Hi there.

I’ve been rubbish again and haven’t updated in a few weeks. I swear, I have good reason though. Or at least an attempt at an excuse. 

First of all you may have noticed the Heisig widget (courtesy of Dani Wright over at ダニーの日本語) that has been sitting dormant in the sidebar to the right (or, as the case may be, haven’t if you are using Explorer… Scroll down for the time being, I’m trying to work out why the layout is screwy in IE). Well, that number has slowly started increasing as of late, as my study has been increasing. I’ve been endeavouring to get into work early and finishing early enough to do some evening study. The improvement in the weather, as well as having a flat with a garden combined with getting my laptop working again has really helped with my motivation.

The method I’m using for study for the time being is Heisig. For those that don’t know, Heisig is a nmemonic method for learning the kanji, which advocates a divide and conquer strategy by associating a single English keyword with each kanji only, for all Jōyō kanji, before learning anything else such as On-Yomi, Kun-yomi, compounds e.t.c.

While there are plenty of critisisms of this method (it doesn’t teach you how to combine kanji into compounds, it doesn’t build your vocabulary nor it doesn’t teach you pronunciation amongst other things) I’ve found Heisig useful in the past both as a motivational tool and to give basic comprehension and this is why I am choosing it again to study (as well as Khatzumoto over at AJATT recommending it as the first stage). Additionally, I think it’s one of the more effective methods to study outside of Japan,  where the more normal context of everyday conversation, MSN, email and other general aspects of immersion tend to be lacking and a more formalised approach is required.

I’m intending to switch to more JLPT orientated study come September ready to attempt JLPT 2 come December. I failed JLPT3 by half a percent a couple of years ago, so I reckon JLPT2 is well within my grasp for this year. 

The second reason I’ve been slacking off this blog is I’ve been doing a bit of XNA programming the last few days in an aid to keep my programming skills alive, and to make my portfolio look a little healthier. I’m intending to help out a friend over at Front Room Coder in a few days time, and maybe port his iPhone game over to XNA, so I’ll definitely be keeping busy. I also have a couple more posts in the pipeline for this blog, so here’s hoping my updates won’t be quite as sparse from now on!

Until the next post, best of luck with your endeavours readers!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.