Day 13 (10.83% complete)

Until today I've been learning new Kanji readings from words themselves.  The process works but it's still very difficult and time consuming.  I've decided to augment my approach so that the acquisition of new words goes a little more smoothly.

I have a new deck of Kanji onyomi readings.  These are onyomi recognition cards only.  My new strategy is to add new cards to this deck as I learn new words.  The day before I learn a new set of words I'll add any new Kanji to this deck and study the readings.  This will give me some exposure to the reading before I get to the new words in the vocabulary deck.  It seems obvious that if you know the meaning of the Kanji and the readings that learning the definitions is like the final step.

Today was my first day trying this approach.  It was time consuming to manually create nearly 50 new onyomi reading cards but I think it was worth it.  This morning I memorized the new onyomi readings before proceeding onto the vocabulary deck.  Although I used to be generally opposed to the idea of memorizing readings I think this is a fantastic way to prepare for the brute-force method I'm employing for learning a massive word list.

There is a great side-effect to this approach.  Learning readings is generally pretty easy.  I attribute the relative ease to my prior completion of Heisig's Remembering the Kanji book.  When I'm through with my challenge I will have failed/suspended a large number of word cards.  However, I will have the ability to read almost all of them during my next run.  When I go through the list of remaining words at the end of my challenge I predict that they will be easily acquired.

That's all for now.  I've got to get to calligraphy class!