🙋 Language goals for 2024? How did you do in 2023? ✨

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It’s that time of year, right? How’d you do on your 2023 goals if you had 'em? What are your 2024 goals?

I’ll give mine quickly:

2023 goals - Japanese

  • At least 5000 pages read in Japanese :white_check_mark:
    → 7480 currently
  • Read 4 nonfiction books :x:
    → Only 1/4 :sob:
  • 75 hours of conversation practice :x:
    → at 37 currently
  • Something like 300 hours of listening practice :question:
    → I stopped tracking this, so I actually have no idea.

:sparkles:
2024 goals - Japanese

  • At least 5000 pages read in Japanese
  • 4 nonfiction books, dammit
  • 75 hours of conversation practice
  • 300 hours of listening (…and track it this time)
  • Read 5 books from my physical backlog

2024 goals - Swedish! :new:

Aggressive? Slow? Who knows. The rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

What are yours?

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My goal for 2023 was to read 20 non-light novel books.
I’m at 18/20, halfway through one more and I plan to read チュベローズで待ってる AGE22 as well, rounding off the count.

I do not have any specific goal for 2024. Maybe 20 non-light novels again? So that I still read some “proper” stuff. Maybe focusing more specifically on non-fiction books could be a good idea too. I read 4 last year but only 1 this year.

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I have a few coming in the mail soonish, I’ll let you know if any are good. At least one of them isn’t my usual death and crime fare :joy:

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I didn’t have goals for 2023. I mostly slacked off until September and then started reading in Japanese again after that.

Here are my goals for 2024. Hopefully with goals I’ll be able to keep studying throughout the year.

2024 goals:

  • Read 10 novels or light novels
  • Read 300 news articles
  • Read 50 manga volumes
  • Read 1 non fiction book
  • 25 hours of conversation practice
  • 150 hrs listening practice

My goal for conversion practice is low because I have to pay for it on Italki and I don’t like talking to people anyway. Haha.

I don’t know how reastic these goals are but i guess i’ll find out :laughing:

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(Note that when I say “novels,” I don’t make any distinction between regular novels, light novels, light bungei, children’s novels, and short story collections.)

My 2023 goals were:

  • Continue plodding along on WK (no goal for level, just that I keep progressing)

Apparently I started in the 20s (mid- to late 20s, but I didn’t write it down), and I made it to at least lv 39. I don’t think I reached 40, but I ain’t checking. But there was the big overhaul earlier in the year that broke a bunch of scripts and made the UI gross, so I stopped using it online, and then a few months later it felt like the text size on TsuruKame got increased, which made it uncomfortable, so I stopped using that too. That was, uh… a while ago. I’m waiting on Hakubun’s iOS release to try that out. In the meantime, I haven’t replaced it with anything, though I keep adding stuff to my “add to KameSame” bookmark folder in Shirabe Jisho…

So I did complete at least 10 levels this year, but I didn’t exactly keep progressing…

  • Finish N4 on BunPro

Yup, very much did not happen. I’m at 104/177, and I keep forgetting to do reviews, and I ain’t doing more lessons when I’ve already got 70+ reviews waiting for me.

  • Audio practice!

Well. I’ve done some? I listened to 34 episodes of Japanese with Shun throughout the year, watched 4 seasons of anime and 1 movie without subtitles, there was one day where I listened to the (30-minute abridged) 朗読 of 明日をくれた君に、光のラブレターを 7 times in a row (I accidentally tuned it out pretty early and it just turned into background noise while I did other things, including read… Auditory processing issues), and I’ve listened to various audio dramas, several of them multiple times. But mostly my listening amounted to songs, which. That barely counts.

Update: Oh yeah, I somehow forgot that I’m doing the Origami Advent Calendar over on WK and those videos have audio instructions, so I’m getting a not entirely insignificant amount of listening practice in this month.

  • Finish at least 3 novels outside of book club picks (final stretch goal: 35 total novels)

I made this goal months before I first managed to finish a novel within a month, much less within a single week (my record is I think 3 days), so I kept adding stretch goals lol. I’m currently at 29 total novels, with 25 of them not having been read with a book club. So I met my previous stretch goal of 25 novels outside of book clubs, but there’s no way I’m meeting my last one this month. There’s absolutely zero way I’m finishing 6 this month. The most I’ve ever managed thus far is 5. I’ll get 1, maybe 2 this month, but not 6.

