Remembering the Katakana

I'm back to 97% accuracy for all hiragana, so I tried my hand at katakana again. It will probably take twice as long as the hiragana (which granted, only took a day and a half), but I'd forgotten how much harder it was. I'll have to drill like mad to make it work long term, because it's not enough to recognize the characters eventually, I want to be able to sound words out with close to the same ease I can use English phonics, and be able to from 'a' to あ as well. That will take a lot longer than just the recognition, so I'll chip away at it ("fifty times in your notebook!") instead. 

Still, I've got 25 of the 46 basic characters down to 100% accuracy, so I'm hopeful I can finish the other 21 today, tomorrow finish the voiced characters plus the doubled characters, and by Friday have the weird doubled characters down (mostly for English sounds that don't exist in Japanese; but since I read a lot of manga/light novels, foreign words are everywhere, and will be unintelligible without that effort. Ugh).

Going forward I will probably segment my kana review into three sets or so: basic characters, voiced characters, and doubled characters. I'll likely do two reps: one set in order and one set at random. I may further subdivide into hiragana and katakana, at least in the beginning. After awhile I'll just do one review daily of the 244 characters all at once, with all scripts, in random order. When I can do that in less than five minutes with 99%+ accuracy, I will be confident that the kana are truly mine. 

Kana Redux

 ....aaaand promptly after learning the kana, I did no work on Japanese. At all. For eight months. Which meant my vocabulary is shot, my kanji is shot, and my kana is shot. I didn't learn much/any grammar, so that's not shot. 

So now I get to learn kana again. Don't think it will take as long this time, since I've already retrieved the 46 basic, and will do the voiced characters this evening, plus the compound characters. Tomorrow or Wednesday I should have the basic katakana down, and by Friday I should have the kana again. 

My goals haven't changed (read/watch raws, get conversationally fluent someday). I might be erratic and lazy, but I'm not giving up. The language is too much fun, after all. And it's mine, in a way that no other language is. This is something I chose for myself. So let's see it through to the end.

But for now, let's climb the kana mountain again and get our first key back.

edit

It's just before 2000, and I just regained 94% accuracy on the hiragana, all characters, including voiced and compound characters, in random order. Tomorrow I can probably achieve the same even on the harder scripts, but the main task will be getting same or better scores with the katakana, which is way more common than I thought back in August. 

Still, not bad for one day's effort. I'm almost halfway to the first key again.