wow, I’m back just a day later. It’s like a seasonal holiday miracle or something. 
This is gonna be a long and rambly one, guys, so buckle up.
So I’ve been thinking about goals a lot. Mostly because everyone is making their goals in the goals thread, but also because I’ve been thinking a bit about stuff outside of language goals. I’ve been thinking a lot about the point of goals and how they can work positively for me. I’m still in pretty deep burnout (although doing a lot better than I was even a few months ago) and I have the issue of doing all of the things, or none of the things (and therefore burnout). I’m trying to figure out a way to get myself motivated by my goals, but also how not to feel weighed down by them. I also don’t do well with sandbagged goals, since if I complete an easy goal I will immediately discount it hell, I discount actual goals all the time, so a sandbagged one doesn’t stand a chance.
What works really well for me is to make consistency goals. I had a secret goal this year of reading every day and unless something crazy happens in the last weeks of the year, I’m going to make that. I see two problems with “read every day” goals though. The first is the obvious: once I fail once, I’ve broken a goal for a whole year and I will have zero motivation to get all day but one if I miss a day in say March. The second issue I see with this goal, having done it now (I had a long streak of reading every day before Jan 1 this year so I’m pretty confident that I’ve read every day for a year, just not the exact window of Jan 1 to Dec 31 yet) is that it’s not really specific enough anymore. Now that I have the foundation of a habit I’m not going to lose it overnight, so I think that maybe something like a yearly page goal (I think I’ve seen that in Cat’s goals?) is something that will suit me better?
Checking in with last year’s goals and secretly using that as an excuse to put the link here so I don’t have to keep looking it up, just doing any consistent reading at all in 2023 was a big deal, so I’m glad that I’ve kept that habit over the last year.
Unfortunately, what’s bumming me out is that first goal:
Which like, before I wallow, I’m going to step back and say that I pretty much did it for my listening goal last year. Level 25 is not 100% comprehension for me, but it’s not at all frustrating to watch that high without subs. I will sometimes miss things said quickly or parts get more technical, but I’m fine considering that “comfortable”.
I would even go so far as to say that I find it easier to watch/listen to level 25 than to read it right now. I’m not sure if it’s because I have more tolerance for ambiguity when it’s just listening or if my listening skills are just better than my reading skills now (it’s probably a little of both).
Put another way, I’ve brought my listening skills up from low N3 territory to high N3 territory in a year by watching a bunch of anime and also reading along to a ton of audiobooks but that sounds way less sexy, and yet I’m bummed out. 
Don’t tell my therapist, I’d never hear the end of it 
But kinda getting to the meat of the issue, I didn’t make my reading goal this year. In retrospect, I don’t think it was a good goal, because what I’ll be able to read is not something I can directly control, it’s only a product of things that I can control.
I think where I “went wrong” with reading was that somewhere in the middle of the year I was exhausted with reading 29-31 level books and found that when I went back to 22-25, it was really really easy for me to read and I could read more like how I do in English. And so I stopped reading anything harder for a few months and just read things that were easy. I don’t regret that decision, nor do I think that it was harmful to my goals. I’m not sure how much better I would have been having read less of harder things compared to more of easier things. But I think if I want to read around level 30 I’m going to have to read around level 30 (or at least higher than my current comfort zone) at least some of the time.
Another thing that someone pointed out in one of the threads I made last month was that I can be reading harder manga. I had been thinking of manga as more of a “reward” of getting my reading up to the level of the manga, but especially with Mokuro on digital manga, lookups are trivially easy and bonus that I finally got my setup working with the GPU so it only takes an hour or so to do 10 volumes now. I prefer reading from physical volumes, but only when I know there will only be lookups every few pages. I wonder if manga in the genres I’m hoping to eventually read LNs in (fantasy, otome, shrine/kami, sci-fi to some extent) will be a way to get the vocab for the novels? I’m currently trying to bias my anime watching towards the genres that I want to eventually read (although I have a lot of simulcasts right now that don’t fit that but a lot of those seasons will be done in the next few weeks).
Finally, something that I hadn’t really thought about until I was reading an entirely unrelated Reddit post, is that because the knowledge you need to pass any of the JLPT levels grows with each level, necessarily the Natively levels can’t be equal to each other. So when I first made my level 30 reading goal for the end of the year, I was looking at the differences that I was seeing between levels 22 and 23 and expecting that amount of effort to get between 29 and 30, and I think this can’t be true.
So a lot of hand wringing. I think what I’m taking from this brain dump is:
- make a page-based reading goal
and as a corollary: - make a hours-based listening goal
- have a quota for reading a certain number of books/pages above say level 28 (the midpoint of the N2 range I think?)
- make sure I’m reading things that are in the genres of things that I’d like to read longer term
I’d also love to find a long series of books that is a bit of a stretch for me now but I can finish and come out the other side leveled up. Since this is dependent on finding a series I’m not going to put this as a goal, but I will keep my eyes open for one.
