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Achieving Your Japanese Goals – August 2020 — 16 Comments

  1. Last month went so well, I want to just keep at it and do more of the same for awhile:

    1) Keep up with reviews
    2) Listen to Nihongo Con Teppei podcast – 30 min per day – starting with oldest beginner, eventually going through all of intermediate.
    3) Hello Talk – Daily moments post and at least 1 direct convo a day
    4) Add new words from podcast, hello talk, shadowing etc to my self made deck
    5) As I get time continue Terrace House. I want to at least watch more 5 eps of the latest season.
    6) Continue shadowing everyday. 15-30 min on average per day and I want to get through unit 3 section 1 at least.

    • Good month again, maybe not as mind blowing as last month but solid.

      Specifically:
      1) Keep up with reviews
      DONE

      2) Listen to Nihongo Con Teppei podcast – 30 min per day – starting with oldest beginner, eventually going through all of intermediate.
      DONE – Finished Beginner, now about 25 episodes into intermediate. Much harder but very useful.

      3) Hello Talk – Daily moments post and at least 1 direct convo a day
      DONE

      4) Add new words from podcast, hello talk, shadowing etc to my self made deck
      DONE – by my rough estimate I have around 750+ homemade cards already on top of jalup.

      5) As I get time continue Terrace House. I want to at least watch more 5 eps of the latest season.
      DONE* – I did 4 episodes and it was then pulled off the air. I did 1 episode of another show to try. I need to find something new for next month.

      6) Continue shadowing everyday. 15-30 min on average per day and I want to get through unit 3 section 1 at least.
      DONE – Did great on this one. Finished all of unit 3 and 4 (section 1) and some of 5.

  2. This is the big month for me, it kinda all comes down to this.
    My test is on the 18th and I need to pass it to apply for school. Otherwise, I can’t go to school next year in Japan.

    1. Continue listening for 5+ hours a day (condensed audio, podcasts, audiobooks, netflix)

    2. Continue to read a chapter a day of konosuba until I finish the 4th volume then, probably read くまクマ熊ベアー again because it is super cute.

    3. Add words from my BJT books until i can read/listen all the questions with no lack of understanding due to vocab (probably add 20-30 words a day)

    4. Review my BJT books everyday and listen to all the audio everyday (2-3ish hours of audio).

    5. Get a score of 400 on the test which i need to apply for school (it would really suck to fail this on lol)

    Assuming all is well and everything goes well then the rest of the month I’ll probably start on a new challenge. I don’t know what that will be yet though. It will either be, subs2srsing a bunch of shows or going through all 16 volumes of shield hero on my shelf. I’ll figure it out by then and post it here.

    • Update 1:

      So I decided to move my test forwards nearly two months. I wouldn’t have been ready.

      New strategy:

      1. Subs2srs terrace house to 98% morph readability and go through terrace house first and second show. (140ish eps)

      2. Add terrace house to immersion pod and play 1-2 more times with condensed audio

      3. Sub2srs danmachi s1 which will finish the month

      4. Read a couple 20-30 pages of くまクマ熊ベアー a day

      5. Read 2-8 chapters of manga a day

    • Update 2:

      1. Didn’t finish subs2srs and only went through the first show subs2srs wise but I will still count it. I haven’t finished the show because it is taking a while but am on season 6 so almost.

      2. Haven’t finished it but am listening to the condensed audio atm.

      3. finished and did s2 as well.

      4. I am up to 60 pages a day in くまクマ熊ベアー so in a week I will be done with vol 4 and be onto the next series.

      5. I did this for a while but since I am reading so much novel text I will give myself a pass. Manga is really casual for me now.

  3. 1) Finish review of Expert
    2) Begin Hero (at 10/day)
    3) Read 2 graded readers/day
    4) Finish Mobile Suit Gundam Compilation Movie Trilogy (in Japanese)
    5) Shadowing – complete 3.5
    6) italki conversation practice (one hour a week)

    • How do you like italki? I have been considering it. How did you find a teacher you liked and how do you structure your time?

