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Achieving Your Japanese Goals – May 2019 — 20 Comments

  1. 1)Average 35 sentence cards a day(35*31=1085)
    2)Average 7 episodes of raw anime(7*31=217)
    3)Increase daily average to 8 episodes of anime
    Read more
    Start monolingual transition after finishing 1 step

    I will continue mining sentences from anime(One piece and good ones that I will watch) and VN(Little Busters) using my anki/morphman setup.
    I will add monolingual definition instead of translation if definition has <=1 unknown word(will try to bruteforce that word) and I can understand it.

    • I’m half way done and burned out as hell.. It takes about 7 hours a day for me. I will complete it as a challenge, but in the future I would have modest goals, that’s for sure :)

  2. I want to:
    – add 300 kanji from my RTK deck (The truth that I want to finish RTK. I have 700 or so kanji left. In a perfect world, I would add 25 kanji per day for 28 days and be finished. I don’t think I dare to make that my goal though. My “official” goal is to add 300 kanji, my crazy goal is to add 700, maybe in the end I’ll add 500. We’ll see by the end of the month!)
    – add 350 cards from Jalup Intermediate (going from 350 to 700)
    – keep up with reviews as much as I can. The more kanji I add, the less I’ll be able to review. Right now I’m tempted to focus on adding kanji, getting to the end, and then dealing with the review monster. We’ll see.
    – spend some time enjoying Japanese. Play games in Japanese, listen to YouTube videos, watch Terrace House, anything. It’s so easy to get so focused on studying and reviews that I forget why I’m doing this in the first place!

    • I DID IT!!! I finished RTK! 700 kanji cards in one month, 25 per day, 50 the last couple of days. Phew! I’m so glad that I’m done with adding cards!

      As expected, I was unable to keep up with review, and I have a mountain of reviews to work on now. Since there will be be no more new cards, I think it should be doable to get them down. I’ll spend June reviewing and relearning RTK. But it feels soooo good to be done with adding cards!

      I’m more or less up to date with Jalup Intermediate too, and I should be able to get to 700 cards by June 1st.

      In addition to RTK and Jalup, I was able to spend some time enjoying Japanese too. I love it when all of a sudden I recognize kanji “in the wild”! Then all my work with RTK really was worth it.

  3. Okay this is my last month before I get to spend a month in Japan. I am nearing finishing most of my current content which is good because during the trip I am shifting gears for a month or two, more on that later.

    For this month in order of priority:

    1) Finish Jalup expert cards, 10 cards a day
    2) Keep up with RTK and anki situation reviews
    3) Find and listen to basic Japanese phrases intended for travelers in the car just to brush up on specific stuff for restaurants, shops, train station, etc. ANY RECOMMENDATIONS?

    5) Immersion – 11 episodes of Terrace House Opening New Doors – Finish the series
    6) Increase reviewing key phrases for my upcoming Japan trip in May
    7) Try and finish the first book of Dragonball, this is a stretch goal, ~200 pages

    • For #3 I decided to try JapanesePod101 for a month. I have been a bit skeptical of it but it has a lot of beginner content for getting around Japan which is exactly what I want to focus on for now. So I will try this month and then cancel. If I love the system I may resubscribe in July when I get back from Japan and do more advanced content in the car. I don’t see a lot of mid-high level japanese lessons for the car (other than immersion) so I may do this. Open to suggestions though. I have already done all of Pimseular and Michel Thomas. If you know good audio lessons for car use let me know though, especially if it is mostly J-J type stuff.

      • Early post this month as I head to Japan shortly and will be there until July. This will be my first time there since I started learning the language. I am super excited and fairly nervous to try speaking. As for May here it goes:

        1) Finish Jalup expert cards, 10 cards a day
        DONE – Finished Expert, it felt easy which is great. I often found myself though wanting to do more than 10 cards a day. I may increase it when I get back from my trip and start Hero.

        2) Keep up with RTK and anki situation reviews
        DONE

        3) Find and listen to basic Japanese phrases intended for travelers in the car just to brush up on specific stuff for restaurants, shops, train station, etc.
        DONE – Listened to about 20+ episodes of jpod101 survival phrases, some of them multiple times

        5) Immersion – 11 episodes of Terrace House Opening New Doors – Finish the series
        DONE – Finished the last Terrace House Opening New Doors today. It sounds like the next season starts any day so I will be able to keep my binge going after my trip is over

        6) Increase reviewing key phrases for my upcoming Japan trip in May
        DONE

        7) Try and finish the first book of Dragonball, this is a stretch goal, ~200 pages
        NO – This was always a stretch goal. I think I did about half of this, maybe around 200 pages. I am having a hard time getting into it. I don’t know how much is because of my Japanese level and how much is because I already know the story. I suspect both but more of the latter. I will see how I feel after my trip. I am thinking about trying a Manga I don’t know the story of, maybe One Piece.

