Diacritics in Hiragana, scheduling

I've continued working on my Japanese a bit this week, despite the business of circus and the end of student teaching (woo!). I got through the main letters of the hiragana syllabary and then started working on the voiced sounds. This is something really interesting. Japanese has a couple of diacritics, one is two lines that look like a quotation mark (colloquially called 'ten ten') and another is a circle (colloquially called 'maru'). The presence of these diacritics indicate that the sounds should be voiced--in most cases. Actually, I should be more specific. Since the Japanese "letters" are mostly syllables in CV (consonant, vowel) form, the consonant is either voiced or unvoiced. Vowels are, obviously, voiced. So here are the unvoiced and voiced sounds. 

With the diacritics the syllables starting with /k/ now start with /g/, /s/ to /z/, /t/ to /d/. These changes make linguistic sense. Unvoiced stops and fricatives are changing to their voiced counterparts. The crazy part is when we want to make syllables starting with /b/ and /p/. For one /p/ is not a voiced sound, and its voiced counterpart would be /b/. In any case, these are bilabial sounds, so we might expect them to be related to the /m/ set of syllables, but they're not! Rather, both come from the /h/ line of syllables. I guess this is just one more example of language being arbitrary.

As I mentioned last week, I started using Japanesepod 101. It seems pretty good. I've been making frequent use of the hiragana symbols quiz thing; it shows you a letter and you have to name it. I've only listened to a couple of podcasts (I can now say, "hello, nice to meet you."), which were pretty accessible. All of the podcasts have "lesson notes" with them that have transcripts and grammar notes. They also have kanji notes available for each lesson. The notes are for paid subscribers, so I decided to subscribe for a month. I noticed that you can download everything when you are a subscriber. So, being cheap, I have been systematically downloading all the content so that I won't have to keep paying for it. Go loopholes.

I've been trying to work out how I want to schedule my language studying time for the next while. It's necessary for me to have some kind of schedule. In the past, I have usually decided what to do by saying "I have to do X things today." However, that slowly drives me mad since I can't always get through everything, things take different amounts of time, I end up focusing on the wrong sorts of activities, etc. I think I need to make a time schedule. Right now, I'm leaning towards doing something like this on weekdays, weekends are kind of a melee for whatever I feel like doing:

• One hour of Japanese. Since it's new, I need to work on it a bit more for now
• At least 30 minutes of Spanish, probably in reading and watching TV (news, telenovelas)
• 30 minutes of Arabic: a bit of everything. Maybe vocab one day, reading, listening and then reading again.
• French? I'm thinking about doing 15 minutes a day or just something small to keep going with it. Probably in the form of listening to podcasts (yay for the internet).

I'm hoping this will work. In reality, I'll probably end up doing more than this, since I'll be working a boring job all summer where there's very little to do. So, we'll see how it goes!