I managed to reach one of my “secret“ goals just before year‘s end, namely to read one book around level 35 with an average of less than 10 look-ups per page.
And the winner is…(the novel part of) らせん with an average of 9.5 look-ups per page. (I am fine with reading afterword, commentary and explanation next year, as these parts do not enter the statistics, anyway. Most of it was not even written by the author of the novel, and may change depending on the edition of the book.)
So I will change my goals for 2025: read five to six instead of previously three books with level around and above level 35, with one of them around level 40. So far I only own four books around L40 and for starters I plan to read the shortest of them: 美しい村 | L41. The others will be volumes #3 of the リング、狼と香辛料、and コップクラフト series, 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 1 and with hopefully some time left at the end of 2025, volume #4 of the Spice and Wolf series.
I wrote a long, handwringy post in my learning log about a month back reflecting on my 2024 goals in a lot more detail, but for a high level summary:
2024 Goals Read comfortably at about level 30, listen comfortably at about level 25 Read more days than not Finish 3 book club books Finish 3 Switch games
Additionally I finished the year with a little over 6k (non-manga) pages read, and a ton of listening hours (I haven’t calculated the total yet, but just audiobooks are more than 75 hours). With that in mind, I set up my next year’s goals to be difficult, but still less than I achieved this year, with some additional stretch goals in mind if I meet these early.
2025 Goals
☐ 1/4 of finished books* are orange levels
☐ Finish a physical manga series that I own**
☐ Finish a VN
☐ Read every day (I’m able to)
☐ 250 listening hours
☐ 5k non-manga pages read
*I’m not counting manga in these numbers since I view reading manga as more of a hobby than a way to improve my Japanese. It won’t not improve it, but having been a manga-only reader for many many years until recently, I know from experience that it’s not actually that great for my language skills.
**This can be a series I’ve already started, except for the one series that I only have one more book left to catch up to the most recent release.
I’m getting back into studying Japanese this fall for the first time since college, so I don’t really know what numbers I want to be aiming to accomplish. My goals here are pretty vague.
My goals for 2024
Read more thoroughly - no skimming manga – actually look up and make vocab cards for words I don’t 100% know.
Finish going through my premade 2k/6k anki deck.
Read (thoroughly) my physical volumes of manga before buying any more (physical or digital).
Practice writing every day.
Try an LN.
I think I accomplished basically all of these! I’ve been reading more thoroughly and making vocab cards as I go. I’ve shifted my focus to prose from manga, which I am enjoying a lot more. But, I have a few physical books in my TBR that are a bit more challenging than what I want to tackle right now, so I’ve gone against point 3. I don’t know when in the year I figured out my writing (more kanji handwriting practice than actual writing) routine, and “every day” is a real stretch, but most days I accomplished. My one LN I read (後宮の烏 | L36) I did not like, and I’m not eager to attempt any more at the moment.
2025 Goals
Visit Japan
Take the JLPT N1 (not committed to passing, just taking)
Rely less on yomitan (make a guess as to the reading/meaning before reflexively looking it up) when reading.
Try an italki (or equivalent) lesson. ✓
Start outputting more (both text and verbal).
Maintain the study habits I started in 2024.
No real numbers-based goals for 2025, which is intentional. I don’t want to be chasing some number and lose the enjoyment or the consistency.
Updates:
Did my first italki lesson (well, more of an intro session today) on Jan 2. I don’t know why I put it off for so long. It feels great to speak. I think I may have been a bit too humble and my teacher thinks I can barely read and write, but I think she’ll get a better sense of that next time.
It’s the 31st, so let’s take a final look at how I did this year.
I hadn’t reached my 30 books a year goal the last time I posted in this thread, but now I’m at 32/30. That means I achieved 3.5/5 of my goals and only completely missed the L41+ one. Not bad.
I’ve also already managed to fail one of my goals for 2025 before the year has even started My unread books currently take up more than the allowed 4 rows of the bookshelf. In theory I could still achieve my goal by the end of 2025, but looking at my reading vs. my buying speed and factoring in my lack of self-restraint it’s not looking good.
Other than that I realised that I was close to 200 books read according to Natively, so I finished a couple of Aozora shorts to reach that number. I was curious how many actual books were part of that 200 and apparently I sit at a proud 75 books read?! How? When did this happen?
In other good news I noticed that my reading comprehension has improved. When I took the N2 in 2023 the reading section was pretty difficult, but on the N1 this December I felt a lot more confident when selecting my answers. For at least half of the 読解 questions I’m pretty sure I got the right answer.
I’m proud of the progress I made in the last year(s). Let’s keep it up in 2025!
