Man do I resemble this one. I tend to make my goals over the winter holiday when I’m not working and totally refreshed, so they’re technically achievable but realistically would burn me out.
As such I failed all my goals this year but I did make some progress! I finished a VN, several manga, and will finish 本好き1. I also finished Bunpro thru Quartet 2, so I’m mid way thru N3 grammar.
I think I’m going to scale back my 2023 goals since I do like them over all.
2023 Goals
Read One Manga Per Week
Read One Book Per Month
Read 5 Satori Articles per day (until subscription is up in Aprilish)
Play Persona 3 Portable (starting over from scratch with the re-release in Jan)
Keep doing WK reviews (staying at 45 at least until April, maybe longer)
Two Vocab and Two Grammar on Bunpro per day + reviews (until all unknown/weak N4/N3 are covered)
One Hour of Listening per Week (probably will increase in April when other things lighten up)
Maybe try the JLPT N3 for funsies in December
2024 Goals
Read Two Manga Per Month
Read Two Book chapters Per week
Play one game or VN
Finish WK (currently level 53)
Finish Bunpro N3 (3-5 grammar points per week)
One Hour of Listening per Week
Read 6 TBR books 23/6 This didn’t make a huge dent because I bought more books I think my current physical TBR is 24 novels and 40 manga
Get comfortable reading novels at L30 I feel quite comfortable with novels in the L30-32 range at the moment! I’ve also read a few novels in the 34-38 range this year although those were much harder
Take JLPT N2 in December Not sure if I passed the listening section, but goal was to take the test, not pass it
Mandarin
Read 1.2M characters (1M/1.2M right now, should meet this goal)
Do 50 hours of listening (51/50)
Watch 3 dramas 4/3 + 1 movie
My 2024 goals are:
Japanese
Read 50 LN/novels
Read 50 volumes of manga
Finish 3 novel series
Do 100 hours of listening practice without subtitles (because I read instead of listen )
I read 12 LN/novels in November so I’m being ambitious and hoping that the trend will continue for at least part of next year haha. This could go very wrong but chances are most of my reading will be 本好きの下剋上 (I’ve currently read through volume 7 of 33), ティアムーン帝国物語 (9/14, ongoing series), and かくりよの宿飯 (3/12).
read at least one book in the L34-L40 range (the green levels): 0/1
finish Wanikani: reached level 50 , but not level 60
finish Bunpro N3:
listening: didn’t really do much of this but I did finally do a couple italki lessons and I listened more than I did in previous years, so it’s sort of a win?
I was doing really well until June, then I kind of stopped >_< 2023’s not over yet, but I’m not going to be able to meet my goals.
But on the other hand I’ve gotten back to learning Irish!! Which was something I wanted to do but didn’t have any specific plans for
2024 Goals
The main priority will be Japanese, but I will also work on Irish^_^
日本語
actually finish Wanikani oh my god
Bunpro N2
read every day. that’s it. I have some reading challenges I’m participating in (Level+1 and Natively Bingo), but my main priority will be staying consistent
edit: 1000 minutes of active listening practice
Gaeilge
keep attending classes (started going again recently and I wish I never stopped)
I didn’t expect to be doing any language learning at all this year until I found Natively in October while I was in Japan (and then bought a bunch of books that I couldn’t read ) It’s been a pretty productive couple of months, though I can feel the initial burst of energy waning. I’ve been surprised that I’ve been able to pick it back up pretty quickly given that it’s been a couple years since I’ve done anything outside of Duolingo.
I am also the kind of person who is terrible at goals, so for 2024 mine are going to be very simple:
read
don’t burn out
have fun
More specifically:
keep learning grammar through Bunpro (finish N4 + start N3)
keep learning vocab for various things I eventually want to read through jpdb
maybe read my first LN and/or children’s novel (I signed up for both book clubs which might be biting off more than I can chew, but we’ll see)
I hope I can keep up with some book clubs here and on WK, and the bingo event! And maybe slowly get back into Mandarin & Cantonese as well.
Good question… I had to dig through my browser history to get an idea, because I don’t remember. I think I saw some Tadoku graded readers in a Kinokuniya, googled some reviews of them and ended up on /r/LearnJapanese where someone mentioned it in a comment as a good place to find material at your level after graded readers.
It’s fairly new, right? I didn’t see Natively being used for WaniKani book clubs in like… late 2021 when I briefly dipped back into learning Japanese, or I would have probably found it there.
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).
That sounds about right? I want to say that Natively started up in like 2021 or so? Is that right @brandon? But I myself didn’t really start seeing it on WK until, say, early 2022.
