今日は! Over the past few weeks I've been very interested in raising my Japanese listening aptitude. I realized that podcasts were a great way to do it. I had tried to find some before, but was never successful. I finally realized the key, search with Japanese terms. I searched for テレビ、ニュース、and 文化, and these are some of the great podcasts I found.

• 小西克哉 松本ともこ ストリーム
  • TBS Radio Stream Podcast
  • 3 New Podcasts Every Weekday
    • Chat with Shingo, et al.
    • News Round-up
    • 花道 Opinion Column
      
• 読売ニュース ポッドキャスト : YOMIURI ONLINE（読売新聞)
  • This is a longer news podcast put out by the Yomiuri Online Shimbun. Usually 20mins in length, and is extremely similar to the next podcast, except in Japanese.
• BBC Radio NewsPod
  • What's an English podcast doing here? Simple, it is very helpful early on to know what to expect when you're training listening. 例えば、if you hear about the stock market crash effects from China then you know to listen for things like 経済、中国、etc. when you listen to the 日本語のニュースのポッドキャスと。
• 文化系トークラジオ Life
  • This is a discussion of Japanese culture. It's usually put out once a day, and they discuss a new topic every week. It's extremely interesting to hear native Japanese talk about Japanese culture and their perceptions of it.
• Japan Talk (Japundit Podcast)
  • This is yet another English podcast in my list, but this one is too good to pass up. It's a weekly review of Japanese news with explanation from an American who has lived in Japan for the last 40 years. It's extremely informative, reliable, and interesting.

The best part about all of these is that they're all available on iTunes, and all of them except Japan Talk are every week day. That's more than an hour of new Japanese material everyday to learn from. Go forth, become linguistically aware. Mazel tov.

 Since I set down my Japanese regimen a few weeks ago I've found that, unfortunately, I've not stuck to it. Usually when someone makes this statement it's a bad sign, but for me I feel it's kind of a good sign. It's not that I've not accomplished anything, but it's just that I'm tackling it in a different way.

 My daily routine as I set it down a few weeks ago has been simplified. I cut out everything except kanji study. I do as much reading training as I need to in order to get by for classes, but right now I'm drilling through kanji. I'm spending literally every free moment between classes, before classes, before bed etc. I am not exagerrating. On weekends I've spent 8 hours straight studying kanji because I view it as sort of an all or nothing thing with the most common characters.

 Since kanji are so frequently used in compounds, knowing only a few of them doesn't get you anywhere. You really have to piece together each kanji in the compound. So knowing the first few thousand kanji as quickly as possible is very important for recognition. The more kanji I drill through now, the less I will be required to drill later.

 I'm already much further ahead of the game than my peers. I broke 1,000 kanji yesterday. I can write and recognize the general meaning of every single one of them, and more importantly I can break them down and tell you the meaning of their constituent parts. There may be thousands upon thousands of kanji in the world, but there are a far fewer number of primitives. If you're able to recognize all of them, then kanji no longer appear as a jumble of lines. They just appear as a certain combination of pictures much like letters in a word. Learning kanji in this way feels a lot like learning how to spell. 

 This rapid kanji acquisition mission I've been on is really all about breaking into written Japanese as a whole. It's about demystifying something foreign. My knee-jerk reaction before I started really studying the kanji was that I automatically didn't know them and so they confused me. Now it's just old-hat, and even if I don't know the kanji, the pieces of that kanji are usually familiar; same lego blocks, different order.

 I hope to be through the first volume of Heisig, 2,042 kanji, in the next 2 weeks. Here is my current regimen:

1. Review Expired Cards on Reviewing the Kanji.
2. Study all missed cards in groups of 20 using iFlash.
   
   1. Look at each kanji and solidify the story mnemonic in my head.
   2. Drill.
      
3. Study 75 new kanji in groups of 5 using iFlash.
   1. Learn the breakdown of the kanji and come up with a plausible mnemonic incorporating the constituent parts.
   2. Drill.
      

 This regimen fills up every free moment of my day, and I find that, remarkably, I'm not getting the least bit burnt out. It's always interesting, and it always feels as if I'm making progress. I think I'm going to crack open some Japanese text I have laying around that I've been over before to see if I have an easier time making my way through.

If you are seeing frequent stops or skipping in the video, start the video and then pause it to buffer the whole movie before playing. When you see the grey percent bar fill, hit play and enjoy.

I'm a 3rd year at Ball State University. I am also a junior class standing, however this doesn't mean I'll be able to graduate as a senior. Due to my double major(Telecommunications/Japanese) I'm behind in a few things and am probably on a 6 year plan.

I realized early on that simply taking Japanese classes was not enough. You have to do a lot of work on the side to really understand and be able to use the language in a real way. Otherwise it's just like you're taking a core requirement world mythology class and only doing enough to get by. You just can't learn a language like that.

Because of this, I've created my own Japanese learning regimen. I'm listing this here not really for anyone else, but for myself. I really need a page I can come to each day, and run down the list; as follows:

1. Watch the daily eNews broadcast from TBS News, and use Quicktime to slow it down a scoche so that I can understand more. At the same time, use an online dictionary to look up as many unknown terms as possible in the alloted time. No further analysis.
2. Study Heisig's Remembering the Kanji and drill through all past-studied kanji on Reviewing the Kanji; the fanmade companion website.
3. Practice writing the kanji from the current lesson of Remembering the Kanji while thinking about the keywords.
4. Prepare coursework for Japanese classes; JAPAN303 - Basic Reading and JAPAN334 - Culture.

  If you are seeing frequent stops or skipping in the video, start the video and then pause it to buffer the whole movie before playing. When you see the grey percent bar fill, hit play and enjoy.