My main goal in 2023 was to become as conversational as possible before my trip to Japan in November, and I definitely feel successful! By the time we departed I felt confident that I could at least basically communicate anything I really needed to say (not necessarily correctly, but successfully).
In Japan I successfully ...
- checked into hotels
- asked hotel staff for help finding out if a particular onsen allowed tattoos (answer: yes!)
- asked shop staff for different shoe sizes for my partner (the woman I talked with walked us out of the store after purchasing and thanked me for being easy to understand!)
- explained my conundrum when choosing between red and pink or black and grey when buying a sakura patterned scarf, and got the shoplady’s advice (she was right, the black and grey was the one for me)
- asked for specific manga volumes and then for a recommendation at a used book store
- requested vegetarian food multiple times
The only time I felt truly stumped was when I was talking with a woman I met at an onsen. I wanted to say that some other onsen had seemed to dry out my skin, but this one didn’t, but could for the life of me think how to say “dry”.
I achieved that basically through a combination of reading, watching youtube videos, going through a children’s picture dictionary, keeping a journal, and 1-2 italki lessons per week for a period of … 5 months maybe?
Anyway, I’m really happy with that progress, and want to continue occasional italki lessons (mainly to keep in touch with my teacher, who is awesome), but I didn’t make too much kanji progress last year on account of focusing on conversational skills.
Goals for 2024!
- Add 1000 kanji to my study routine (on the Kanji Study app)
- Play reading bingo
There's lots of other stuff I want to do ...
- keep watching youtube videos
- keep improving my conversation ability
- plan a 2025 trip to Japan (involves reading tourism info in Japanese, communicating with hotels in Japanese, etc)
- finish the children’s picture dictionary
- keep a reading log / journal for writing & composition practice
- surpass 10,000 pages read! (as calculated by bookmeter)
But none of that needs to be an official goal. The simpler my goals are, the better I think they tend to work for me.
