what now?

How about a post for February 2013? OK, I'll tell you what happened.  After I wrote my last post, which was about all the handwriting practice that I was doing for Chinese and Japanese characters, I went to the bowling alley and bowled 10 games. That turned out to be not such a good idea. I had to give my wrist a rest so I got behind in my writing and studying of Chinese and decided not to take the HSK tests.
Now I would just like to focus on reading Japanese and learning the vocabulary that I don't know. I prefer to read short books that I can finish because it takes a long time to finish a book. What I am doing is, first I read and just high-lite the words I don't know without stopping to look them up. Once I have about 20 of those, then I look them up and put them in a list for which I have a flashcard program created by me from php and javascript.  Then I take the resulting html page and move it to my mobile phone where I can go through the unknown words and memorize them. It takes about 2 or 3 times through the flashcards.  Then I go back to the book and reread those pages.

Actually, this is work and it is not fun looking up the words and creating the list. Since they are Kanji, I use my PDA to write the characters and look them up in the built-in dictionary. Sometimes I will then type them into an online dictionary to get a better definition. I don't like it when a word has more than one legitimate meaning. Then I try to choose the meaning that fits into the context where I found the word, but what happens later when that word shows up and actually has a different meaning than the one I learned? So I think your known word count is not the end goal.

My goal is to be able to read books without having all these unknown words. If I keep working at it, I should be able to get there. I don't know how long I can keep this up, though.  I guess I need a more measurable intermediate goal. For example, I should work my way towards having collected 1,000 of these unknown words. I'd like to see how long that takes me. Right now, I'm at about 100. It's easy enough to read the book and highlight the words I don't know, but it's a bit of a pain to look them up and put them in the list. It just takes more time and sometimes I run out of time. 20 a day would be feasible if I had time to do it every day. 20 x 30 days would be 600 words. 12 months of that would make 7200 words.  That would be quite an improvement and certainly a worthwhile achievement. Adding about 7000 words to my known vocabulary should be enough to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) level N1, don't you think?