        All in a good last month before my trip to Japan. June is going to be a very different month. I am not planning on adding any cards, but will try to have a real life conversation in Japanese everyday which shouldn’t be too hard. I am also bringing a Grammar book for downtime and see how far I can get through it in June. Mid July I will return home and reassess what is next for me. I think it will likely change once I have real encounters in the language. But if I were to guess I will hit Jalup Hero hard. Finish up the Grammar book. Keep up with Terrace House. Do Jpod101 in the car. And maybe start One Piece Manga and do the Anime at the same pace – no subs obv. Very subject to change, we will see…

  4. For the next 10 days I will be having vacation and plan on relaxing mostly. I will try to keep up with reviews but probably not add much in terms of new cards. Hopefully it should then mean my number of reviews are lower when my vacation ends. Which in turn will mean more space for adding new cards.

    So my goals for May will be modest.

    1. Add 50 new cards from Jalup Intermediate
    2. Add 50 new cards from Kanji Kingdom
    3. Watch 1 episode of Forest of Piano

  5. My goal for May is 930 cards (30 cards x 31 days). Currently, this means finishing the advanced deck + 310 cards from expert. Sometime this month I should finish the 1000 J-J sentences challenge as well. Active immersion will probably stay the same at 3 hours or more per day.

    • I forgot to update this.

      For this month, I believe there were 3 days where I didn’t add new cards due to extended social obligations, leaving me at 220 expert cards at the end of the month. However, I did all the reviews, except for the time I activated vacation mode for around half a day because I couldn’t do any reviews.

      I forgot to mention before that my monthly pre-planned allowance for failure to add new cards is 4 days, 1 for each week. As long as I stay within this threshold, I will consider that month to be a success.

  6. My goal for May is ~450 J-J cards from intermediate
    Immersion when I have the time, but I’m not going to have any specific goals this month as far as that’s concerned.

  7. 1. Watch 10 episodes
    2. Add 100 cards from expert level 2 (currently on card 351)
    3. Read 宇宙兄弟 – finish rest of 19 and 20

    • 1. No only 5
      2. Yes, finished
      3. Only #19

      Didn’t make all the goals, but did a few tutoring sessions and added a lot of cards from them that I was happy with.

  8. *Keep up with Anki
    *10 mined sentances/day, start adding J-J definitions for sentances with only 1 new word
    *At least 15 min shadowing, I don’t have enough time to do more yet
    *At least 1 hr passive immersion
    *30 min MangoLanguages/day
    *Start learning to write 2 kanji a day, this is kind of like a reward to me as I love writing kanji

    Resources

    Shadowing:
    Sound Library ~世界にひとつだけの本~: The lady who does this podcast has a super soothing voice and I’ve really been enjoying shadowing it on my morning walk. She takes lots of breaks so it’s easy for me to follow along. They’re also only about 15 minutes long for the most part, which is perfect for me.

    Passive immersion:
    Rilakkuma and Kaoru-san: This is literally my new favorite thing. Super cozy, and I understand 95% of what is being said, which is pretty amazing to me. I don’t usually watch Netflix but since these are so short (10-15 min) I can watch them during lunch.
    ゲームなんとか podcast: A podcast about video games! Something I was having trouble with was getting bored listening to other podcast on topics I didn’t care about, so I was really happy when I found this. I only get maybe 10% though, but the host’s voices aren’t annoying and they don’t speak crazy fast.

  9. Sorry I’m late. My goal is to finish the light novel 盾の勇者成り上がり. Last month I read 4 chapters, this month I’m reading one chapter a day. It also helps that I am watching the anime as well. See you all on the other side!

    • Done!! It definitely feels good being on the other side. I can definitely feel my reading speed and ability has improved?

  10. * Do all reviews
    * Keep doing lots of immersion
    * Do Jalup Champion stage 3 at 5 cards per day when released.

    • * Done.
      * Done and for once lots of it.
      * I failed this one and never got around to adding the cards. I have now added them and moving the goal to next month.

  11. Gonna proceed off last months goals and try and balance my study time correctly

    1) At the end of each week, figure out how many cards I have added so that I can track them. The goal here is to try and pinpoint things that are blocking me, whether it be not getting up early enough, catching up on reviews, etc.

    2) Continue using the review tracker to balance my daily reviews, i.e. don’t add cards if there is a wave of hundreds of cards coming in later in the week

    3) Try and watch more anime in general, subtitled or not (not dubbed). It’s good listening practice and provides motivation to keep studying.

    I don’t want to set a card goal this month, as I think doing so has had negative affects on my studying, though I do think I need to increase the speed I’m adding cards at, so hopefully my first goal aids with that.

    • I succeeded in my goals last month, and I believe I found the root cause of my stagnation, which is that I get too distracted from the flash cards while I’m working on discerning meaning. I found that I would start reading. Focus on meaning, drift off, look away, and sometimes I would get on the computer and stop working altogether. My solution, and goal for the next month, will be to time each flashcard on a stop watch on my computer where the stopwatch is controlled by the space bar. Not only does this block me from using the computer by incorporating it, but it gives me a time goal per card so I don’t stagnate. was able to clear out a large number of cards in a much shorter time this way.

      I may also abandon writing each kanji out as it is taking too long and my kanji studying is lagging behind my reading and speaking. I will address this in the next month.

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