Added another 300+ sentences including tae kim basic.  I believe that’s 22/day and I have another ~500 to add.  So if I keep this pace, I can catch sentences up with vocab in under a month.

After that:

I re-read nukemarine’s suggested guide and realized that if I do another 500 tae kim sentences and 600 kanji, I’ll be at around the JLPT N3 level.  I’m not sure about the Kanji yet, but I believe I will progress further into Tae Kim Grammar once I catch up with my core sentences.  I might even filter some Tae Kim in along with the core sentences or at least pre-read the lessons.

As far as kanji goes , I hesitate to spend time studying kanji because it won’t make me any better at speaking or listening.  However, I have begun to understand that once I get into studying native material, being able to read kanji will allow me to study a much larger variety of Japanese media.  Tentatively I am considering at least memorizing the 200 some odd primitives to make kanji easier once I get back to it.

And speaking of native material, I am planning on practicing on NHK Easy News rather soon.  I just went over there and realized that I can’t follow along too well.  But I think it would be a good exercise to spend some time looking up all the unknown vocab and practice reading until I can understand a whole article and the video.  I think it’s important to keep challenging myself and move on from sentences to paragraphs.  It’ll also be good to do something a little more fun and useful.

Also:

I’m also considering playing around with a few different mnemonic methods to see if I can increase my speed a little.  I’ve heard some good things about memrise.com, memory palaces and also keywords.  Considering giving one or all a try for a month each and see if there’s any noticeable difference.