obenkyo for Android

Just installed it on my phone and it looks like a nice little tool for learning and drilling kanji, kana and vocabulary.  I had browsed the Android store for Japanese-learning stuff but had overlooked this for some reason; was finally directed to it by a comment on this thread on Charles Stross's blog.  Chances are of course that it'll turn out to be just another very useful thing that I don't actually use.  We shall see.

One thing my Android phone is useful for is listening to interesting radio while out and about; I frequently listen to Ban Ban Radio (Kakogawa) or FM West Tokyo when I'm going somewhere.  I rarely understand much but can at least make out syllables and particles, which is a start.

Tai otoshi

Watched a little bit of the Olympic Judo on iPlayer yesterday; the commentator mentioned a Tai otoshi.  I haven't heard anyone mention that throw since I stopped my very brief experiment with Judo 30 years ago.  Odd to think that I used to have a vocabulary of Japanese Judo terms in my head, almost all of which I've now forgotten.