Achieving Your Japanese Goals – July 2019
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 July
Initial Instructions
Leave a comment by July 1st and include:
1. Your specific goal(s)
2. Resources you will use
3. Game plan/strategy
Completion Instructions
Reply to your comment by July 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 June 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.
As mentioned in the June thread, I spend way too much time doing RTK reviews, and I have too little time to enjoy Japanese books, TV, podcasts and so on. I hope that changes in July!
My goals for July are:
1) Get through RTK reviews every day so I don’t build up another backlog
2) Add 300 cards from Jalup Advanced
3) Get my Jalup review backlog under control and reach 0 reviews remaining by the end of the month
4) Spend some time just enjoying Japanese. It could be anything, just something to help me remember why I do this in the first place!
1) Major fail. I had 2 hours of RTK reviews every day and one day I just couldn’t do it any more. Now I have a bad backlog again. At least this time I have learned and I will add cards slowly back from the backlog so I don’t drown in RTK reviews again.
2) Did it, sort of. Added the cards, studied them a little, failed at the reviews.
3) Major fail again. I had decided to add a large number of cards, and I did it, but I was unable to keep up with the reviews. Lesson painfully learned – always do reviews before adding cards. Always.
4) Also fail, I just didn’t have the time. Sigh…
I started studying again at the beginning of the year. I finished Jalup Beginner (again) in about a month, and got to 2050 in Kanji Kingdom in about 6 months. I started Jalup Intermediate (again) 6 days ago and I’m at 280 cards.
My goals for July are:
1. Finish Jalup Intermediate
2. Finish Jalup Advanced
3. Shadow 30 minutes, 5 days a week on work commute.
3 things have been game changers for me.
1. I started taking trips to Japan last year. I went 4 times last year, 1 time this year, and 3 more trips planned. I have friends who live there and are fluent, and it’s very frustrating having to sit there and not be able to talk to anyone and watch them have all the fun.
2. After going through Kanji Kingdom I feel as if my ‘brain power’ or ‘memory’ or I don’t know what to call it, has really expanded. Kanji Kingdom is no joke. I had to put so much effort into that, everything now feels easy compared to it. It’s like after lifting weights for 6 months, and then going back to your beginning weight and it feels super light. That’s what the intermediate deck feels like after pouring all my energy into Kanji Kingdom.
3. The Jalup app has been amazing. I’ve been shadowing 30 minutes every day on my commute. It really helps to hammer in the vocab I’m coming across in the intermediate deck. I basically just set it to randomly play the cards from intermediate and I shadow while driving to/from work.
Finished with goal number 1. I think this is the 2nd time I finished intermediate and maybe the 4th attempt. The last time I finished it things just didn’t feel right as I kept running into cards in my reviews that I couldn’t even remember learning. I haven’t had that problem this time. Things definitely got more complicated as I progressed through the deck, but learning from the definitions has become easier as a result of the increased difficulty. I certainly am not at the stage where I can use much of this in a conversation yet, I still need time for this to sink in, although I am starting to see words randomly pop up in the wild. I’m probably going to wait until I finish all the decks before I start reading immersion. This is like the low hanging fruit so I might as well just put all my energy into these decks until I run out. Then I’ll need to start my own. I’m very glad I spent 6 months on nothing but Kanji Kingdom, it seems to have made a huge difference.
Starting the advanced deck today after work.
Goal 3 is going smooth as well, haven’t missed a day.
Congrats on making the push to Jalup Advanced! I promise you it will be much easier than Intermediate was, also especially since you have Kanji Kingdom down as well.
Completed Goals 1 and 3. I didn’t finish the advanced deck like I wanted to but I’m at 560 so it’s not too bad. I started to get super impatient and was rushing through my reviews which for me is stage 1 burn out. So I decided to slow down to 10 new cards per day until that passes. I don’t know how it’s possible but I feel like the advanced deck has more vocabulary than the intermediate deck? It’s just jam full of useful stuff. A lot of the kanji vocab also matches up quite well with the keywords in kanji kingdom which makes things much easier.
My goal for July are:
1. Finish Jalup Advanced.
2. Start Jalup Expert.
3. Start shadowing on a daily basis, approx 30 minutes on weekdays and an hour on weekends.
4. Complete all routes in a visual novel.
I’m pretty confident in points 1 and 2, but I’ll see how things go with points 3 and 4. I think my biggest challenge at this point is to focus on outputting and reading faster.
Completed Jalup Advanced, well into Jalup Expert at this point (300 cards). Shadowing has been going well. As for the visual novels idea, decided to scrap that in preference for reading light novels which has gone well (completed 2 full light novels).
First time posting!
I’m taking my time so this might seem a bit slow compared to others, haha.