Started learning Japanese around end of march that year so didn’t really have any goals or expectations but the one thing I wanted to make sure I did was to jump in and start reading which I did despite how difficult it was (and still is) so am pretty happy with 2024
2025 goals
Be able to read some manga more comfortably (this is a bit vague and I’m not really sure how to quantify this goal but the idea is to reach the point where I can read level 23 and under stuff without being glued to the computer for lookups)
Start and complete the n2 grammar section on Bunpro
Have at least 50% of the JP manga I own be read, think I’m at like 20% now and seem to be buying faster than I can read so not sure if even possible
Read all of 僕らはみんな河合荘 | L24 This might not seem like much of a goal on it’s own but this is one of my favourite series so want to wait until I have a much better grasp of the language
Read 5 actual books or light novels (not really sure what the difference is there tbh)
Read 30 manga (or books) without furigana. feel like if I’m reading something with furigana my eyes automatically go there first and I end up unintentionally using it as a crutch
Watch a full anime or tv show. aside from a few episodes of Shirokuma (which I really seemed to struggle with) I haven’t done much listening at all so want to focus a bit more on it
Completely play through 5 games. haven’t played through anything in Japanese before so not really sure where to start here
Read in Japanese every single day. even if it is only a sentence or two on some days, I just want to be more consistent
From my experience you will always end up with more in the TBR pile
I kinda went all out early on and now have a library of books to read in Japanese with another order on the way (I needed them for my 2025 bingo card )
keep attending classes I feel good about how long I went though
start keeping an audio diary
read through the graded reader I have read half a chapter lol
read An Prionsa Beag
Japanese
finish Wanikani
Bunpro N2 started and then stopped
read every day only finished 3 manga
1000 minutes of active listening practice 317/1000 actually logged, definitely listened more than that but also definitely didn’t get to 1000 minutes
I finished WaniKani last year!! aaaand failed the rest lol
2024 was a kinda rough year for me, didn’t even touch language study in the last few months. But 2025 is already feeling like a fresh start in every aspect of my life. I’m super motiviated to work on language acquisition!!
2025 Goals
Right now I’m incredibly motivated to learn Irish. Japanese is definitely on the back burner. Not totally abandoned though! For both, I’d like to work on speaking/listening and focusing on improving the grammar I already have. I might try iTalki again too, but that depends on free time and money
Irish
In 2025, I want to reach basic conversational proficiency and be comfortable speaking at an ~A2 level.
Audio Diary - 52 entries (1/week).
Start and finish Colloquial Irish textbook (this all depends on whether this textbook is actually good; it doesn’t arrive in the mail til tomorrow so idk lol)
Add 2000 words to Anki
read graded reader
Japanese
In 2025, I want to shorten the gap between my reading comprehension and my listening/speaking abilities, with the goal being N4 listening. Getting back into reading would also be nice
Irodori Starter + Elementary 1 (36 lessons, though I did some last year)
Finish watching all Comprehensible Japanese Beginner videos (with Intermediate vids as a second goal if I get through these quick enough)
I passed the JLPT, so I can already check of one of my goals. And I didn’t even have to do anything for it this year!
Since past me did all the work I am going to add a new goal: Read something on at least 90% of the days this year (329 days), with a stretch goal of 95%. Let’s see how I do.
Reviving the thread! It’s April now so how is everyone doing on their goals so far? It’s check in time people!
So far I’ve finished N2 grammar and am 27 grammar points into N1 on Bunpro. I’m somewhat watching things in japanese regularly, certainly more than I ever have before, so I just need to keep it up.
Reading goals are…not going as well as I anticipated. I finished キノの旅. Finishing キノの旅 is a genuine moment of my life coming full circle and it almost brings a tear to my eye. I’ve wanted to read those novels for 15 years.
I’ve also read 夜廻, 世にも奇妙な商品カタログ vol 3, the last 3 volumes of とつくにの少女, たのしいムーミン一家, and the first volume of 7Seeds. Which is…not a lot, if we’re honest.
I started reading 本好きの下剋上 vol 1 and I’m 30% through. I had to take a break from it though. I burned out in March because I was pushing through it too hard, while also studying too hard, and playing games in japanese too hard.
Speaking of the japanese games, I just beat the first one on my list yesterday. Which was ぼくの夏休み 2. I’m also currently 15 hours in to 妖怪ウォッチ4++. I ended up getting Xenoblade Chronicles X (in english) and 妖怪ウォッチ4++ in the mail around the same time, when I had already started BokuNatsu 2. That really screwed everything up.
I’ve now realized that all the japanese games I picked to play this year are actually pretty long and I feel concerned about my choices. Or worse, I don’t know how long they might be at all.
So we’ll see how things go. Feeling a little dejected about the lack of progress, but we still have the whole year to go. I did set these goals with the intention of them being more difficult to achieve than last year and they definitely have been so far.
to read more books than I might buy, and I failed triumphantly. But it was an unrealistic goal anyway
to read six books of mid level 30 and above, so one per two months. This is going well, so far: One book read, and the second I will probably finish this weekend.
to complete the 5x5 bingo card, which means about two books per month. This is also going well, so far: 8 squares done.
Concerning watching TV, I planned to continue as last year i.e. watching about 20 episodes per week and one or the other movie on top. This is also going well, so far: 296 episodes + movies in the first three months.
Read comfortably at about level 30, listen comfortably at about level 25
Read more days than not
Finish 3 Switch games
My unread books currently take up more than the allowed 4 rows of the bookshelf. In theory I could still achieve my goal by the end of 2025, but looking at my reading vs. my buying speed and factoring in my lack of self-restraint it’s not looking good.
Number games with 2025: 20+25=45, 45*45=2025. 
)
aaaand failed the rest lol
