Day 24 (Osaka) : Today's over?

That was hella fast, I'm not even sure what happened after I woke up this morning. I remember it was nice in the morning, I studied at school, and it started raining during the walk home. It's all a fuzzy mix though so it feels like nothing important really happened. I'm doing most of my legitimate studies at home on my own time. Studying at school is great for having the pressure of tests and grades to keep me on the straight an narrow. I got a 28/30 (roughly 93 percent, I think...) on the kanji test that was given last Friday. I'm still disappointed that I ended up missing two that I have learned and forgotten at least a bajillion times.

I finished chapter four in Japanese for College Students today. If the pace seems fast it's because I'm reading all the material that I have already learned and moving on to the next exercise. When I stumble over something I write through the whole unit and move on. This early in the text I'm not really covering any advanced topics, just some basic grammar rules and particle use exercises. For example, one fo the exercises was covering the ~ない form of verb conjugation. That would be the English equivalent of a negative present/future tense verb. (Japanese doesn't really distinguish between present and future.)

I'm satisfied with the content of the book so far but I wonder if I can find a copy of JFCS Vol. 2 to roll into when I'm finished. If not I'll have to drip back into Genki since I have two volumes of it, workbooks, and an answer key. Right now Japanese for College Students is a better match because it uses an introduction method, where kanji is only explained in one chapter. After that you have to know it or look back. The Genki textbook that I have is much more lenient and provides subscript to help reading throughout all of volume one, though I haven't made it very far through the second textbook. Ah, I'm going to get into reading Toppa Mono today. I made the goal of reading all the books I collected during the two years here and it's never going to happen if I don't make time for it.