  • Read at least 125 manga volumes

I met this one in October (ended the month with 127). I’m currently at 162. It’s quite possible I’ll reach 175 by the end of the month, but we’ll see. I have slowed down quite a bit this month so I don’t burn out before January.

2024 goals:

  • Read 35 total novels
  • Read a “classic” novel
  • Read 4 nonfiction books (may or may not count as novels)
  • Read 175 manga
  • Read all of the 黒子のバスケ main series in January (it’s 30 volumes, so should be doable providing I succeed in staving off burnout) | stretch goal: read the two volumes of EXTRA GAME as well :x:
  • Listen to something other than songs at least once a month
  • Make progress on BunPro (N5: 126/126 | N4: 104/177 | N3: 2/217 | N2: 3/210 | N1: 1/180)
  • Get all bingos on my bingo board

Hum, I think that’s it. For the classic, I have こころ lined up, but I also have a few others. Depending how that one goes, I may go for a second. I’ve read a few short stories (Dazai and Souseki) so I don’t find it quite as intimidating as before, but I’m still very much intimidated by 吾輩は猫である lol so I doubt I’ll be touching that one for a long while yet.

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I didn’t make language goals at the start of this year because I was pretty sure I wouldn’t meet them since I had quite a lot of important dates and life changes lined up. And I was right.
My reading has been on and off the entire year, due to time constraints but also mental health related issues… 2024 is likely going to be the same in terms of busyness but I’m determined to set some goals this year, even if they’re small.

2024 Reading/Learning goals

  • read at least 10 japanese books (manga and individual short stories/essays excluded)
  • read at least 5 stories on aozora (Dazai, Edogawa etc.)
  • continue sentence mining from books I read and do my anki reviews
  • get comfortable with books up to natively lvl ~33 (meaning “relatively” few lookups, my upper reading range would probably move to ~36)
  • write at least 5 book reviews on natively!
  • above all: read (somewhat) consistently. no reading 2 books in a week and then doing nothing for three months.
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aaaa can’t believe it’s really the end of the year already… I feel like I blinked in august and now it’s already december :upside_down_face:

2023 Reading Goals:

  • Finish every volume of manga I physically own (from before 2023 started) by the end of the year - i sorta shifted my plan for this to “read the first volume of every series I bought and decide if I want to keep them or not”, and I’m currently at 9/11 of those first volumes read. No plans to tackle the last 2, but that’s pretty solid progress. This was more to prevent my 積読本 stack from getting too out of control, and I more or less followed the spirit, if not the letter, of that goal but still couldn’t quite finish it off :negative_squared_cross_mark:
  • Be prepared to take the JLPT N2 exam in December - Well, I sure did take it, but whether I was prepared is another story lol. Pass or fail, don’t think I’ll be taking another jlpt unless I need to. I really just did not enjoy the experience of studying for and taking this test. I’ll just call it a “learning experience” :white_check_mark:
  • Complete 100 Books (english+jp combined, jp manga included) and 100 journal articles in 2023 - currently at 95/100 books, should easily break 100 before the end of the month, and 29/100 journal articles… whoops :melting_face: There might be some I read but forgot to track on my spreadsheet, but still significantly short of that goal. :white_check_mark: :negative_squared_cross_mark:
  • Continue to work on filling out the natively level n+1 challenge! - At the start of the year, the hardest thing I’d read was 22 (ホリミヤ), and if I finish とらドラ！before the end of the year, I will have finished every level up to 32. Pretty happy on this front! :white_check_mark:
  • No missed japanese reading days - unqualified success! :white_check_mark:
  • Experiment with different formats of reading - this one was kinda unstated, but I wanted to try to branch out from the mostly manga I’d been reading up to that point. I read some childrens books, some short stories, short essays, actual newspapers like the 朝日新聞, and finished a few short visual novels, and at least the better part of a light novel! Dabbled in some novel novels, but ended up not finishing あん or コンビニ人間 :white_check_mark:

Solid progress, I’d say! For 2024, I’d still like to be working on some big goals, but maybe a little less intense than the ones I set up for this year :sweat_smile: I do think I succeeded in getting to the point where most of the manga I read doesn’t feel like enough effort to count, although some series definitely still do.