I joined March of 2021 and iirc I was one of the early joiners. I saw Brandon’s reddit post (I was a lurker) and actually was introduced to WK through Natively.
2023 Goals
These were the goals I had posted on the WaniKani forums last year.
Get to level 30 on WaniKani Stopped using WK after that bad update they did
Finish reading 魔法が消えていく Made it 100 pages in and dropped for an easier novel
Get into N3 grammar on Bunpro. (Currently in N4)
Finish 2 Japanese games. Preferably one DS game and one visual novel
Start reading 7 Seeds in japanese. It’s my favorite manga and I never got to finish reading english scanlations of it. I’ve put it off due to lack of knowledge, but now I think it’s doable.I just forgot about this whoops
Read
40 volumes of manga
6 Children’s books (okay so I’m working on the last one now)
1 Novel/light novel
2024 Goals
Finish N3 on Bunpro (35 grammar points in)
Finish reading 魔法が消えていく (yes, we’re trying again)
Read 魔女の宅急便, 崖の上のポニョ, 世にも奇妙な商品カタログ2, ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂, and もしもの世界ルーレットあったら便利？
Read all the remaining マジック・ツリーハウス that I own
Read more NSFW manga (I mostly read at work so getting to my NSFW manga has been hard)
Play more japanese games than this year
Here’s a link to a google sheet I’ve been using throughout 2023 to track what I read each year. It also has my list of books/manga that I want to read in the near future and later on when I’m better at Japanese. As you can see the progress from last year to this year is staggering. I’m very proud I managed to accomplish almost all of my reading goals this year. Feel free to copy if you like.
I didn’t add it my “official” goals list, but I am hoping to finish N1 on Bunpro next year. I’m a bit surprised how many grammar points I either already know or have see before in some capacity; reading truly is the best way to see stuff, for sure.
One of my goals was to reduce watched TV series to have more time for reading. As it seems I succeeded to go down from an average of 4 episodes to 3 episodes per day. Technique: I just stopped the less good ones until I fell under the desired average, though sometimes I could not help but re-watch something I really like, without counting it in
Start of this year I had no goal concerning a set number of books or manga. I just had one other general goal, namely to read one mid level 30 book with more than 300 pages in less than 2 weeks, which I failed (16 days as for now, so maybe next year). Main problem is unknown words and kanji. I probably still know more (usually written with) kanji words if they were written without them.
Final result of this year I will reach more than 24 manga and 12 non-manga books. Goal for next year: read the 19 non-manga books I bought this November. But as two of them are already done, it’s probably not going to be a big deal.
While there are still a few weeks to end 2023, I can already tell I’m not reaching my 2023 goals.
The biggest sin was expecting to be able to read at least 20mins a day, even if it was manga.
It was a crazy year for me, and sometimes I’ve struggled even putting my bare minimum few minutes a day of Japanese practice, even if it’s just a few Bunpro reviews, Anki’s or whatever.
Also I stopped doing my Kanji writing tests/lessons with the 3DS, as I often found out that after going through them, I’d be burned and not do other tasks, like reading, which is one of my main goals of learning Kanji in the first place. Now I’m field testing a Kanji Garden and learning by exposure while reading.
I’ll be waiting for the year to end to run the full numbers and see how I split time among tasks, and although time is down average from last year, my hope is that I spent it in more “meaningful” ways, like more reading and less watching.
For 2024 I’m going to stop with the objective of getting to read something daily. It just makes you feel worse when you break the goal/streak. I don’t have numbers yet, but I’m aiming for a certain number of books/time spent reading instead, which might be more natural and achievable.
As a side note, I’ll be having sometime in January too my N2 scores, which I’ll be able to compare with last years, and see if there was any improvement, or my morale will be crushed further
There’s a switch version, although for the reviews is not as good. But it might be more accessible.
While I find it a very effective way to learn Kanji, is very slow. Although sometimes slow and steady is the way, I’m trying to do the remembering by exposure now. Maybe I just got burnt after doing more than 700 days straight tests on it, and at some point I might reick it up.
I even had a fancy dock station for my N3DS to put it after using it daily (so I don’t put wear on the power port), and sourced a cartridge second hand for that software.
Writing in calligraphy has never been as one of my main targets, but I never ruled out learning it.
I tend to make my goals over the winter holiday when I’m not working and totally refreshed, so they’re technically achievable but realistically would burn me out.
21/17
I think my current physical TBR is 24 novels and 40 manga
)
but I did finally do a couple italki lessons and I listened more than I did in previous years, so it’s sort of a win?
