Boy, it's tough at times just to keep things going. This is where going to class is such a benefit, as it gives an external momentum to my study. After a few weeks of revision, we're now ploughing merrily into Japanese for Busy People book 2, hitting new verb forms and sentence structures at an alarming rate.

Once again, other commitments made me miss two weeks of class (my daughter starring in the school play one week, and a trip to Brussels the next) - but in fact, those two classes were taken up by the end-of-term progress tests. This is an innovation brought in by the college this year, no doubt dismayed at how rubbish we were at the end of Year 1. Thankfully, 先生 e-mailed me the written papers to do at home, so I've not missed out.

The vocab from the text book is again feeding my Volats, but I have badly fallen out of the routine of running daily tests. Terrible terrible.

In my defence, m'lud, I've done other things over the past few months. F'rexample, I've been watching the drama series 花より男子 (はなよりだんご), which is good for a laugh. No subtitles, either. To be honest, I can't follow much of the dialogue, but it's the trying that counts, n'est-ce pas?