2024 Reading Goals

  • Read 10 books - counting anything over ~100 pages that’s not manga or a childrens book, but light novels are fair game. I wasn’t sure exactly how many I wanted to read, but 10 sounds like a nice good round number
  • Read at least 1 Novel - light novels excluded
  • Finish 1 longer Visual Novel - the ones I finished are basically bite sized (max 40k chars), I want to try getting lost in something with a bit more scale to it to really feel like I’ve tried out the format
  • Physical 積読本 stack under 20 - this one is probably my most ambitious goal, seeing as how I am incapable of not buying more books :laughing:
  • Transition to a J-J dictionary - I have some mixed feelings on how useful this will be for most words, but it’s something I’d like to try out for a bit at least
  • Daily Japanese Reading - kinda goes without saying, since consistency has really been my main weapon in learning japanese, but I would like to keep my streak alive so I write it for the sake of accountability
  • Continue Natively Level+1 Challenge - my goal this year was to break into the 30s, but making it all the way to the 40s seems extremely optimistic. Either way, call that the loose goalpost :laughing:

No plans to even pretend to prepare for N1 at the moment, but I imagine pushing higher into the levels will naturally prepare me for that should the need to start studying arise. I really hope the need does not arise, though…

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Goal: Read 魔女の宅急便
Achieved: Did not do that

Instead I read like uhhhh 102 manga and 27 graded readers and who knows what number of NHK Easy articles, tweets, etc. I think since Jan 1 I’ve missed less than 20 days of reading at least 15 minutes a day, and as I got more confident that time spent per day became higher. I’ve started branching out and feeling comfortable challenging a much larger variety of manga than I thought at this stage.

It’s been a good year, even if I didn’t achieve the goal I set out with. I only wish I had started sooner. (In fact, I think I registered on Natively years ago, but I didn’t actually start using it until this year. How stupid of me)

2024 goal: read a novel or a light novel or a children’s book that isn’t for preschoolers. Everything else is a bonus

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My goal for this year was to read

150 Novels/Light Novels/Children’s Literature.

Currently at 130/150. I don’t think i’ll make it but I sure will try!

For 2024

  • 150 books (Novels/Light Novels/Childrens Lit)

  • Shadowing practice daily

  • Get myself an italki tutor for conversation practice

  • Make some friends

  • Maybe take the N1

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Love It Whose Line Is It Anyway GIF - Love It Whose Line Is It Anyway Smile GIFs

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I don’t like to set specific goals, as they tend to have the opposite effect on me. I just want each year to be better in some way than the last one.

Here’s what I wrote last year:

Let’s break it down:

  • Read :grin: :white_check_mark:
  • Clear my current 積読 pile :x: (hahaha, dream on)
  • Read more books than last year :white_check_mark: (32 so far compared to last year’s ~15)
  • Discover more authors I like, and enjoy myself. :white_check_mark:

All in all, not bad.

For next year, I’d like to:

  • Read more books than last year
  • Discover more authors I like
  • Read fewer books I have misgivings about. So far no book I read despite my instincts turned out to be one I enjoyed.
  • Read at least one book from my 積読 for every newly bought book I read (note: read, not buy. That would be impossible)

Vague, optional goals:

  • Get better at listening. This has already been quietly happening, but I hate working for it. I’m willing to work hard at reading, but listening often feels like a chore, even when I understand what I’m hearing. Anyway, it would be nice to look back and see that I’ve made some progress. Not really a quantifiable goal, I know, but that’s okay.
  • Possibly start, very slowly and casually, learning Korean? I’d like my Japanese to be much better before I do that, but nothing compares to the thrill of starting a new language, and watching what previously seemed like gibberish gradually turn into understandable content. So, maybe? Or maybe not yet.
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My goals for 2023

  • alternate between digital and physical :x:
  • only partake in a bookclub, if I already own the book :x:
  • alternate between Japanese & English audiobooks :x:
  • go through a good chunk of my 児童書 :x:
  • read at least 25 books from my 積読 pile :question:
  • listen to all available 本好き audiobooks :x:

