Achieving Your Japanese Goals – May 2018
We all have goals, big and small. Things get in the way, preventing you from achieving them. Not any more. This time you are going to win.
Task
Write down specific goals you want to achieve for the month of May
Initial Instructions
Leave a comment by May 1st and include:
1. Your specific goal(s)
2. Resources you will use
3. Game plan/strategy
Completion Instructions
Reply to your comment by May 31st and include:
1. Which goals were you able to accomplish
2. Which goals did you fail (how far did you get)?
3. Your experience (issues, struggles, discoveries)
If you don’t come back and leave a reply, it will be assumed you didn’t meet your goals for the month. Pressure. But sometimes a little positive pressure can be a good thing.
Complete your goals, finally.
* Make sure to update your April goals!
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
1. 1 card per day from Intermediate Situations.
2. 2 new kanji per day (should put me around 1370 kanji by end of month).
3. Learn all J-J sentence cards produced through the other goals.
4. Lots of immersion, especially listening.
1. Done
2. Done
3. Done
4. OK, but could have done better.
1) Continue the pace of 30 new kanji a day. Tomorrow I’ll start on #1261, and I should be at #2190 by the 31st.
2) 25 new intermediate cards a day. Tomorrow I’ll start on #151 and finish on #925 by the 31st.
3) 80 minutes of new active listening a week, to be added to my library. Ideally I want to be more consistent on this instead of binging every two weeks.
4) Continue passive listening during downtime.
I’m noticing that I have two difficulty points right now with J-J cards. The first is obviously getting the initial understanding of the word. I found that sometimes image searches are my friend, and sometimes reading other definitions from 国語辞書 help. After that first struggle though, I can remember the concept and meaning pretty well when I see it. The second struggle though is remembering the 読み for that new word. I didn’t notice it as much in the past because I’d cover the word several times before I started reviewing it in my SRS, but now that I encounter these words for the first time, I fail them several days in a row because I don’t remember the reading. I don’t think that part can be avoided though, and I’ll just have to fail a card a number of times before I remember the reading.
As for Kanji, I’m definitely feeling fatigue, but my new card format is helping out for sure. I’ll be excited when I’m past the point of learning 30 a day and just need to maintain reviews on them.
Finally, I think towards the end of the month I might give another peek at となりの関くん and see if I can start making that a primary learning source. I’m hoping that branching for me won’t get too out of hand at that point so I can focus a little more on enjoying the material instead of searching for an hour on each new page.
End of the month update:
1) Kanji has been going pretty smoothly. I’ve been on pace all month. I can get through my kanji learning/review in less time now than last month.
2) I’m on pace with the intermediate cards. I’m getting a lot more used to reading definitions in a 国語辞書. I’m not completely weaned off of my J-E dictionary though, for instance when I encounter a word that’s usually spelled in kana, but like 99% of the listings in 大辞林 have multiple kanji entries to match that kana. I’m going to have to get better at this as I start getting deeper into reading independently.
3) I’ve been doing new listening, but at the moment I’ve stopped adding it to my library and instead just write down what I’ve listened to for later.
4) I still do passive listening when I can’t do anything else actively (i.e. cooking, driving).
5) I’ve started reading a few chapters of となりの関くん around the middle of the month. Compared to the last time I tried picking it up, things go a lot smoother. I’m able to enjoy it, although I still need to have a dictionary or image search available for certain words. Doing more of this will be part of next months goals.
Goals:
Finish JALUP expert (550 cards left)
Read 2 novels
That should keep me busy enough. On vacation for 11 days so not sure how that will mess with my goals.
Vacation kind of messed with me more than I hoped it would. Got really behind on cards and couldn’t study anything, let alone read.
I got to 4900 cards. So close!!!!!!
I read a half a novel.
I’m a liiiiittle late, but.. I recently got back into Japanese again and HOPEFULLY for the last time working on JALUP intermediate.
1.) Continue JALUP Intermediate at 20 cards per day. I’ll reach card #910 on May 31st.
2.) Finish 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン anime.
3.) 31 or more chapters of 美少女戦士セーラームーン. I do 2 chapters on my days off and 1 on the days I work.
4.) As much active and passive immersion as possible!
