I am, in fact, still alive...

Thanks for checking in, though!

I personally think that the best excuse for not holding up one's end of a daily dedication is "homework" or "school". But, in this case, the dog didn't eat my homework. My homework ate... my time. *forced guffaw*

But, I am not here for excuses! I am here to give a nutshell edition of how I have been following my schedule for the past week or so, to take the place of my slightly longer explanation of part I of my Japanese Box. (I should give it a better name.)

First of all, writing and speaking on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays have been going exceptionally well. The only trouble I am having so far is what to review on Sundays' "Review Day". I find myself not being able to absorb information by just looking over them two times; in fact I probably am an auditory learner. I ended up just turning back to pages I had done on Monday, etc. and re-writing my notes on those days (which didn't help much at all).

 I also have trouble creating quizzes and tests for myself! If I know the material already on the test-- well, first of all, it takes away the authenticity of being able to have not studied some of the material (which is something I do often-- it's all a part of the fun), and secondly, it's not much of a review if I wrote the questions and answered them myself as well, unless I wrote the test a month in advance! Which would mean, I'd have to start planning for the test as soon as I begin a new unit. (I wonder if that's what real teachers do. In fact-- I should ask them.)

I used to have great fun creating Hiragana and Katakana quizzes for myself, which was much easier because I could structure the quiz without having known any of the characters yet:

Yeah, it's not such a great picture. 

Sorry...

But, as you can well imagine, I used lots of creativity and variety in my quizzes.

Just how creative do you think one can get with learning this kind of material? :(

Beside that, I have been doing pretty well with this new schedule! P.S. I am LOVING the book "Kanji Pictographix", which is a book that helps you easily memorize well over 1,000 Kanji pictographs, as well as both the Kana syllabaries. If you are looking into the study of Japanese writing, I highly recommend this book!

Have a great week!

--JP Otaku