My back has been killing me, and obviously the weight of the books I've been carrying to the library can't be helping. But I always read and work from several books at once, since I have the attention span of a chihuahua (unless I get totally sucked into what I'm doing, which is nice but doesn't always happen). So I've started making copies of short textbook chapters as I find them, like from the English companion volume to みんなの日本語, where the majority of the content is in the Japanese language textbook.This also lets me enlarge the pages a bit, which helps distinguish kanji with post-middle-aged eyes.
It also lets me mark up the pages with impunity, with multi-hue highlighting and summaries in the margins, which is pretty much my method of studying grammar. Speaking of which, I've also decided to review Japanese grammar by using Practice Makes Perfect's Basic Japanese as a coloring book for highlighters too. Maybe I should dig out that recent thread about how to study grammar, and share my crazy method -- coloring is "in" these days, right?
A while back I'd copied a few chapters of
Learning Irish simply to enlarge (and decorate), but that now makes them convenient to carry too.
Buntús Cainte is a small and lightweight book also. I love these books because they
don't start out with the standard meet and greet stuff. However, meeting and greeting would be the majority of what we'll be doing at the conversation group I mentioned in my last post. Wasn't there was a thread a while back about how short term linguistic goals can deflect one from one's long term plan? That describes the ambivalence I feel about this. If I want to study meeting and greeting,
Colloquial Irish and
Gaeilge gan Stró would be better textbooks to focus on. But they annoy my by providing insufficient grammar.
I also figured out today that part of what's making my shoulder so angry has been practicing writing my kana. I write with a heavy hand unless I'm consciously remembering to do so (only briefly, alas). So I'm going to switch my writing practice back from pencil back to fude pen, where any pressure at all is too much.