On learning Japanese...

Ooo... I think I've been studying too much Japanese. For two nights in a row now, I've had these weird dreams of Kanji characters floating around in the air, like bubbles. In those dreams, it was my job to pop them... and to do so, I had to figure out their pronunciation and meaning. I forgot what a lot of them meant... so the Kanji characters just kept building up. Pretty soon, I was surrounded by hundreds of these floating Kanji bubble things!! Aaah, scary. x_X

I think it's sign that I shouldn't push myself too hard... or else I'll be haunted by Kanji. I'm a little overexcited about learning though, because there are a lot of things that I would love to finally understand. However, I need to take things a bit slower... If I rush, I might not learn as much or as well as I could have.

I did find another good website to aid my studies though. 

JLPT Study Page - This website has actual material used by JLPT tests in the past years. It seems JLPT 4 consists of mostly hiragana with a few words in Kanji.  This means there's a heavier focus on knowing nouns and vocab words rather than Kanji itself. For example...

学生は　ここに　すわってください。= Gakusei wa koko ni tsuwatte kudasai = Students please sit here.

学生は = Gakusei wa = Students
ここに = koko ni = here
すわってください = tsuwatte kudasai = sit please

Out of this whole sentence, only two kanji characters are used (学生). The Kanji for the verb "to sit" isn't used, but you still need to know what it means. It turns out there are a lot of words that I don't know, so I'm working on memorizing all of them right now (I didn't know what tsuwaru meant until after I looked up the translation).  There are about 800 vocab words on that website that are used on the test... so it looks like I have a long road ahead of me.