What Made you Smile/What Ticked you off Today?

[mjmjr25]

Ticked: Found out three of my finals are back-to-back-to-back.

Smile: 1000th post of this thread!

Smile: Logged into the IRC

Frown: No Yosh.

[YoshiEgg25]

Ticked: Found out three of my finals are back-to-back-to-back.

Smile: 1000th post of this thread!

Smile: Logged into the IRC

Frown: No Yosh.

What are you talking about, I am clearly there dude.

[mjmjr25]

Ticked: Found out three of my finals are back-to-back-to-back.

Smile: 1000th post of this thread!

Smile: Logged into the IRC

Frown: No Yosh.

What are you talking about, I am clearly there dude.

From 5p-8p - no sir, you were AWOL.

[YoshiEgg25]

Smile: Logged into the IRC

Frown: No Yosh.

What are you talking about, I am clearly there dude.

From 5p-8p - no sir, you were AWOL.

Excuse me for needing to eat and be at work.

[CatchFiveBats]

Psh...food, work. Only the weak participate in such things.

Also,
Smile: Finally figured out an effective way to study kanji.

Ticked: 200 kanji test is in the morning and I just figured out said method earlier today.

[brunoafh]

Finally figured out an effective way to study kanji.

What are you doing?

[CatchFiveBats]

Finally figured out an effective way to study kanji.

What are you doing?

Well, first of all...reading I'm just fine. Next to no trouble at all if I'm looking at a Japanese blog or something and am presented with a kanji I've learned. The real challenge for me is writing; I totally space on a lot of the kanji I'm supposed to be able to write (about half, I found out today).

Up until this point I've just been drilling myself on each group (writing the meanings and kanji for all the characters in each group on graph paper several times), but that feels like it takes forever and gets really tiring because there's no gauge of how well you're remembering anything and it's EXTREMELY repetitive. Because of that I only regularly practiced the most recent group I was learning and managed to forget a lot of previous kanji I've studied.
With the test approaching, though, obviously I'll need to be able to remember how to write all of those kanji...and drilling myself just wasn't cutting it.

So today, for something different, I went through all the kanji I'm supposed to know and tried to write each of them from memory, to first of all figure out which I didn't know.
Then I took notecards and wrote the English meaning and readings on one side, then the kanji on the other, for every kanji I'm supposed to have learned that I couldn't write from memory.
After that was done, I pulled out a piece of graph paper and went through the stack of notecards, looking at the English meaning/readings side of each card and trying to write the corresponding kanji. If I could remember it right away, it went in one stack. If I couldn't, I looked over the kanji carefully and maybe rewrote it a couple times, then it went in a different stack.
Once I got everything separated, I repeated the process with the stack of kanji I struggled with until there was only a 'remembered' stack. Then I waited a bit - went and did a different assignment or played a game for a while or something - and went through it all again.
Repeat. A lot.

It's a good system because you can clearly see how much you're remembering and it's easy to gauge your progress over time. This would be wayyy more effective if I were doing it every day, but I suppose just cramming it in as many times as I can before tomorrow morning's test will have to do... :/

[BRIK]

Ticked: For some reason the bus I was in this afternoon had the heater on way up. Seriously felt like 35 degrees in there with no open-able windows. Those damn buses are like tin cans.

Smile: Drinking coffee. Coffee always makes me happy.

[lisalover1]

Ticked: 4-hour AP English Literature exam today.

Smile: Last exam of High School. My school has a policy that, on your last semester of senior year, if you get a B+ or higher in a class, then you are exempt from the exam, so I don't have to take exams for Physics, Advanced Composition, and Psychology!

[Bradtemple87]

Smile/annoyed: Jury summons = no work today