八つ当たり has come up three more times for me since I learned it. The most recent:
So far, I’m managing to keep up on my kanji material:
The Maruko book sometimes feels like it takes a while to make progress in.
Even though it’s one page per kanji, each bundle of kanji has a three-page comic at the start. If I need to read two kanji pages to meet my progress goal for the day, there may be a three-page comic between those two, making it five pages to go through.
Another aspect that makes it take longer is that I’m trying to add words for each kanji reading to my flash cards. I may skip a reading if it doesn’t seem to be common or used in words I’m likely to encounter, but so far (counting flashcards I created the last few months of 2024) I’m up to over 120 flashcards. (I know some people create that many every few days, but I’ve never been good at absorbing a lot of new words.)
For the Conan book, it continues to be an exercise in encountering words I don’t know and trying to complete sentences that I can’t fully understand while there’s a missing word.
But more importantly, many of the sentences use an expression or idiom that requires the missing word to complete. It’d be like presenting the sentence, “Tim let the ___ out of the bag about my surprise birthday party,” to someone learning English and telling them the missing word is one of: tractor, bridge, cat, light, forest, time. It’s impossible to “solve” if you’ve never heard the expression before.
On the reading front, I’m…probably not going to catch up with book clubs I’m behind in any time soon. But I’m still working on steadily moving forward.
Maybe I’ll use my three-day weekend to catch up a little?
I’d also like to start making progress with the Conan manga series by setting monthly goals so I can keep on track reading throughout the month, but where’s the time? And that wouldn’t help me catch up on book clubs…
Back to kanji, over 95% of what I’ve been doing has been review. It’s been taking up time and I’ve been creating flash cards. I feel like when I get to February and have a larger number of gaps to fill in, I likely will slow down drastically and will start drowning in flash card reviews. I’ll know for sure in a few weeks!
And my time management certainly isn’t helped when I go to do kanji studies and I think:
“If I do this to my site’s search feature, I can reduce the number of search queries being sent to and processed by the server. Let’s implement that and test it right now.”
Then as I’m getting into kanji studies:
“When viewing a word on my side, if I add grade levels to the word’s kanji list, I can see if it would be good to create a card for to help with near-term kanji learning.”
(Not yet moved to live.)
I am always in awe of people able to organize their study log posts. I could give it a try, but that would take away an hour of what can otherwise be reading time, so…