災

Ok, so thanks to Heisig "災" is one of the few kanji  I recognize easily. Unfortunately Japan has had a huge 災. There is fire and water just like the kanji. I am seeing it over and over again on the blogs and many tweets on twitter. I have been watching NHK on Ustream http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-gtv. I am lucky and grateful that I was able to hear from my "little sis" Yuki in Tokyo and know that she and her family and her husbands family are all safe. Also there are 4 of Miss S's classmates at preschool who have family in Japan and all are safe. I have 4 "siblings" in Japan I haven't heard from. They are probably fine since they live in Tokyo, but I wish I I knew for sure. I have so few of my Japanese posts to read these past 2 days I hope that all of the bloggers and their families are safe as well. Positive vibes for Japan.

Immersion Day with a friend

Well I have a friend who is also trying to learn Japanese and we had a great day on Saturday. We spent  the whole day shopping in Japanese stores and hearing いらっしゃいませ over and over again. There is something comforting about hearing that phrase. I really like it. I like it almost as much as おかえり. Anyway we started the day at Mitsuwa and HQ Video. I bought ホタルノヒカリ２。I rented ホタルノヒカリ Disk 1. I love my HQ Video Card. 2 hours of immersion fun for $1. It was fun but sort of awful because there were so many movies and I only had a little money and I had to save some money for lunch. At the grocery store I bought a grape juice drink and it was yummy. We had lunch at Shojin. I ordered a delicious spicy ramen. Then we went to Bookoff and I bought a back issue of Sakura magazine for $3.

I have no idea what day this is.

ok. So being a mom and doing kanji are not that great of a match. I am not having any trouble doing my reps, I can do those while the baby is napping and while the older one is playing at the park. I am having trouble with the finding 5 minutes to sit down, get out my RTK and learning any new Kanji. That book is just too big to carry around everywhere I go. My diaper bag already weighs a ton. Anyway I did 100 cards on Anki today and I am still a bit behind, but I am sure I will get caught up again by tomorrow.

Smart.fm is no more :(

I was using smart.fm to work on my kana and it was working really well for me I think, but now the tool is going to pay only. Since I have only been using it for kana I cannot really justify paying for the new service. I just have to decide if I should put them into Anki or not. I know that it is sort of silly to only find this out now, but it just came time to do my reviews.

You can read more about it over on Tofugu:
http://www.tofugu.com/2011/01/26/smartfm-closing-down/

Squee! HQ Video!

I am so excited/happy/goofy about my day yesterday. I Found the best place on earth. Okay maybe it is not the best place on earth but it is pretty great. I went to Mitsuwa. I have ben meaning to visit and check it out for a while, but this was my first time. Inside Mitsuwa was the the best thing. HQ Video! Seriously the place is amazing! They have every drama available for rent and quite a few available for sale. They also have Japanese movies and Japanese versions of English movies. I was able to get a previously viewed うぬぼれ刑事 with bonus commercials for $24. I thought it was serendipity because I was going to write a post about my favorite actors and Nagase Tomoya / 長瀬智也 is at the top of my list. He is gorgeous and hilarious. I wanted to buy more, but I had forgotten my wallet at home and The Hubby only had $25 on him. I will be back though. Mitsuwa was especially awesome because walking through the store for an hour I recognized quite a few of the songs. As I was leaving they played イチブトゼンブ which almost made me play air guitar in public like I do when I hear it in my car. The cafe also had some cute magazines and sewing books. I liked it because it was not nearly as intimidating as being in stores in Little Tokyo. Definitely motivates me to get going faster on my Kanji. Not be able to read things really pisses me off.

Day 8

I am totally sick. I managed to get my reviews done and add the last of the kanji in Part I. I am starting Part II tomorrow, Also watched some random Arashi variety shows and surfed around some Japanese blogs which I tried to actually pick out the characters that I know and not just look at the pictures. Mostly I was just sick though.

Day 7:

I have some kanji to review and some to study. I visited a mandarin school though for my Miss S who will be starting kindergarten next fall so I did get to "read" some kanji on signs and posters and such today. I have been keeping up with my reviews and am on frame 270. I have not added in the supplement yet. I am really hopin to be finished with RTK I by my birthday, or the end of March at the latest. That means that I need to do more new frames then the 10 I have been managing to do so far.


I am also getting really excited about the idea of cooking some Japanese food. Making vegan versions of things is kind of tricky though. I really want oumrice though. Also my friend made her son a super cute bento lunch today and I was jealous that I don't have sweet bento skills like that.

Day 4:

I managed to get my Anki reps down to 0. I had to bribe myself to do it with an episode of Tokyo Dogs. I watched a lot of keyhole T.V. and learned about the shooting yesterday through Japanese news. I love Japanese commercials by the way. time for more input.

Random Thoughts

I was looking over all my Japanese blogs in google reader and clicked on someone's twitter link. I think I should get a Japanese twitter account. The tweets are just long enough to give me bite sized amounts of kanji with kana practice as well. Then I got thinking about having a Japanese name to tweet with. In school I always had a foreign name to match my foreign language study. Momo and Eiji have Japanese names. Since both of my daughters really have Japanese names I feel like could have one too. I am choosing between few different names. I know it is highly unlikely that anyone in real life will use it but I want one just the same. コスモ is just not doing it for me. I will settle for hearing おかあさん or ママ. In high school french we also did a whole project creating a French persona and life. I may do that too.

Day 3!

I did manage to get all caught up on my smart.fm reps and still have only 2 katakana left to complete. Yay! Katakana are sort of hard because there are several that look alike, some look like hiragana, and many look like kanji.

I thought I got caught up on my RTK reps, but I was fooled because I forgot to sync my app. Today is my deadline for getting caught up though so I had better get back to it so I can start unsuspending cards again tomorrow. I downloaded the supplement to RTK with the new Kanji so I am going to go back and add any that fit in among the 1st 250 that I have done already.

I also watched a bit of Tokyo Dogs and listened to a bit of a podcast.