Keith's plan A

This is Keith on July 15th, Wednesday afternoon. I just finished my count of the Kanji that I need to study. Using the book, Kanji in Context, I went through it and wrote down the number for any Kanji that I felt I don't know. Previously, I estimated that I need to study about 800 characters, and the total from my count is 829 characters!

Ahmad has posted that the 2009 Kanji Challenge starts tomorrow and ends on the 31st of August. If my count is correct, that is 47 days. What I would like to do is go through the characters I need to learn twice. So that means studying 36 characters per day.

On the first pass through, I will take a good look at the vocabulary listed for the character but I will concentrate on learning only the first word in the list. So at the end of the day, I will be able to read 36 new words. At the half-way point in the Challenge, I hope to know and be able to read 829 new words.

During the second-half of the Challenge, I will make a second pass through the characters. During the 2nd pass, I will try to learn any additional readings for each character and one word for each reading. Of course, I will also get to review the words I had learned during the first pass.

I have not yet figured out what exactly I'm going to be doing to learn these words. Hopefully a lot of activities. Or maybe I will just be staring at them all day. If I spend my time as I am currently planning, I will be in front of the Japanese TV broadcast all day and so I will do my Kanji activities at the same time which means I could be working at this Kanji Challenge all day, just about every day.

I finished my counting today with the TV going and I'm also writing this post with the TV going. Will I also be able to learn the words I'm working on while the TV is going? I don't know, but if those words get used on TV I think it will have a positive impact.

Even if I don't manage to put these words into my reading ability, I hope that I will be able to remember having studied them before. That usually helps later when the words show up naturally. If nothing else, it creates a bit of excitement and creates a link between activities. Whenever a word is just in an isolated event, it is difficult to get it to stick in your mind, even if that event was a natural encounter. But several events will allow you to make connections.

So the next thing I need to do is to think about what I can do to learn the Kanji in the words each day. I'll post again.