I am on a roll… backwards and downhill, but I’m rolling. :melting_face: I almost made the bookclub goal… then チュベローズで待ってる AGE22 | L33 came around… :smiling_face_with_tear:

My goals for 2024:

  • read at least 12 books from my physical TBR
  • read as many first volumes as possible (to decide, if series is worth continuing)
  • only participate in bookclubs where I own the book ( Try again. Fail again. Fail better.)
  • complete my Bingo card
  • stretch goal 1: finish (on average) at least 1 book per week
  • stretch goal 2: read daily
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I didn’t really have any goals for 2023 except to pick up Korean again and start learning Japanese… Let’s say those were successful! :rofl:

2024 Goals

:jp: Japanese

:kr: Korean

:cn: Chinese

:thailand: Thai

  • complete touch typing lessons
  • complete มานะ มานี books 1 & 2
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2023 goals

  • Kanji – I want to increase my ability to recognise kanji dramatically
    • Study 4 new kanji and related vocab per day with the aim to target recognition
  • Vocabulary – I want to steadily increase my vocabulary by reading consistently
    • Read 1 episode per day on Satori and add 3 new words per day to my stack
  • Prepare written text and sentences for my conversations and grammar course
  • Grammar
    • Make an overview of grammar points from JfBP and Satori (optionally cross reference Genki grammar and points from DoBJG)
    • Write new grammar points and constructions (e.g., on index cards) as prompts for when I’m preparing sentences for conversation practice

What happened

Shortly after the new year, I recognised that I was doing what I always do. Make really big goals that are unrealistic and then proceed to do none of them most of the time.

So I decided to do just one thing really well, and I decided to read every day. And I tracked my vocab growth with that. I document that on the WK forums here.

The summary of what I achieved:

  • Except for 1 month I read every day, and except for about 3 months, I read my target amount per day (> 1500 characters).
  • I increased my vocabulary by more than 1000 words, and after having stagnated for several years this felt great
  • Reading is dramatically easier, I went from struggling with a 2nd grade biographies book, to being able to read several new pages a day and enjoying it. I finished my first manga – 小さな森のオオカミちゃん and several series on Satori (Jam Maker, River Sanzu, Oku Nikkou). And I can read short stories online that are targeted to native speakers. It really surprises me that this is already possible!

2024 goals:

  • Continue my daily reading/vocab experiment. More specifically, I’d like to finish at least 2 books and 2 manga. I’m pretty sure I can blow that out of the water, but I’d like to be realistic.
  • Add one new goal/focus - currently drafted as improving my kanji recognition reliably by about 36 kanji per month.
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I see a red rainbow thread connecting these languages… :eyes:

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What can I say, BL’s a great motivator! :rofl:

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I had some pretty vague goals at the start of 2023; like so many other before me, let’s break them down:

  • Read more in general: Easy success. I finished 68 books this year (all book types combined) compared with 24 in 2022. I’ve also read for a cool 267 days so far this year, and managed to hit one month where I read every single day! :white_check_mark:
  • Become more comfortable with different styles of writing and author voices: Hard to track, but I probably succeeded given the larger number of books I managed to get through this year. :white_check_mark:
  • 30 LN/novels completed: 16/30 :x: Well, I got over halfway at least. :sweat_smile:
  • Slowly pick up manga off my TBR pile and work my way through them: Another easy success: I read 40 entire manga this year (compared to 8 last year). :white_check_mark:
  • Listen to more audiobooks: I did fantastic; I got really lucky in that most of the book clubs I’ve participated in this year had an audiobook I could pick up. By my rough count I listened to 6 full audiobooks this year (7 when I finish medium) as I read along. :white_check_mark:

2024 Goals:

  • Achieve at least 3 bingos on my bingo card
  • Read through all my physical manga (or read enough to decide not to continue it if need be)
  • Work my way through the rest of the audiobooks I picked up this year (I won’t jot down an actual list; just gotta get through more)
  • Finish watching 5 TV shows and 5 movies in Japanese - harder than it looks; I barely watch anything in English so I’m predisposed to not watch anything in Japanese either.
  • Finish reading FLESH & BLOOD (series) | L34 : Ugh, I hate to even say it; it’s one of those series you read and read and hope it never ends. But I’d rather read to the end than never finish it. And there are plenty of bonus stories and drama CDs I’ll need to work on in-between, so the party should last me all year.
  • :fire: 2024 Spicy Modifier: Only read books and join book clubs for books I already own :fire: : Ain’t gonna happen, lol. But I’ll try my best, and only buy the new books that look really, really good. (Watch me immediately break this…)

