Day 1: 僕の目標/boku no mokuhyou (My Goal)

Today is the start of my journey and the point where I should laid down my ground rules and set some goals.  But first, I'm going to talk about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

So, the point of this blog is to force a degree of accountability for my actions or lack thereof.  My intention is to post daily about my journey to learn Japanese through self study over the course of 3 months (summer session from school).

A little background: 
I have taken Japanese classes in college.  Two of them to be precise, both of which were elementary courses, putting me at the intermediate level of Japanese for the purposes of taking another class.  However, it's been two years since I've taken a Japanese course and I feel like I'm a bit rusty. (That's putting it mildly.  I don't remember a lot of Kanji or how to pronounce it.)

My tools:

• Software: Anki (Spaced Repetition Software used like flashcards to help with memorization of material) 
• Book: Remembering the Kanji/RTK (Used with a deck for Anki to better understand and memorize kanji characters) 
• Anki Decks:  I have RTK 1 and 3 as well as a sentence deck that was downloaded through Anki.

The rules:

• Study daily.
• Blog daily, even if there's nothing to even report. 
• Finish by the start of the next school semester. (August)
• Rules can be added, but not removed.

The goals:

• Learn at least 1900 Kanji characters. I don't have to know the pronunciation of the characters, only their meaning.
• Study 1000+ sentences and learn the Kanji pronunciations from sentences.
• Be able to follow a Japanese television show's dialogue.
• Be able to read an easy Japanese novel without being glued to a dictionary for every word.
• Be more than ready for Japanese classes in August.  (I plan to minor in Japanese).

The process:

• I will be listening to Japanese music and watching Japanese movies for passive learning throughout the whole process.  Much like a child learns to speak, first they listen for a very long time.  Input before output.
• I will start with learning all 1900 Kanji first.  I feel that in order to learn Kanji reading I should be able to associate that reading with its meaning.  
• I will learn sentence structure from 1000+ sentence cards after all 1900 Kanji in the deck have been learned.

Let the learning begin!  Wish me luck!