Certified First Class with Restricted Delivery

Mailed off some key paperwork today. Whoo... I might finally get the green lights to start the process of moving back down to San Diego. Hopefully it'll happen tomorrow so I can go ahead and start calling places... if it doesn't... I won't get anything till Monday probably =/

Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 8
Group 1: 31/31 (100%)
Group 2: 23/25 (92%)
Total Kanji learned: 175

I guess I should explain what these statistics represent. Obviously I'm currently studying Japanese. While my level should be intermediate (I was classified as advanced beginner or something like that at the beginning of my trip), I figure recovering the basics yet one more time would be beneficial especially since I'm approaching a self-learning system. Pimsleur is a learn by audio tapes language program and seems to be pretty popular. I do have a few problems with the content as the first 8 lessons have pretty much taught me how to approach a young japanese woman and invite her on a date. Well... I suppose I don't have that much of a problem with it to some extent, but the PC side of me (along with some other unsavory experiences with the stereotypical westerners in Japan) baulks at it. I've checked other 'audio tapes' and the experiences are more or less similar. Pimsleur is by no means advanced material. I have 3 levels and at the end of the 2nd level or at 30 hours of lessons (each lesson is 30 minutes long) I could understand maybe 70% of the dialogue. The plus side is that the pronunciation is quite excellent and the dialogue is at a native speaker's pace... which is quite fast even for my experienced beginners tongue (ha ha... how's that for an oxymoron). I'm not sure how close to fluency these 45 hours of audio lessons will get me, but at the very least I should improve my speaking ability while expanding my tenneigo vocabulary. They also cover keigo by lesson 60!

On the written side of things, I'm relying on Heisig's 'Remember the Kanji' which uses a 1:1 kanji to keyword match to teach you how to write a kanji using visual mnemonics. Heisig claims that you can learn how to write about 2000 standard use kanji (quite a number of them are not practical at all but are taught nonetheless) in a month if you pretty much dedicate yourself to the program. Heisig himself claims to have developed this system and learned the kanji within a similar space of time. I attempted the Heisig method over the summer in Japan and managed to stall at about 500 kanji... eventually kanji retention became an unsustainable burden because I was trying to learn 100 kanji a day (yes... I got up to 500 in about a week or two) and it was starting to corrode my abroad experience. During this time I was using a website called Review the Kanji which has a pretty flashcard program that uses Leithner's learning method. The idea behind the method is quite simple. Once you memorize the desired information, you test it at increasingly longer intervals. If you fail, the timing is reset to 0 and you start again from the bottom. This method is useful in that you minimize the amount of 'testing' you have to do in order to maximize the time spent on other things, like learning more stuff. The timings are broken down as follows:

Group 1: 0 Days
Group 2: 3 Days
Group 3: 1 week
Group 4: 2 weeks
Group 5: 1 month
Group 6: 2 months
Group 7: 4 months
Group 8: 8 months

Obviously this follows a somewhat exponential curve on the fucked up increments we use to represent time.
While in Japan I didn't follow the Leithner method, I just studied the entire deck... which is horribly inefficient when the deck grows to 500 cards. Hopefully it'll be better this time around. In an effort to shorten the time it takes to include new kanji into my working Japanese toolset, I plan on starting the learning process on kanji reading. The downside to Heisig is that the keyword matched to a kanji only suggests the meaning of the kanji on its own. There is no reading (which is the difficult part of Japanese kanji as opposed to Chinese hanji which typically only has one pronunciation) and sometimes the readings don't even match a standard definition of the kanji. I figure the sooner I can master these kanji, the smoother the vocabulary learning will be. The thing about Japanese is that there are a fair amount of synonyms which are in-differentiable without kanji. Furthermore, reading large blocks of kana is a bitch. Having kanji delineating words from particles and even foreign derived words from native Japanese words makes communicating in writing so much more convenient and really, complete reliance on kana just doesn't work... but I suppose its better than relying on romaji.

It is my plan to follow a similar course for Cantonese. While I am pretty close to being a native speaker (I've spoken a broken version of Cantonese all my life) it is by no means complete or correct. If you were to throw me out of a plane in Hong Kong I could survive, but I'd be severely limited in understanding. I can't watch the news or listen to the radio because the Cantonese used in these forms of media are out of my reach at the moment. I have several grammatical and vocabulary issues since I learned the basic day to day language as opposed to actually having an education in it... think pre-Civil Rights Movement Black English... then take away the worthless schools they had back then. The trip through Cantonese is meant to serve as a spacer so that I can solidify Japanese before moving on to Mandarin.

Here are the other goals in order of approximate priority:
German
French
Spanish
Hindi (or Pali)