Achieving Your Japanese Goals – March 2020
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 March
Initial Instructions
Leave a comment by March 1st and include:
1. Your specific goal(s)
2. Resources you will use
3. Game plan/strategy
Completion Instructions
Reply to your comment by March 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 February 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.
Goals for March
1. Go to Japan and not stress about getting better at Japanese!
2. When I return (mid March) I expect to:
– Start Advanced
– Keep going with RTK.
That will do for now
1. I made it to Japan just in time before the world went completely crazy, and thankfully also got back just before flights started to get cancelled worldwide eeep! I did ok at the not stressing about being able to use Japanese in daily life, but it was a truly humbling experience ordering food and other conversations where the other person knew very little English. Another thing I wasn’t prepared for was reading Menus, a lot of Kana used so the Kanji keywords couldn’t save me!
In retrospect I was very lucky to go when I did, a couple of weeks later and I would not have left my house, let alone the country! A LOT of tourist sites were closed (incl. Ghibli museum…), but other than that life seemed pretty normal to my untrained Tokyo eye :)
2. Having returned, I am very pleased to report my desire to learn Japanese has not diminished and I have now started Jalup advanced and so far I am very much enjoying the process :) And of course we all have a lot more time on our hands all of a sudden so my April goals may get bolder!
1. Your specific goal(s)
a. WaniKani Level 19 (654 kanji, 2119 vocab)
b. Purchase JALUP Maximum Package
c. Read vol. 3-4 of Yotsubato
d. 3-5 daily hours of passive and active immersion
3. Game plan/strategy
a. Mainly find those little bits of time throughout the day to knock out reviews, do passive immersion at work, and be very careful about my time at home so I can get that active immersion in. I might balance things out by shifting a little more of the active immersion to the weekends.
I’m wondering everyone’s thoughts: I should be able to purchase JALUP Max in 1-2 months. Do you think Bunpro is worth it to preview the grammar or should I just put that off and skim through the Excel spreadsheets that come with the Anki decks to preview the grammar instead?
This month is a HUGE milestone for me, I will finish Jalup (yay)! After March will therefore be a huge transition for me so I will need to do some serious planning for that. I have a general idea at this point but very open to any and all suggestions to helping me keep momentum going post jalup.
I was looking back and when I finish it will have been exactly 2 years since I started with jalup. I am really happy with the speed and how much I did immersion all along the way, etc. I would love to say at 2 years in I am fluent. My beginner self would have said I am now. But in reality I think I have 2-3 more years before I can confidently claim that. That said I have an amazing base under me now and can pretty easily use j-j dictionaries without much branching. I can watch and read most of the entertainment I want to consume with a decent level of understanding. My goal for the next year of studying is to really improve my speaking and listening. My conversational Japanese.
As for March goals in order of priority:
1) Finish Jalup Champion!
2) Finish book 1 of Let’s Speak Japanese: Shadowing (1 unit left) with at least 15 min of shadowing a day.
3) Finish Jalup Champion accompanying anime
4) Watch at least 8 episodes of Terrace House (through episode 31)
5) Prepare for life without Jalup in April, make sure I have an April game plan ready!
Congrats :) I’ve followed your progress for a long time now, and it’s so great to see how far you’ve come.
As for that “confident feeling of fluent,” it always seems to get pushed back further and further. The more you know, the more you feel you don’t know…
Well the bad news is the world fell apart this month. The good news is I finished all of jalup!! As planned I finished a little early this month so I can plan out better how I want to tackle things on my own now. I am still finalizing the plan and it may shift a bit as some things are easier to do in quarantine than others!
Hope everyone is safe and healthy. Specifically for my goals:
1) Finish Jalup Champion
DONE!!! Thanks Adam jalup has been everything I hoped for and way way more. Never has my money been so well spent.
2) Finish book 1 of Let’s Speak Japanese: Shadowing (1 unit left) with at least 15 min of shadowing a day.
DONE – more like 15 min/day this month as car time is severely reduced.
3) Finish Jalup Champion accompanying manga
DONE
4) Watch at least 8 episodes of Terrace House (through episode 31)
DONE – did through ep 35
5) Prepare for life without Jalup in April, make sure I have an April game plan ready!
Finalizing…
Goals for March
1. Finish Jalup Intermediate around mid month (I am doing 25 cards a day and am at 550 right now)
2. Start Jalup advanced at a pace of 33 cards a day.
3. Keep immersing watching 2-3 episodes of anime a day and read a manga chapter of anything each day even though I don’t understand most of it yet.
Update 1:
I just finished adding new cards from the intermediate deck today!!!
I had to take a few days off to review while i was on a micro vacation otherwise i might have gone crazy near the end there.
Tomorrow I am gonna get started on advanced at a pace of 33 per day…hopefully i survive
As for immersion I have kinda held off on reading until starting advanced and have been trying to catch up my reading. For the last week I have been trying to do about 4 hours of active listening a day with basically no passive besides and occasional podcast. I still don’t understand most of the what is going on but I trust the process.
Update 2:
I started Jalup advance at 25 a day for 2 days then upped it to 50 a day. I only one day off for reviews only which was last Sunday. Today I completed the 450th card and plan to keep this pace until I finish the deck.
As for immersion, it has been all over the place. I usually get about 2 hours of active listening which is either podcasts or anime or both. For reading I have been slowly increasing how many pages of manga i read a day. Currently I am doing a chapter a day but will slowly increase that next month.
This month I’ll be focused on Kanji since I don’t want to start Intermediate until I’m at 1000 characters. I’m actually flying to Nagoya this morning and will be staying in Japan for at least a month working remotely so I’ll be sure to get some passive immersion too :D
1) Do at least 4 Kanji Kingdom chain links per day
2) Read/listen to the 20 Jalup beginner stories
3) Read volume 1 of Yotsubato
And of course stay current on all reviews, but that’s always the goal
I took a few days of review-only mode so I fell short this month.
