2024 Recap:
- Read 10 books - not happening, I’m at 3/10, could potentially make it to 4 or 5, but 10 is pretty much out of the realm of possibility.
- Read at least 1 Novel Finished コンビニ人間
- Finish 1 longer Visual Novel - played through the first ARIA PS2 game in my listening challenge in feb.
- Physical 積読本 stack under 20 - lmao, lol I did a pretty good job of not increasing the amount of physical stuff I bought this year, but I definitely did not make a big dent in my current stack.
- Transition to a J-J dictionary - this one I’ve kinda done a little bit. I have a j-j dictionary on yomichan, and spend a lot of time looking up things in japanese, especially as the japanese specificity of my questions has increased, but I still primarily use a j-e dictionary when reading if that options is available.
like said originally, I still not totally sold on using a j-j dictionary for everything, but there’s definitely cases where it’s easier or required to use them, so getting practice using one is definitely good. - Daily Japanese Reading - 0 missed days, don’t see that changing
- Continue Natively Level+1 Challenge - other than finishing toradora at L32, I haven’t been able to fill any boxes in, but if finishing okami is any indicator, that’s not from lack of language improvement
Now that I am a lot less scared of reading stuff in the green, those reading levels will naturally start to work up as I continue to read the kinds of things that I want to read.
Overall, my goals were set based on the idea that I would continue primarily spending my time reading, which really just isn’t what happened this year. Most of my time with japanese has been spent either playing games or listening, which means my quantifiable goals for tracking reading progress did not align with the actual study I ended up doing, and that’s ok!
2025 Goals:
I feel like as I’ve progressed a bit the thing that has worked the best for me are actually mid-length challenges, something that’s maybe a month or two long, so I’m going to make my main yearly goal to do more of those This year I had a lot of success with doing a listening challenge in feb, and doing what amounted to approximately a month long project of playing okami. If the stuff I’m working on stretches beyond that time frame I seem to have a hard time staying focused on the project, so I’m going to look for more things around that length to work on.
But! there are a few things that I can say are certain goals:
- Daily Japanese Reading and Listening - this is my kind of minimum goal, just doing something with the written and something with the spoken language at least a little bit every day, no matter how small. I’m over 800 days of reading and about 300 days of listening at this point, so those are pretty established habits.
- Finish a Light Novel Series - I know I just said no longer term goals… but man I really want to have a finished light novel series under my belt Primarily looking at とらドラ！ still, which is only 10 volumes and I have finished the first.
- Finish a long Visual Novel - I finished a ~10 hour one this year, but most of the super highly rated ones are in the like 40-50+ hour range, and I want to tackle some of those. That’s probably going to be a monthish challenge goal type thing
- Read a Physical Book - Thusfar, all of my text reading has been with the benefit of yomichan or some kind of copy/paste lookups, but I really want to be able to just pick up a book, hold it in my hands, and read it, so gotta start actually trying to do that
- Lower the 積読 stacks for both physical books/manga and games - No hard numbers, but I want that to be a general trend, trying to be reading and playing the stuff I already own
- Spend time working on output - I really have spent close to 0 time on producing japanese, either spoken or written, but since 2023 was my year of breaking into reading, 2024 was my year of breaking into listening, I think 2025 it would be nice to be able to at least try to start working towards speaking/writing a bit. What that looks like? I don’t know! That leads me to…
- Try new things! - One of my joys in japanese study has been finding new things to like, and I want to continue to experiment and try out new kinds of study to see where those things will take me! Doing this is what derailed my study plan for this year, so let’s make explicitly doing this the goal instead next year Maybe I make some new friends online and start chatting with them more, maybe I get really into writing a japanese language blog, who knows!
Like with my last few years, I fully expect to fail some of these still. I do not know what my life will look like 12 months from now, or how my study techniques and likes and dislikes will change within those 12 months, but I hope that by the end of 2025 I have continued making progress in ways that bring me joy.
