Japanese attrition...

I'm disappointed to realize that while my Japanese may not be much worse than it was two years ago, it's certainly not any better. And why would it be? I haven't been doing anything but the required homework. I hadn't been reading anything but homework and fic. I was so motivated, once--because I didn't quite know enough for my own purposes. Now I do, and have realized that my own purposes aren't that noble.

What's there to do? I can whip up my motivation for a couple days, but maybe in the end I should just accept that I don't really want to read Yukio Mishima and Natsume Souseki. (And I can make it through Mishima with a little effort on my part--it doesn't go way over my head or anything)

It really doesn't help that I'm what's known as a "wapuro baka"-- a word processor idiot. Japanese word processors let you type the sound of the word, and pop up a bunch of kanji options for you to select from; so if you use a word processor, you don't actually have to know how to write the kanji. I would estimate that I can read the majority of elementary-school kanji; I can write the majority of 1st-grade and 2nd-grade ones. And this is embarrassing.

After a certain point, maybe "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" just doesn't work.