I wanted to read more books than I buy, but failed epically. How could I even think about it
Here I succeeded: I read the planned 4 books around L35, and the one book around L40
Of course, I also would have liked to black out the bingo , but I will probably just fill 21 squares, which will be 6 bingos. Though I tried hard, I couldn’t make up for the gap produced by three months of manga-only reading plus summer break. At least this led to a total of 87 manga this year, some more than last year.
I also managed to get nearer to one of my secret goals, namely to read a non-manga book with less than 1.0 look-ups per page. Previous record was 1.2, new record is 1.02
TV-watching went well as usual: I succeeded to watch 3 episodes per day on average, plus some movies on top.
My first post here was from April not the start of the year. I had personal goals but maybe I posted them in my own thread. Either way I think I remember what they were so not a big problem. Overall: The first half of 2026, goals felt very useful in motivation, 2nd half they felt stifling. It isn’t a coincidence as my life was very different in those two halves. I think next year I am ready to have more concrete goals again.
I think I succeeded in this one lol
Still, let’s see how my original goals went.
Japanese:
reach level 45 on wanikani deck : I dropped WK at level 42 and changed to a different workstream. However I found I like it much more. While technically I failed this, I think I succeeded in the spirit. I’m fairly sure I have studied more kanji than if I had reached 45. read 6/12 novels: The initial goal was 6 but I had that done by april already. I later changed it to 12, but in the end I only read 11. 2nd half of the year my focus changed to vns and then physical manga. finish 1/2 vns: I finished code_18, fuyukara kururu and amaranto (plus a few I don’t count: read maybe a quarter of memories off, skimmed most of nekopara vol 1, read 1 super short vn) read the pyhsical manga volumes of the first 4 arcs of higurashi: I had given up on this goal at some point but I ended up finishing them regardless in december. More listening practice: I’ve watched more anime towards the end of the year, but still not as much as I should probably. read 100 vols of manga: I had stopped tracking when goals started being too stressful but turns out, I read exactly 100 volumes.
I added and removed various goals for German. Honestly I decided I just won’t stress over german going forward. Privately my goals for the last quarter for german were simply: read books on my shelves , if I want to watch a non-jp show watch it in german.
Mandarin
I had fun with it but the more I think about it the more I think the amount of work it would get to be at the level I want is not worth it for how much I am interested in mandarin. I might return to it eventually, but right now I am shelving mandarin.
I got into reading and got vocab to HSK Level 6 (reached just very recently, with SRS via cnpy for Pinyin first, and meaning check with LLM), but reading comprehension remains left to be desired. I read Chinese (mostly VN) almost everyday, regardless.
Listening got fair comprehension, but it depends on the materials – as expected.
I didn’t touch speaking or chatting at all. Maybe I am just socially shy, but could still be possible with some push. (Making it sustain could need a harder and more creative push.)
Listening to audiobook without text is possible for most part, but still feel not worth it at this point. I don’t want to miss many things.
I barely listen to news at all.
Manga magazines too, not yet. I will try again the upcoming year. I don’t particularly care about web novels or news. I could change my mind, but I don’t want to make it a new goal.
Light novels series, may be more or less. Manga, probably also. Maybe I’ll count later.
For the new year, 2026, more grammar for Chinese, and manga magazine for Japanese. (Year 2026 Post later.)
Well, I’m definitely not going to accomplish all my goals. That being said, I currently stand at:
Read 20+ non-LN books: 17/20 oof, I sure didn’t feel inspired this year (even with LNs, I’m only at 77, which is my lowest over the past couple of years)
Out of those, read at least 4 non-fiction books: 5/4! Did that one at least.
Read my 10 oldest in TBR: currently at 6/10, but two of the remaining are manga, so I will pretty likely get to 8/10. On top of that, I have read 2 more books from my 20 oldest in TBR, so if I manage that, I will count it as done. Edit: done!
I definitely managed this with 43 books read this year (granted 30 of these were Manga). Other than the last several weeks where I’ve been ill or busy due to the time of year, I feel I did pretty decently considering.