Bonus 2024: :es: Dust off that Spanish
Ah, the eternal “I should probably pick my school Spanish back up”. Now that Natively’s got Spanish locked in its sights, I’m hoping to be able to access that everlasting well of motivation called “peer pressure”.

Any particular reason you’re starting on the third book, out of curiosity?

I audibly snorted at this. Very nice.

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2023 Goals

Japanese

After several intense years with Japanese, I didn’t set any goals this year. I suffered from pretty bad burnout at the end of 2022 and wanted to take it easy this year and start having fun again. I think I’ve accomplished that and am back in a good mindset, ready for 2024!

Korean

This was a fantastic year for my Korean learning! I think I’ve achieved a very solid level that will allow me to learn 90% or more from reading and listening immersion only going forward.

  • :white_check_mark: Reach TOPIK level 6
    → I missed the test but will consider this complete as I was easily completing level 6 materials
  • :white_check_mark: Interact with Korean culture and Koreans more
    → Visited Korea this year and spoke to people for the first time, made some amazing Korean friends this year
  • :white_check_mark: Reach 300 hours of total time spent listening to Korean audio without subs
    → Was not easy but I did it with a lot of effort and time management!
  • :white_check_mark: Reach 8,000 pages read
    → Just completed this as I finished up the Korean edition of Ascendence of a Bookworm with the book club!

2024 Goals

Japanese

  • Read all of my TBR
    → I am currently at around 40 books and think this is doable with a bit of discipline
  • Read at least 15 level 40+ books
    → I feel very comfortable reading the average work of adult fiction but want to continue going outside of my comfort zone and tackling harder and older books
  • Read all of 本好きの下剋上
    → I have always wanted to read one of those very long LN series and enjoy this one, so let’s do it!

Korean

I anticipate that Korean won’t be my main focus in 2024, but it would be great to keep up some of the momentum I have from this year . As such, I’ve set myself the following very casual goals:

  • Join in any Korean book clubs that pop up on the forums here
  • Read 13 novels (if I don’t reach this I won’t be disappointed, though)
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Because I found it at a used book store - I know the whole series basically inside out because I loved it as a kid, so which book I start with isn’t super relevant all things considered.

Also so many people have 積読 goals…maybe I should work on mine :see_no_evil: Ok, ambitious addition to my 2024 goals:

  • Read 5 books from my physical 積読
    I say this like it will even make a dent…
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I wish I could make detailed concrete goals like you all! But I’ve had enough failures to realize by now that I’m the sort of person that, if I spend too much time doing that, my brain seems to get the same satisfaction as if I actually did it… and then I get nothing done. :disappointed:

What’s been a lot more successful for me is to tell myself to put in x amount of doable time a day doing something, logging it so I can check progress every now and then and moving on.

So! I guess my major goals will be to:

☆ Continue to review 10 new kanji in the ‘Kanji Study’ app and do all my reviews, which equals about an hour of work each day.

☆ Once I get through all the 常用漢字 around spring, start incorporating more kanji/vocab textbooks so I can review them in different contexts. (For some reason, I seem to remember vocab better from seeing the kanji first, so that’s why I’ve been prioritizing in that direction.)

☆ Carefully read for at least one hour a day - that means making sure to check unknown vocab in a monoligual dictionary and read articles about confusing grammar points until I’m sure I understand how it’s being used in context.

Ultimately what I choose to read I leave up to however I feel that day so I don’t feel bogged down. I only joined this site a few weeks ago, so I’ll be aggressively logging everything I finish, and hopefully by this time next year, I’ll be pleasantly surprised by my progress! :blush:

I’ll consider taking the JLPT 2? 1? closer to the middle year if I feel up for it, as well.

Wish I could do more like Anki sentence mining but right now in my life, if I can’t do it on my phone/e-reader, it won’t get done at all.

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