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 
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
- 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”
- 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
There might be some I read but forgot to track on my spreadsheet, but still significantly short of that goal. - 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!
- No missed japanese reading days - unqualified success!
- 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
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 
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
- 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
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…
