Back in the year

Yo, the new year finally starts for me. I already had some fun, but from today on I'll be serious.

Then, I'm setting some goals:

1st: Putting all the joyo in my anki cards. There about ~250 kanji that are still not there. I want to finish it in 2 months, so I'll need about ~5 kanji/day. Sounds it will be easy.

2nd: Fix my writing. I'm doing recognition only. It makes wonders for reading comprehension, but I need to work on my handwriting. I'm able to write with the IME, but I want more than that. My plan at this point is simply start copying the harder sentences during my anki reviews. After some more experimentation, I'll decide something better.

3rd: Fluency. I think I'm doing good on this one. I'm breezing trough my 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 novel, reading the slashdot.jp daily, acompaining the headlines from 読売新聞 and TBS and a few more blogs, like the awesome http://nihongodaybyday.blogspot.com/

Well, that's it.

Vacations, more or less.

No, this is not a post to excuse myself for not using a SRS again. I'm still using it daily. I have not skipped a review since my last post. I'm just adding fewer cards.

5 days ago, my Haruhi Suzumiya novels arrived, and I'm reading the first volume. I'm doing 3-4 pages and watching/listening only 1 houre of japanese for day only. I'm only adding sentences for the words I want to know really baddly, so it means only 4-5 new sentences/day.

The great thing is: I'm doing fine!
I can read these novels without much effort, for laizure. And I'm loving them. The plot is really nice and all, but these novels have something that really impressed me:
The ultra long sentences it cointains. It is one thing that until now I ignored and I'm still not used to it, so it is gonna be great training.

Short pause and reacceleration

The listening the news project is somewhat halted. I'll go back to it soon enough.

I did not reviewed my sentences and RTK decks for 3 days. The following day, I had 500+ sentences to review, mainly from the mass adds from the hollydays. The RTK review was very small and it is back on track. The sentences review is probably gonna be back on track today. For 6 days I only added 3 sentences.

But I did not stopped with the fun stuff. I started a new experiment. I got Code Geass again, now with subtitles. It was not on purpose. It is harder to find raw series as soon as they get out of fashion.

So I started to watch them with the subs.

For my admiration the lyrics translation is not that great. There is even a mounstruous transcription mistake. Also I've seen many other mistakes in the series.

Well, what am I doing with subbed anime? I'm watching it slowly. I let it go while I get 100% of understanding. When I hear something I cannot figure out, I go back 10 secs and read the subs. Then I go back and hear it again. Most of the times I get that "click" and figure out the meaning of the word that I could not understand. Then I go back again and listen to it one more time.

Because of that, I can say that I understood 100% of the first 5 episode of Code Geass season 1. Yeah, it is cheatting. But hey, it gives me motivation!

The audio is also in the mp3. Only today I listened to episodes 1 to 5 two more times each.