I had been proceeding up until now with the expectation that I would join my class within a week or two of Christmas. That was fine, if annoyingly long; it allowed me to sign up for the JLPT on the assumption that with nothing better to do with my time, I could study Japanese.

I went today to see the cadre member in charge of scheduling; if my start date were a week or two earlier than I had expected, I wanted to see if I could delay it until after the test. Instead, I received a surprise: the unofficial estimate by the man who will eventually make the final decision is that I will class up on October 10. This means that I’m likely to finish flight training by the end of January, and graduate from flight school perhaps a month after that.

This is great news, in the sense that it means that I’ll probably be out of Fort Rucker months before I had expected. On the other hand, it makes it unlikely that I’ll be able to take the JLPT. The universal word is that you have to study harder for your advanced aircraft than you ever did in primary. Consequently, there will barely be time to sleep each night, let alone study up in a foreign language. I could possibly switch tests and take the level 4 after two weeks of not studying Japanese; I’d expect to pass, but it seems kind of pointless.

Until I actually get a finalized start date, I’ll keep studying. Even if nothing else, I do enjoy learning the Japanese language. Still, I can’t help but regret yet another missed opportunity to get some sort of formal qualification in it.

The examinee has mastered grammar to a limited level, knows around 300 kanji and 1,500 words, and has the ability to take part in everyday conversation and read and write simple sentences. This level is normally reached after studying Japanese for around 300 hours, which is equivalent to completing an elementary course.

When I left Japan, I was easily at that point. However, I haven’t actually touched the language more than in passing since then. This is kind of a challenge to myself: in the four months until the test date, can I reclaim the “300 hours of study” I once had?

Why do this now? Unless something drastic changes, I won’t be back in actual flight training until after the New Year. The programming project I talked about earlier this summer is pretty much stillborn, and I’m getting kind of sick of just bumming around all day every day without any particular purpose. With any luck, the dual facts of having invested non-trivial money into this project and having a definite goal and deadline should hold my interest long enough to actually accomplish this.

Will this be useful? Probably not. Even if I pass, I’ll be submerged back in flight training shortly after taking the test, and after that ends I’ll most likely be caught up in the day-to-day Army life with little or no time to study with any real degree of intensity. I expect that by the time I’m out and able to focus again on studying with any real degree of intensity, whatever skills I gain in this process will have faded again.

Even so, this seems like an opportune time to reach out and claim a milestone. It’s a more productive use of my time than I’ve been engaged in so far in this bubble, and it can only help my future goals, even if in a small way. Even if I forget everything afterward, it should be even easier to re-learn the third time around.