Yesterday I unearthed my first year Japanese textbook from my one mod long (1/4 of a school year) extremely introductory class. I started picking over the hiragana, remembering bits and pieces. But katakana was a completely different story, I had absolutely no memory for katakana characters.

Over lunch, I brought up that I was thinking about diving back into Japanese, and Doug mentioned that he'd be interested in it, as he's into manga and anime. I mentioned that I'd like to read for a while, and eventually pick up enough to understand some anime (like Neon Genesis Evangelion). Unfortunately, there aren't too many places I know of where we can talk to a native speaker, but we'll see what we can do.