1. Goals:
– Finish Jalup Beginner (just started! 100 cards reviewed by now)
– Review and Finish Genki I
– Get to Wanikani level 10 (currently lvl7)
2. Resources:
Anki with Jalup Beginner deck, RTK deck (finished/reviewing), Genki vocab deck. Also, Wanikani and Genki textbook + audio tracks.
3. Game plan:
– Everyday finish all Anki reviews (no review left behind!), and take it easy with the number of new items.
– Take notes on Genki and finish the last 3 chapters.
– Don’t let Wanikani reviews pile up and finish a level every week.
Aside from these goals, I will also be trying a few videogames.
At my level, they are a nightmare but I have found Pocket Camp to be pretty mild and forgiving.
I would love to try Let’s Go one of these days…
Anyway, good luck to everyone!
July is a little transitional for me still. I will probably update my goals mid month and adjust, add, or delete because I am traveling right now.
But so far my plan this month in order of priority:
1) Keep up with all reviews
2) Finish last two chapters of my Grammer book
3) Start Jalup Hero. Aiming for 225 cards this month.
4) In car shadowing and/or immersion (trying to finalize this still)
5) Immersion (I may try and make this more active this month so still trying to finalize a plan)
Okay so a pretty good month getting back into things. I think I figured out my new immersion plan as well.
Specifics:
1) Keep up with all reviews
Done
2) Finish last two chapters of my Grammer book
Done
3) Start Jalup Hero. Aiming for 225 cards this month.
Done, got to 210, did 10 a day and feeling easy
4) In car shadowing and/or immersion (trying to finalize this still)
5) Immersion (I may try and make this more active this month so still trying to finalize a plan)
Okay so I have a new approach with 4&5 that I’m going to try for a few months. I’m really wanting to focus more on listening and I got some advice from other learners. Basically I am going to watch something (ie Terrace House) with no Japanese subs either, just listening. Then I’ll watch it a second time (scene by scene) with Japanese subs to improve my comprehension. Then I’ll move it to passive immersion and listen to the episode in the car once or twice. Then move on to a new episode. The only drawback so far to this is my in car time is low until september so my passive listening time is low and its slowing down my active. Early results are great though. I am gaining more confidence in listening. I don’t know if it is from my time in Japan, or just practice, or both. But I am way better at listening than I realized. Still a long way to go but happily surprised.
1. 100 new cards (now on expert stage 3 card 76)
2. Read 宇宙兄弟 21 and continue reading a little of こそどの森の物事語
3. Watch 10 episodes — season 2 of グッドモーニング・コール from netflix..
1. Yes, did 129 new cards
2. Finished 宇宙兄弟 21 but decided to read グッドモーニング・コール #1 (only part way through)
3. Sadly, only watched 3 episodes.
My goals for July:
1. Finish Jalup Intermediate (about 800 cards left)
2. Do 300 cards of Kanji Kingdom
3. Listen to audio drama’s during commute to work
4. Read 30 NHK Easy articles
Goals for July:
– Finish 1000 J-J challenge
– Spend time beating back the review-storm
– Get back into native material immersion
* Do all reviews
* Keep doing lots of immersion
* Complete Jalup Champion stage 3 and continue stage 4 at 5 cards per day
All completed.
My goal this month is to make my studying more relevant. I had been studying from できる日本語 and a school kids news magazine ニュースがわかる (which is surprisingly erudite. Japanese primary school kids must be waaayy smarter than Aussie ones), but I’ve realised a) the textbook is boring b) news articles use a small subset of grammar and c) できる日本語 is aimed at foreigners living in Japan and arranged around themes like describing where you’ve been and ringing the restaurant to see if you left your cardigan there. Living in Australia, there’s not going to be much scope for using that skill (unless I go to a Japanese restaurant and deliberately leave my cardi there, but this is Australia, so it would probably be stolen) so I’m concentrating on reading manga and children’s books and watching drama. To that end I’ve discovered jreadability, which lets me put an extract from an ebook into it and get an idea of how hard it is to read. And I’m using aegissub to step through drama a line at a time and shadow. I figure I can construct a collection of grammar, phrases and words from these “authentic” sources and then send the lesson to my online tutor to practice.
So I my attempt to make my study more authentic was a success, I think. I’ve had lots of fun lessons talking about manga and drama. I learnt that the jreadability site isn’t all that useful because it thinks that a book with lots of ゐs and big つs instead of っ is the easiest to read, so I fell back on good old Harry Potter. My teacher explained to me that some of the translation uses deliberately “other worldly” feeling words which is quite different to Ms Rowling’s intent, I think. I’d like to get the end of the textbook (which promises I can pass N2 if I finish it) by June next year, but if I keep doing authentic, instead of contrived things, I won’t get there! Perhaps I need to spend less time reading English.