InsaneJournal

AJATT
I came across the blog All Japanese All The Time (ironically, it's all in English) the other day, and I'm still making my way through everything written there. Basically, the guy became fluent in Japanese in 18 months, studying on his own, never having visited Japan. Last year, I had a similar idea as this guy's, in trying to expose myself to as much Japanese as I could, essentially bringing Japan here and immersing myself in the language. Granted, it didn't last too long, 'cause those were the high school days.

It was also never quite as intense as AJATT, where the idea is to almost completely forsake English. You're supposed to think of yourself like a baby, really - get lots of input (listening and reading), begin understanding, and the output (speaking and writing) will come later.

I want to try it, even though forsaking English (no English websites, no English TV, etc.) seems pretty difficult. But I'll just work up to that gradually; after all, I just got back on the horse less than a week ago by using iKnow - now I'm up to 212 words "studied" and can work at a pace of about 200 words/week (plus it's helping my kanji recognition; I can always go here to get an estimate of the number). When I do yoga in the morning, I put on the news (using LiveStation). Since coming upon AJATT, I've started pulling my J-pop collection back together to listen to as much as possible, and rewatched the first episode of Last Friends last night. Then I switched LiveStation to Tokyo FM, and left it on while I slept. I almost feel ready to start reading again. I downloaded Skype (I could never get either of my mics to work with it on Windows, but of course it's perfect on my Mac), so when I feel ready to talk, I can find some people - maybe even native speakers - to chat with.

Admittedly, I'm not doing the exact AJATT method, which starts with learning the Jouyou kanji using the Heiseg method...I've tried that, it just bores and frustrates me. I'm picking up kanji left and right at iKnow just fine. Phase 2 is kana, which I already know. Phase 3 is learn 10,000 sentences (although he admits he only did 7,500), which iKnow has covered for me, as well, since the official lists have 6,000 sentences (one for each word) so far.

Now for some math...it'll take 7.5 months (late August) to go through the official iKnow lists and learn 6,000 words, 6,000 sentences, and god knows how many kanji (definitely more than the 400ish I know now...) As a low estimate. I should be at JLPT level 2 at that rate!

No pressure. I'm just going to take this one day at a time. Especially considering I have neither started my second semester nor gotten that part-time job I need. But I'll try to update my progress once a month. This should be fun =)