Unplanned Hiatus

After an unscheduled 1 month break from studying Japanese I'm back!  I went through a month where I didn't feel like doing any studying and so I didn't.  The hiatus was triggered by boredom and other personal reasons but it gave me time to do other productive things like actually speak Japanese!

I discovered a few things during my break.

• I'm more proficient in Japanese conversation and have plenty of confidence speaking with strangers.  I can spend all day in Japanese and although I can't express everything that I want I could survive without ever using English again
• There are still a number of words and verb conjugations to learn
• My meta-skills have improved but if I intentionally work on them now I'll be far more comfortable using a limited vocabulary
• There are a number of sentence structures I need to learn for more natural conversation

I'm very happy with my progress and I feel that my study methods have been validated over the past month.  I've gotten to a true intermediate level without stepping inside a classroom or spending much time speaking.  It's been 95% input using flashcards, TV, and iPod up to this point.

Instead of going back into the vocabulary flashcards where I left off I'm going to start a new challenge.  I have a flashcard deck with 2,252 sentences from the book A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar.  I'm going to try and finish this deck in the next 30 days at the rate of 75 sentences per day.  It shouldn't be too difficult because I'm already familiar with this book and I probably have most if not all of the vocabulary that it uses already.  After this challenge I have another 3,157 sentences from the Intermediate book from the same publisher.  That might be my next challenge.

Time to get started!  I'll be maintaining my Kanji (production and reading recognition) decks during this challenge as well.  I don't want them to degrade any further following the extended break.