I decided I would make my transition into using monolingual sources for my Japanese acquisition.  It’s only been a few days, but I think this is the way to go.  It just feels really good to look up a definition, see a line of kanji, and say “I can figure this out.”

I’ve heard of people who waited until they were at a certain level before transitioning to monolingual dictionaries and such, but I think you can start sooner than that (It’s only been a week since I finished 2040ish kanji).Because of exams and such, I’ve just been reviewing kanji the past few days and I am just now getting into stage 2 of my master ever-changing plan to become fluent: Doing everything in Japanese with the exception of this blog.  But even that will change.  I might just start writing my posts in English and Japanese just to get used to it.　いい考えだと思う。Nothing major.  No translation of posts.  Maybe after a year or so.  After all, I’m still a fledgling, with only ~5 months of Japanese learning, most of which was spent pretty much memorizing the Genki texts.  So in actuality I have ~1 month of fun, kanjified, immersive Japanese learning.

I also recently stopped using the what-I-once-thought-was-amazing-Google-Chrome-extension-Rikaikun  I find that it takes much longer to find out what a word means, but it also feels more rewarding. Of course, if I’m in the zone while reading a blog post about モンハン I’ll turn it on so I don’t lose steam.  But when I’m done, I go back to those words and look them up, monolingually(?).