Continue with my language exchanges and lessons, alongside the shadowing to help improve my speaking and pronunciation
The lessons and language exchange has continued but the shadowing fell by the way side pretty early on. I did try to pull it back by shadowing audio flash cards on Anki but this also took a dive the last few months as I focused on other things.
Review the grammar I’m stumbling over as well as making progress with Tobira
This is something I need to take seriously as I’m struggling with it quite a bit now and feel I’m not moving forwards.
Listening more
I certainly did this, though the majority of my time was spent listening to Anime, I did watch a few films at the cinema in Japanese too and found I wasn’t having to read the subtitles much. Total logged time across the year was just short of 260 hours listening but I have more time that wasn’t logged (at least another 30 hours I know of from before May). Will be trying to continue with this next year though switching focus to add in audiobooks and podcasts.
Continue practicing Kanji and writing in Japanese
I did a little of this but not much. I also found I wasn’t having able to make short diary entries (5-10 sentences) without having to check much except occasional vocabulary
Try to form a better habit for studying so I am more consistent with my time and manage to get more done within that.
I did manage this until this month. A had a good several months of decent study habits, I just need to fine tune them next year to be able to be more efficient with my time.
All in, I’d say I managed pretty well this year (most of December I’ve been ill) and I think some of the plans I put in place have panned out pretty well.
I have 2 main goals for 2026:
Continue building a decent habit for listening, reading, and grammar study.
Complete my Manga bingo card using all the Volumes I have of certain series instead of individual Volumes (170 volumes).
4/3 chapter books, 14/6 manga – Goal passed in second quarter update, and this quarter I also met my stretch goal of 1 additional chapter book!
2/1 games finished – Goal passed in first quarter update, nothing else achieved since
186/100 days read – Goal passed in third quarter update, and in the end I made it to 50% or the year read
1/1 bingo – GOAL PASSED!!! Last-minute, but I made it!
3/5 TV series - GOAL FAILED!!! No progress since second quarter update
I intentionally set very modest goals for this year, because really I just wanted to continue my Japanese reading habit and stop the dust from gathering on the materials I bought to learn with 5 years ago. Books-wise, I finished everything I planned to read and then basically doubled my goal, so I’m pretty satisfied that the habit has stuck! I was initially concerned about having the time/space/privacy to read regularly, but I made myself a reading nook at the start of the year, and having a dedicated place where I go to read really changed the game in terms of my motivation and comfort in forming a routine.
As I touched on in my last update, I was unemployed for most of the first half of the year and went back to full-time + gig work in July, and that was a sharp cut-off for my consumption of any other kind of media. I was doing really well with regularly gaming and watching shows in Japanese for the first half of the year, and then I simply didn’t touch them in the second half. I’m accepting it as a sign that there’s a limit on how many types of media I can focus on at once while I’m working, so while I failed my TV goal and made no progress on my stretch goal for games (finishing Summon Night 1 & 2), I don’t really feel bad about setting those aside to concentrate on reading.
Overall, I’m glad I set concrete goals for myself this year and I’m happy with the progress it helped me make! Thanks everyone for sharing your goals and giving me an excuse to join in! Can’t wait to do it again in 2026!
Failed the first goal. I read about 75% of 香君, but that book burned me out so much that I barely read any other Japanese books (non-manga) for the rest of the year. Instead I listened to a lot of English audiobooks, sunk 100 hours into Expedition 33, and sunk 200+ hours into Celeste.
This goal has been achieved because Surugaya hasn’t shipped my latest order yet. Down from 37 to 26 volumes, though a few I’m not counting are from series I’ve now dropped. Part of that same burnout had me not make much progress on the few full series I own. Hopefully I’ll make more progress on those in 2026.
I did not do great on reading physucals this year. Which is part of why next year I’m planning on doing a lot more physical reading. I also didn’t get around to a VN. For some reason I have a bit more friction starting a VN than reading a book. I think I’m going to shelf this goal for now since I’m doing just fine reading books.
