Current progress:

Nearly done with Steps 5 & 6 in iKnow’s Core 1000 (96% and 92%, respectively). I should be finished with those this week. Pretty close with Step 7, too (76%), but that might take until next week (it says 1~2 weeks for me right now). Step 8 is going pretty quickly; a lot of the words in it I already knew (I thought we’d already studied all the numbers, but then 九 and 七 came up again and things like that), so it’s already starting to tell me I can start on Step 9. If I can continue at this rate it should be pretty easy to finish Core 1000 by the end of the month, or maybe even by mid-month, depending on how 9 and 10 go.

I’m nearly done with CCS 8, which means I actually already caught up with my Twitterbot for the Super Challenge now. Lately I’m much faster at reading, which is nice. It only takes about 30 minutes to get through a about a fourth of a 単行本. Little longer when there are sections where I don’t know/can’t guess words well enough I have to pull out my dictionary and look up some things. I stopped reading out loud as much, though, to gain the speed, and I think my pronunciation’s starting to suffer for it. I do read in my head, but the mouth doesn’t always follow along properly without practice. Not sure if I want to start reading aloud again, though, since it’s more enjoyable to just read things at the moment.

Outside of those things and Pimsleur, I’m really not very regular with studies, I think? I have a couple textbooks I’m sort of using, but I never seem to actually do a lesson a day or a week or anything, just whenever I feel like it I pull out one and do some exercises. Using J301 (which is review for me; I can’t remember if I kept my old homework and keep meaning to look because if I had the correct answers, that would be nice), Unicom’s old 3級 grammar book, and Complete Masters (also old) 3級 book. The Unicom book seems to be the best so far, since it has the answers to the practice questions, but also forces me to read and understand the concepts in Japanese, since there are no English example sentences or explanations. Which is also a bit difficult sometimes, but the grammar is review for me, so I seem to be okay at understanding the explanations so far.

My tutorial yesterday was kind of blah. I was really tired and sluggish and kept reading things wrong and not remembering words or grammar to say what I wanted (though I was also trying to say some things I wasn’t really sure how to express anyway). I have 小さい宿題 due for next week, I guess, just making up three sentences, since we ran out of time. Though as we got sidetracked, we also didn’t really spend a lot of time on ～とのことです, so I’m kind of confused how it differed from ～ということだ (someone said that~) and ～ということですね (so you meant~). She said ～とのことです is basically the same as ～ということです though more like written language, but the examples we went through were still spoken language examples, so…