  4. Ok, cruising in solo mode. I still don’t want to set specific immersion goals (especially after the fail last month), so everything boils down to 1 major goal for probably more or less the rest of the journey:

    1) 5 new cards per day. Preferably they are self-made cards from immersion, but Jalup Master (and later Champion) will be used if I do not have enough spares.

    Other points:

    2) Immersion. Immersion. IMMERSION. I never felt I did particularly bad on this but this is so incredibly important at this stage. And more is always possible.

    3) Start thinking about the game plan for output. Ideally I would have wanted some sort of personal tandem partner (and my city certainly is big enough for Japanese people wanting to learn German running around) for this but with the pandemic ongoing I hesitate meeting new people in person. So maybe also the HelloTalk route is better, but I don’t want to wait too much longer.

    • I’m also from Germany. Mönchengladbach. From which city are you?
      I found a Facebook Group. Tandem [Deutsch-Japanisch]. There people can post if they search for a tandem partner. The group is quite big. So regularly someone is searching. At these times many are also fine with online tandem.

      • Berlin. I know of plenty of groups/sites to find those people, I am mostly anxious about meeting too many new people because of the pandemic. So probably it will be some sort of online tandem, yeah. Thanks for the advice though! :)

        • Hello Talk +1. I was super skeptical of trying it (my wife tried it once with spanish), but it is what you make of it. I do daily public diary style posts and then message with at least one person each day. More realistically I have 5+ conversations going at once each day. All of my output is dictated so I practice speaking (more important to me than writing). It works. It was super hard for me at first, and I have a long way to go, but wow the progress in just a few months with production is astounding.

    • Well, the goals were rather open so this is more of a diary by now :D

      1) Ye, easy. At the beginning at the month I feared that I would not be able to create enough cards. At the end of the month anki says I created an average of 9.2/day while I only added 5 of them so no worries there.
      I still added a couple of Jalup Champion cards on days were I had a little spare time.

      2) Yes. More is still possible though, especially on the passive part. I think I average a couple hours daily but its hard to keep track and it also varies wildly from day to day.
      Also I finished 数学ガール :)

      3) I did make a HelloTalk account (thanks for the push laddr!). It is true, it is what you make of it. I never was that kind of person who goes out of their way to meet new people, and the same is true here. But I managed to find at least one person and we write more or less daily messages and I am happy with this for now. Unfortunately she is a grammar nerd so now I have to learn the horrible mess that is German grammar as well because she keeps asking weird questions and I can’t even blame her (-:
      Writing is really hard though, I feel like I am back to level 20 there (which is probably true), so many easy mistakes :| But it is slowly improving.
      Also, I got my first 上手, fittingly after getting a horrible mistake corrected, so that’s out of the way at least :)

      • Awesome glad to hear hello talk went well. I felt like it was so hard writing in Japanese at first but you will progress quickly. Still hard but feels way more natural now.

        If you want to find more partners and up output try doing ‘moments’ posts as often as you can. I continue to dictate in my phone to practice speaking because that’s more important than writing for me right now. Good luck next month!

  5. 1.Continue reviews
    2.Start Jalup Advanced at 20 cards a day
    3.Continue learning kanji from kanji kingdom at 5 cards a day
    4.Continue reading スイッチを押すとき for at least an hour a day. If I finish it before the months over, start reading 夜市 for an hour a day
    5.Listen to at least one hour of Japanese daily,be it through podcasts, YouTube videos, Netflix, or otherwise
    6.Continue to fill my leisure time with reading manga, scrolling through Japanese Twitter, etc
    I haven’t entirely figured out how yet, but I want to start practicing producing in Japanese daily. I’m thinking about trying to write short stories in Japanese or starting a diary in Japanese.

  6. 1. Finish くまクマ熊ベアー Vol 3 and 4
    2. Start the 青春ブタ野郎は series
    3. Keep sentence mining the 青春ブタ野郎は series
    4. Keep mining shows alongside that adding 10 cards a day from things like 軽音, おおかみこどもの雨と雪, 青春ブタ野郎は映画, etc.
    5. Watch 12 eps of shows a day
    6. Listen to a podcast every other day or so (そこあに)
    7. Listen to condensed audio of things I have watched

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