There was one day when I was traveling that the only thing I read was the subtitles on an anime. But you know what, I’m counting it, which means I read every day this year! 345/250 6,537/5,000
Seeing that I set somewhat sandbagged goals for myself, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I crushed it, but I’m really happy with where I’ve ended the year. At this time last year I was really bummed about my lack of progress, but this year I’m actually really pleased. It felt like things really started coming together towards the end of the summer. I still have a (long, long) way to go to reach my final goals, but I’m now to a point where a lot more native content is opening up to me, and I don’t have to read pretty much anything anymore just because it’s at my level. I’m hoping that 2026 blasts me into language learning orbit
Thank you everyone for being here and being ambitious. You all are the reason I’m still at it (and plan to be at it far into the future). See you all in 2026!
Read as much as I read in 2024
2024 - 6192 pgs Novels etc, Manga 377pgs
2025 - 8414 pgs Novels etc, Manga 1449 pgs
So yay done OK there
Some progress towards N1
Probably no
I read lots, and did a bit of grammar study at the start of the year, but otherwise nope.
SSRS
Nope
That said, happy overall with the year - just reading lots has felt like I’ve improved a lot.
Also, I was in Japan for 2 months this year, which meant listening/speaking has gone from being very very rusty to passable - which was nice!
良いお年を！Hopefully everyone had a good sliding into the new year as we like to say over here. Time for a quick 2025 summary and review! I’m just going through my prior list.
Did not progress significantly with Tobira (just started Chapter 8), but I managed to work through all my JLPT books. Grammar still needs a lot of polishing though.
Done and done! For next year, I will probably not set a specific goal. I feel like unless I’m mining a book, I only add a handful of new vocab. Though I still want to complete 常用 kanji at least (I’m missing about 180) - I’m thinking about making a word helper schedule in Renshuu to not have to learn the kanji in isolation.
I read a whopping amount of 11 novels! Almost 1 per month. For next year, that seems like a good goal. I did not manage the initial 20k pages, but the adjusted amount (3k+8k). I think I can keep that pace. Manga reading is a lot faster and needs its own tracking I guess. Or maybe I could count 5 manga pages as 1 novel page. I think I should research what the average moji counts are.
Met my days reading goal, I did not track how many books I read from my Owned pile, but I did read a lot of books that were on my wishlist. Counting that as a success.
Did not finish the Tadoku readers, but there shouldn’t be too many left. Maybe an easy entry goal for 2026.
I did not watch a lot overall, a few movies which I begin to feel comfortable with or without subs.
I reached the adjusted goal, but 150 hrs is just too much. Do I want to spend so much time watching TV? Maybe I should make a combined goal with general listening (aka podcasts and the likes).
N2 officially taken (let’s wait for the results though).
I did not have a lot of exchanges. I’m still bad at keeping relations, and my conversation partners equally as well, lol. Working on this is not so much a language goal, it’s more a self-improvement goal.
I did not really find a good way to use a monolingual dictionary, I did use it a bit on kindle but for quick lookups I generally use the Renshuu dictionary. There’s still hope Renshuu will one day have Japanese definitions, they just need to find a good open source.
I do plan to relax a bit 2026 and just read whatever I feel like. I need to stay consistent with SRS of course, but I’m setting my goal there at 10 new words a day.
So yeah, overall I’m pretty happy with my progress. I will definitely need a bit of thinking for the 2026 post.
, but I will probably just fill 21 squares, which will be 6 bingos. Though I tried hard, I couldn’t make up for the gap produced by three months of manga-only reading plus summer break. At least this led to a total of 87 manga this year, some more than last year.
reach level 45 on wanikani deck : I dropped WK at level 42 and changed to a different workstream. However I found I like it much more. While technically I failed this, I think I succeeded in the spirit. I’m fairly sure I have studied more kanji than if I had reached 45.
read 6/12 novels: The initial goal was 6 but I had that done by april already. I later changed it to 12, but in the end I only read 11. 2nd half of the year my focus changed to vns and then physical manga.
Can’t wait to do it again in 2026!
I did not do great on reading physucals this year. Which is part of why next year I’m planning on doing a lot more physical reading.
