Okay I need to make a plan for how many words I’m going to analyze and convert each day.

I’m using the online Naver dictionary to estimate how many words there are for each JLPT level.

JLPT 5 = 801

JLPT 4 = 1191

JLPT 3 = 1907

JLPT 2 = 2648

JLPT 1 = 3246

And a running total would be:

JLPT 5 = 801

JLPT 5+4 = 1992

JLPT 5+4+3 = 3899

JLPT 5, 4, 3, 2 = 6547

JLPT 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 = 9793

These numbers aren’t perfect, since there are a lot of duplicate entries, but it gives a good idea of how many words there are to analyze.

So what I’m thinking is that I need to take 2 days to sort words into three categories:

1. Native Japanese Words
2. Sino-Japanese Words
3. Foreign Words

After that, I can focus on blasting through rewriting the Sino-Japanese words.

I’m hoping to get through 100 words a day.

So it would be a 2+5 schedule: 2 days to sort out and get 500 Sino-Japanese words for analysis.

All right, I’ve made some huge progress. 

I made a template for rewriting Japanese words into Pahanngana and then comparing the Japanese form of the word in Pahanngana to the Korean form. This should be very interesting!

Sorting out the Kanji into sound groups is going to take a lot more time than I thought.

No wonder Heisig didn’t sort all of them.

So what I’m going to do while I sort the Kanji into sound groups is just simply convert Japanese words into Pahanngana.

This is the path of least resistance, and will be useful for people to see how my research will benefit the world of Japanese linguistics.

I’m going to start with Sino-Japanese words – Japanese words of Chinese origin – since those are by far the easiest ones to rewrite.

I’m aiming for a pace of 100 words rewritten a day.

I’m also doing a primary audit of my Kanji sound group sorting.

This is going to take a while, and then I’m very sure that I’m going to have to do multiple audits to make sure that the data is all good to go for publishing.

So I’m also planning to audit 100 Kanji a day.

But I’ll also have to do multiple audits, so this is going to take a while.

Heisig has listed 3000 unique Kanji in his books, and I’m currently at 400/3000 with my audit. 

Slow and steady wins the race!

Okay, I need to list out what projects I’m working on and try to figure out what the end goals are.

So for example, if I want to focus on publishing information that people can use, I should work on these:

1.  Rewriting Japanese words into Pahanngana
   1.  Nouns
      1. Sino-Japanese words are extremely easy and are basically like solving math problems
      2. 1-2 syllable Native Japanese words are easy to rewrite, but finding them is a little hard
      3. 3+ syllable Native Japanese words are very difficult
   2. Verbs
      1. 2 syllable verbs are by far the easiest
      2. 3+ syllable verbs are difficult
         1. So I should just make blog posts of all the different permutations there are and just have people choose
   3.  Adjective Verbs
      1. 2 syllable adjective verbs are easy as well
      2. 3+ syllable adjective verbs are difficult as well, just like verbs
2.  Conjugations
   1. Verbs
   2. Adjective Verbs
   3. Conjugation Formulas and Tables
      1. I actually already have the “formulas” to conjugate verbs and adjective verbs
      2.  However, in order to get words conjugated correctly, the base words have to be correct
3. Kanji Sound Groups

Even though I finished writing the groups that Heisig originally created into sheets, I still have a lot more to do.

Out of a total 3000 Kanji, Heisig did not put around 1553 Kanji into any sound groups.

Although he didn’t group many Kanji into specific groups, a lot of them could be easily grouped together with groups he already made.

Not only that, but he has duplicate groups which are redundant.

So it really made me wonder, why didn’t Heisig just clean things up a bit and try to group more Kanji together?

But as I’ve been working on this project, I’m starting to realize why he left a lot of Kanji ungrouped – this is a lot of work and it requires a lot of editing, which means a lot of time.

Okay, so I’ve hit a huge milestone with my project. I’ve taken all of Heisig’s Kanji groups in his books Remembering the Kanji 2 and 3 and converted them into spreadsheets.

However there are still over 1,000 unsorted Kanji that I need to now go through one by one and sort into groups.

So what I’m thinking is that I’ll put off publishing pages of the groups until I’ve sorted all of the unsorted Kanji.

For now, however, I’m thinking about what I can publish.

I think something that I can publish regularly is either:

1. a blog post about my progress and updates, or

2. pages where I convert Japanese words into Pahanngana (my modified Korean alphabet)

I think if I keep a pretty regular pace of like 30~50 words a day, I can convert 10,000 words pretty easily, especially the Chinese character based words, since it’s just a formula. I don’t need to guess or anything.