Still waiting on a new shipment of reading material, but meanwhile I’ve been reading this really old Japanese Reader that was lying around my parents’ house. Written by a somewhat famous Italian guy and his wife. It’s interesting since every piece in the book is written in katakana, hiragana, romaji, and is also translated both by word/phrase and as a full English text. I don’t find the romaji that useful, and the English is sometimes distracting, but it’s kind of nice having large blocks of katakana to practice reading, since my recognition of katakana tends to be lesser. I just finished the kana-only passages, so I’ll start on the “with kanji” section soon. It’s very … old, though. Like the style of dialog is clearly old-fashioned, with keigo, also. Which isn’t bad, but it is weird.

I bought the whole 耳から覚える set a little while ago, though I haven’t really been able to put the vocab or listening books to much use yet, actually, so mostly I’ve been using the grammar book (link to Amazon.co.jp’s version, though I got it at White Rabbit). I never really know what to do with textbooks? I’m going through this one with my teacher, at least, so she usually has some other things prepared, and then once I finish a section there are exercises to do for review. But I try to go back and study them, and find I’m not really sure what to do with it except re-read the definitions and practice sentences. Making my own sentences would be a good idea if I didn’t feel like I had writer’s block whenever I tried to think of anything to say. Sad excuse, I know.

Contacted a tutor who’s closer to my workplace, so I might try to meet up with someone in person once a week also. In iKnow, I finished the first step in Core 2000 a couple days ago, and I’m more than halfway through step 2.

In general there’s a sense of progress, but also of being stuck? I haven’t progressed much on my extensive reading goals (or listening), at least, not with twitter and the super challenge bot, partly because I am too lazy to count up every off sentence I happen to read in textbooks and whatnot. I think I’ll be glad to get the new reading set, which should be arriving either this week or next? Though I don’t have delivery notice and my post office is weird about notifying me, so I might just have to check in with them on Saturday if I still have no word to make sure it’s not sitting there and no one’s told me. I read through all the Level 2 Graded Readers I bought earlier, and I started doing re-reads, but I’ve only gotten through the first set on re-read.