hopefully not about nothing

i just wrote out a long blog entry about what appears to be nothing.
so i deleted it. Hopefully this won't be a repeat of the last attempt.

Last night before going to bed I spent some time studying and was attempting to read. Keyword here: attempting. It was painful - I clearly need to do this more because my reading is painfully slow (it's not that I didn't understand, well, I looked up a couple of words but I'm just still really slow at reading.) And I need some more reading materials!!! A girl can only read so much about how　ブラウンさん (Mr. Brown) works as a lawyer in Tokyo from 9-5 Mondays to Fridays (4 paragraphs of this?! really - it's boring! I really couldn't care less about Mr. Brown!)

So today I searched the work catalog and found that we had some 31 Japanese titles in the catalog (none of which are in stock or available for order - surprise surprise!) Anyway, I started going through all of them to give me an idea of stuff that I could maybe order elsewhere and honestly, it was a sad state of affairs. For some reason we have 29 titles about traveling in the Canadian Rockies and 2 childrens books. I find that very strange... that's a whole lot of Japanese books about the Rockies and not much else. The children's books looked like they might be okay - but they were translations from English into Japanese - I'd like to stay away from translations right now.

I will try the internet tonight and hope for something simple enough for me that doesn't have any real Kanji (I only know a few kanji still... oi... I'm so slow!) I'm not discouraged just yet but I'd like to actually read something somewhat interesting.

Unfortunately with my very limited vocabulary I may end up having to read more about Mr. Brown for the time being.

I've definitely seen an improvement in the last few weeks in my understanding. I've been watching some more KeyholeTV when it's not terribly boring. The news tends to be interesting but is way over my head. I find it really hard to watch Japanese TV - I think it's a combination of not watching much TV to begin with and having trouble understanding. Other than that it's mainly movies with subtitles and a dictionary in hand.

My Anki set has proven to be helpful so far and not too overwhelming. I find it really helps me focus on just a few words instead of repeating 300-some words every day and hoping that a few will stick.