I must confess to having sidetracked a bit from my original homepage project. A combination of intense diaper changing and Anton refusing to fall asleep in his stroller led me to take a look at my Japanese Anki deck. I ended up scratching an itch I had for learning Japanese. So I dusted off my Genki and dragged out my Pimsleur tracks and headed back into the land of Nihongo.
I have a long term goal to become proficient enough to actually read books in Japanese and watch movies. Training my spoken Japanese will be more difficult to do in spare moments so it is a secondary goal. We will see how it goes down the line.
My current skill level is still very much a beginner. I can read the kana and a smattering of basic phrases come naturally but beyond that I come up short. I’ve always been frustrated at the mountain of a learning curve that is picking up Kanji.
So to try something new I will attempt an ambitious lightning climb of the Kanji mountain.
Learn the meaning and Onyomi (‘Chinese’ pronunciation) of all 1,700 Kanji in KanjiDamage in 100 days. By the end of the 100 days I will have successfully completed the challenge if I manage to recall both the meaning and Onyomi of at least 95% of the 1,700 Kanji.
I have started my challenge Wednesday the 12th of May 2015 and the day of Judgment is Friday the 21st of August.
With such an ambitious challenge I believe motivation is key. To help I have decided (and Laura gave her blessing!) to put up a shiny new IPad 2 Air with 64GB of space and cellular connection as the grand prize for completing the Challenge.
I’m not 100% certain it will end up being an iOS tablet and not an Android. In either case it will serve as both a great gadget to hopefully read some more Japanese and look up difficult Kanji or phrases. It doesn’t hurt that Amanda is also certain to love finally having a tablet in the family. Can it be considered child abuse that she can’t play around with one yet?
To rub the grand prize in my face I’ve switched the background of my phone so every time I pick it up it will be there waiting.
To keep up the pace I have weekly milestones of going through at least 7 * 17 = 119 Kanji a week. I’ll use this blog to keep track of how far I’ve gotten perhaps even add a fancy graph of some sort.
I will reward myself for meeting each weekly milestone with a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I discovered this great ale while living in San Diego, sadly they are fiendishly expensive in my local supermarket. The positive angle is that this makes them a rare treat and a great prize.
Finally this blog will help my shout my crazy goal to the world and hopefully shame me into not failing what I have set out to do. Although I have always been able to convince myself that what everyone else thinks is just that; what everyone else thinks.
Hopefully I will be able to squeeze in the time and stick with it.
Wish me luck!