A LONG overdue update

Hey everyone, I figure it's about time for an update.

I kept up a little bit of training with anki and RTK over my two week training period, but not much. I think at the worst time I had 1300 kanji due for review and over a 4 day period I whittled it down to 1000 but then after moving and starting my job I stopped again and now I'm somewhere around 1600 due!

I seem to remember the kanji I studied in the middle the best, but some of the early ones I mix up with the mid/late ones. What I mean by this is that anki will ask me for the kanji for "street" and I'll write the one for "road-way". The good thing is there usually isn't the same mix up the other way around. The last kanji I studied in the two weeks before Christmas are barely in my memory and I forget/mix them up them quite easily.

I have returned to smart.fm and Rosetta Stone but due to the long time of not touching them I'm only reviewing old things at the moment. I'm also finding that a lot of the smart.fm stuff didn't stick, which is making me wonder how good of a system it is.

I also started doing Pimsleur's japanese 1 on my ipod while I walk to work / commute on trains and I think it's great! Especially since it seems to work more on building what you learn. It makes you think more about how to USE the words, you have to do some conjugation, and you end up having actual conversations.

Smart.fm seems too disjoint. learning single words with little to no connection to the words you previously learnt. There is also the problem that there are so many words in a step (200) that the time between reviews is just too long. However I guess at some point or another you do need to just drill vocabulary, but I feel I shouldn't' be at that stage just yet.

I am also more skeptical of the order of words. I always get "chairperson", "president of a company", and "company" and "business" mixed up. Also I haven't learnt how to say "purple", "sun" and other words I feel I should know how to say by now.

On that note it looks like smart.fm is changing to iknow.co.jp and will be a paid service soon, so I'll have to decide if it's worth sticking with soon. Recently I'm thinking not, but the "promise" that it will have an iphone app might make me stick around (I'm planning to get one in 2 weeks).

So now I'm really stuck with what to do next for learning spoken Japanese and even the "readings" of the kanji. I browsed RTK2 and it seemed to have some good points so I'll need to look into that more and decide soon. I'm definitely going to keep going with the Pimsleur but I'm almost done the first level and I know that the 3 levels won't be enough to take me to the spoken skill level I desire to be at.

I think the most important thing will be finding a Japanese person to have conversations with. I'm hoping to do something where I speak with them in English for 30min and then we swap for 30min. But right now I'm still adjusting to work, my town and sightseeing to look into it.

I'm slightly afraid that it might turn into one of those chores that gets put off for too long, so please hold me to it.