July 12, 2005

Japanese: Yay

So the good news is that I'm still resolved to try to pass JLPT 2. The bad news is that Japanese Certificate Level 3 was not advertised in the paper. Does this mean that it's not being offered? Must ring to find out.

Okay: results of phone call. Operation Motto Motto Renshuu (Much More Practice) is go. Sasaki-sensei is still teaching (yay!). Japanese Certificate 2 and 3 are now two semesters each (they used to be one semester each), so they're half way through. I think that I'm past Certificate 2, so I'll turn up to Certificate 3 and see how it goes. Hopefully a bajillion hours of anime watching and manga reading will make up for two semesters of actual study. Exciting!

I've been tearing through the low level kanji, using the new software I've bought for the purpose: ReadWrite Kanji from Declan Software. It's not perfect (particularly the way it uses the printed way of writing the characters instead of the handwritten style), but it suits me. It takes no prisoners: you must correctly identify the onyomi, kunyomi, stroke order and English meaning of each character before "graduating" from that character. If you get any of these wrong, the character stays on your list to review. And it's got a cute little countdown of how many characters you've "graduated" -- so far I'm at 44 of the 1945 official kanji.

The printed vs. handwriting thing is fairly serious though. It doesn't affect stroke order, but it definitely changes how the character looks. Good examples are iu for speak and hairu for enter. Aaaand at some point I'll put some pictures up. (God knows I won't be scanning in my practice book, because my handwriting sux0rs.)

Also, my house is full of cool packages: a bunch of tshirts for Emma-sensei that she ordered from Think Geek; a bunch of dvds (I think) for Xopher from the UK (his family in London is fine, thank goodness); and finally and best of all for me -- a bunch of uber-cool random anime stuff that dadbot sent me. Whoot! My favourite is probably the microfibre towel with Roy Mustang (and his staff) of Fullmetal Alchemist on it. It's so geeky and excellent.

JLPT Level 2. Days remaining: 145. Kanji nailed: 44. Kanji remaining: 966.

4 comments:

Polysemous said...

966 scared little Kanji sitting on a wall.
966 scared little Kanji sitting on a wall.

:~)

Polysemous said...

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmkay.

If you can't actually post (due to all the Kanji nailing you're doing) perhaps you can respond with a death count?
:~)

emmajeans said...

How was class last night?
Which level-group did you join?
Tell me more, tell me more!

Polysemous said...

Want more real life!! More! Real! Life!

Leave the poor little kanji alone for a moment, and post!

:~)