1. Finish intermediate (330 cards)
2. Read 2 manga
3. Watch 8 drama
– Finish 250 Jalup Beginner Audio – Text cards, where I just changed the field order on the cards for some listening practice :D
-Work on my backlog on Jalup Next
– Learn some Jalup intermediate
I’m back in the game after 8 months. I live in Puerto Rico and last September we got hit by hurricane Maria. It did a lot of damage to the island and my house. So, I was very busy working and fixing the house. Thankfully all of my electronic devices are in Japanese so even tough I wasn’t studying at least I was seeing Japanese everyday. Now I’m finally back.
Jalup NEXT looks very scary with the 999+ reviews I have to do but I started to do the reviews of the entire beginner deck since I know all those cards pretty well. Intermediate is a different story though, I’m gonna have to learn that almost from scratch.
So my goal for this month is to complete all the reviews of the beginner deck and start relearning the intermediate deck. Also, I’m going to buy the Jalup Situations beginner and start doing that too.
By order of priority:
1. My daily reviews are still high, but I want to expand my vocabulary nevertheless, so I’ll just settle for as low as 5 new cards a day for this month and hopefully the review number will go down over time and allow me to add more cards. Stretch goal: increase daily new cards.
2. Keep shadowing every new NISJ that comes out. Stretch goal: shadow older posts.
3. Read Suzumiya Aruhi to end of first chapter, which is very near. Stretch goal: start chapter two.
4. Do kanji reviews, currently at a staggering 619.
5. Review JLPT N1 grammar. This will go up in priority as the exam date approaches.
1. Done and increased to 10 a day since 5/25, reviews are currently below 100 a day
2. Done
3. Done along with a chunk of chapter two
4. Stopped caring about it somewhere along the way
5. Done 1 of 8 chapters from soumatome bunpou
Wow, I was really busy during April. It did not stop me from studying japanese (although I had a few days where it was really hard to find time for it), but it did stop me from writing the April’s monthly goals post.
Well, I’ve got to say, I did complete March’s goals :) and April’s too! I finally reached 2000 kanji, hooray! I’m taking a break from kanji (mostly because things are going to get even busier from here up to the 13th of June), but I will finish the 300 remaining this summer.
I have just one goal this month:
-Reach 750/1000 cards on Jalup Advanced [240 new cards as of now]
(current progress: 510/1000)
It’s a pretty lean goal, but I can’t do much more than that this month. Next month, however, I’ll be having an additional fun goal (besides finishing Jalup Advanced and starting Expert): I’ll be making a small little program to aid me in the creation of J-J dictionary branches! It’ll just merely be a visualization tool, like if I were to write the unknown words on paper and draw the branches. But since I don’t want to be dealing with sheets of paper (which I might or might not know where are at a given time), I’m going to make a really fast and straight way to do that on the computer that doesn’t require messing around a lot like other graph drawing tools require you to (not to blame because they allow way many more options than mine’s gonna have).
1. Weekly lesson with Tutor (more Japanese conversations!)
2. Clear JALUP Intermediate decks every day
3. Listen to 20 mins of Japanese per day (youtube/shows)
4. Read 2-3 pages of ラモーナとお母さん or 1 リットルの涙
This month I want to select a specific time to complete some of these everyday. Like watching a show at 7pm or reading at 9pm. Having a regular time will hopefully help to establish these habits more firmly.
It’s way way a lot of time since my last update, December 2017. I’ve literally thrown away about 3 months of study thanks to 2 weeks of fever and pneumonia. And now, 5 months later, I’m back.
As goal for the rest of the month I want to clear my reviews to zero. In the past days I went from 1000 to 800 and if I spend one hour per day I think I can do that. These 1000 cards are from Jalup Beginner only on NEXT. I’ve froze the kanji because I want to start them over on June.
Let’s see if I can do that
I thought I had posted here at the start of the month, but I guess it didn’t go through. My goal was to dramatically up the amount of cards during May, since I was on break in Japan. I managed to make up 186 new cards, which allowed me to complete Genki 1. I had to take a week and a half off due to my wedding! We had our wedding at a Shinto shrine, and my wife’s family said I read the 誓詞 perfectly. I spent the last few days catching up with reviews, and am now quite happy that my kanji meaning cards are now below 100 reviews per day. Even with a week and a half off, I was still gettting around an 85% success rate for the cards I added in May. I think it goes to show that there are huge benefits to making your own cards, as that is when you learn the meaning of the new words. I feel much more comfortable in Japan, even than 5 months ago.