Musashi no Ken, etcetra...

This seems like it will be a long entry since I have a lot to say. Well, let's not wait any longer.

A few days ago, I finally got my copies of Musashi no Ken in the mail from Amazon Japan. I have been looking for this manga for over a year and the answer was pretty much under my nose. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the 5th issue in the 10 part series but I have since ordered it and it should come in soon. With the slowness of my Japanese reading, I'll get the remaining manga long before I finish the second one at this rate, lol. I am enjoying the manga a lot though. There is a lot of dialect inflection here but I am getting the gist of what I am reading, which means I have made some sort of progress. I'm trying to increase my kanji knowledge to have an easier time reading manga and video games. I hope to get some more issues of Kaze to Ken which I also found on Amazon Japan, but funds are VERY short right now.

The combination of this manga and my exploits at the dojo for the past few weeks has only made my yearn for improvement increase. First of all, I need to get off of my lazy ass and start swinging that shinai in order to get things started. But I need something more. I want to practice various waza and kata to keep my ground covered. My main problem is that I have a low ceiling so that limits what I can do inside. I could go outside but I'd have to deal with rough ground. As a result, I thought about buying some tabi though I don't know if I should invest in the outdoor variety with the rubber soles or the indoor variety that's softer. I'm looking around for the answer to that, but I'll just deal with the bare feet for now. There is so much that I want to improve on but I feel that two days a week just isn't enough for me. I've never felt this way before, but it feels kind of nice.

The strangest thing happened to me at the dojo last Saturday. I was in jigeiko and I tried to hit kote. I don't remember if I hit it or not but I sure did hit something else! My shinai got lodged in my opponent's men and it launched it off of his head. It's a good thing that he came out okay though. Some blame it on the fact that he didn't tie it on tight enough but it seemed like it was the safest thing to do then since the momentum was all in the men and not transferred to the head and caused whatever damage might have ensued. We were all able to laugh it all off in the end so everything is fine.

As far as jigeiko ability goes, I need to try harder to get my speed and strength up and not make my style predictable. I want to read that jigeiko article by one of the British kendo clubs but I don't remember the name. I can find it though so it isn't that big of an issue.

I guess I should spend this time talking about my Japanese language progress. I have compeleted the last semester of Japanese that I will be taking but I don't want to stop there. I want to learn more vocabulary, but I don't want to look at lists and memorize them. As a result, I am just learining it on the way and learning Kanji compounds.

So far, I know about 300 kanji. I am going through the 3rd grade kanji list now and doing 3 kanji a day and memorizing the compounds of each. We'll see how far this will take me though. I can't wait until I get to the 6th grade ones. I don't know what I would do at that point though.