1) I reached 953 on Kanji Kingdom
2) I only got through the first one, which was surprisingly difficult actually
I am happy with last months goals, so no big reason to change anything here:
1) Keep adding expert cards at any pace between 10 and 20. This should bring me somewhat close to the end of the deck.
2) Have a book or something else to read with me all the time.
Biggest challenge here is to find something when I finish the book I am currently reading, but in worst case I have plenty of Manga which can fill the spot.
3) Keep adding selfmade cards (+branches) to my own deck, at least 4, want to do 6, overachieving 8 or more.
The more I do this the more I like it. These are the cards which are very relevant to me. Also nothing beats the feeling of adding a card and then have it show up in immersion that very same day :-)
Good luck everybody!
Oh well, the world has changed this month, feels a bit weird to compare oneself to the beginning of it. But still here we go:
1) Will reach 900 by the 31st, so about 15/day. Felt much less then that, but the numbers don’t lie. I start to feel how the value I get out of purely flash cards is starting to diminish, so probably I will slow down a bit more and use the time for immersion
2) Technically a success, but then, the 2nd half of the month I barely went outside for reasons you all know.
3) Way overfulfilled. Added 10 new ones. This is mainly for two reasons: 1) Suddenly I spent way more time at home, so more time to dabble with this. 2) The amount of branching I need to do has decreased quite a bit. A couple of the cards I added did not require any of it (especially for the definition. Most of my struggles currently is finding branch-free sentences :|)
Overall a good month. I think I transitioned well into restructuring my habits into the new situation. Working from home means less down time e.g. on the way to office which I used for my reviews, but also more time for immersion (mostly that exact down time). Also, its easier to gain passive immersion while working.
I also started playing my first completely-Japanese video game (before I was playing partly Japanese because for some weird reason the FF-XIII(+2) steam versions have English game menus but Japanese sound, but having finished those I am now in complete-Japanese land. So far it works well and I am quite excited :-)
Oh and of course, lots and lots of video immersion. The discovery of Japanese audio tracks on regular TV shows in netflix really got me covered there. Not setting concrete goals there is exactly right for me.
Stay healthy, everyone!
So I’ve been a long time lurker here on this site. I’ve been a bit burnt out from Japanese and finally am jumping back in after a few years!
A bit late but here it is!
My goals this month:
1. Finish 250 J-E cards from Jalup Beginner
2. Achieve Wanikani Level 10
I’m happy to announce that I have completed my goal for this month! It might have been a little easy but I wanted to start off with a small goal.
So this time I’m planning on challenging myself a bit.
1. 100 new cards — finish to card 200 on expert stage 6 (card #4450 of Jalup deck)
My goals the month
1. Get a minimum of 100 Jalup Intermediate cards done this month which should put me past the halfway point of the deck (Currently at 430). I may push a bit harder on this but ran into a string of cards that were giving me some trouble so don’t want to risk frustration burn out.
2. Finish the last episode of 明日の君がもっと好き and then dive into 池袋ウエストゲートパーク.
3. Read(well try anyways) 美少女戦士セーラームーン vol 1 (full of furigana yay!) and try ダーリン・イン・ザ・フランキス vol 1 since I really enjoyed the anime.
4. Continue with passive immersion with shows and music when I have free time. Not putting a hard gaol on this one.
Results for this month.
1. So I managed to to get 115 cards done this month which puts me at 545 into Intermediate. Hit a few rough patches but I’ve decided when this happens to slow down and take some extra time. This really helped a lot and helped lower the frustration pressure I was putting on myself to always go go go.
2. Really happy with this. I finished both shows. I loved 池袋ウエストゲートパーク even if the level was very far above were I am now. Such a different show then the usual J-Drama fair. Also watched the live action ゆるキャン and a bunch of old school Sailor Moon episodes.
3. Kinda disappointed in myself for this one. Didn’t really get any reading in this month. Have to work on that for next month.
4. Passive immersion was good. Did it when I felt like it. Mostly a mix of shows and music.
Results for this month.
1. So I managed to to get 115 cards done this month which puts me at 545 into Intermediate.
Hit a few rough patches but I’ve decided when this happens to slow down and take some extra time,
this really helped a lot and lowered the frustration pressure I was putting on myself to always go go go.
2. Really happy with this. I finished both shows. I loved 池袋ウエストゲートパーク even if the level was very far above were I am now.
Such a different show then the usual J-Drama fair. Also watched the live action ゆるキャン and a bunch of old school Sailor Moon
episodes.
3. Kinda disappointed in myself for this one. Didn’t really get any reading in this month. Have to work on that for next month.
4. Passive immersion was good. Did it when I felt like it. Mostly a mix of shows and music.
I took an unexpectedly long break from studying. Since getting back, I have been pretty poor at setting and maintaining goals, so this month i’m really looking to change that:
1. Get to level 31 in WaniKani (currently level 29)
2. Get through 10 cards a day in Jalup beginner
3. Do 10 minutes of immersion listening per day
Reading 2 volumes of novels and 15 manga volumes. (Will try to read 15% of a novel volume and 1 manga volume every 2 days)
I think that will be my main goal. Will do other stuff as well but the rest i dont need to track I think
Forgot to update this. I managed to read 2 volumes and 15 Manga Volumes last Month. Even though I could have managed more if I wouldn’t have been side Tracked by Animal Crossing
For March
-Finish reading 悪夢のエレベーター.
-Start reading サバイバー or another 悪夢 book.
For April
-Finish reading コンビニ人間
-Finish reading サバイバー
-Find and watch an interesting TV series on Netflix…