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.

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