language goals
"One of the things you can be virtually certain of in life is that you don't get something you don't aim at. Often people will keep their goals fuzzy, because one of the problems with specifying your goals is you specify your failures ." -Jordan Peterson
Officially starting from the 1st of June until the last day of 2020 .
There are 213 days left and seven more months to go, here's this year's game plan:
※ Recognise 1,023 Kanji Characters
※ Finish Core 2K/6K Optimised Deck
※ 4K Mined Sentences
※ Improve Japanese Handwriting
※ Pass JLPT N3
Recognise 1,023 Kanji Characters
As of the moment, I'm using the app Kanji Study to learn Kanji. It's not 100% free but the lifetime subscription will only cost you a mere US $5 and it's full of so many different functionalities which you can watch in action here . Initially, I tried doing the RRTK pre-made deck by MIA but... it just didn't feel... right, for me.
Luckily, making associations is a bit easier since I'm not learning Japanese as a complete beginner. I just happen to still be illiterate because I never memorised Kanji actively and have been passively recognising random characters through titles or typing in Japanese.
It was only this year that I even tried to read Japanese books. I attempted to read the novel Another by Ayatsuji Yukito on my Kindle. The Kanji didn't have any furigana however, but I discovered that it was possible to use the Japanese dictionary on my Kindle to look up the reading/meaning. I realised that quite a lot of these characters were actually words I already knew and would otherwise have no problem understanding if I were to hear it, which is honestly quite frustrating when you think about it. Having to highlight and wait for the dictionary to pop up is making the whole process way too cumbersome so I had to stop reading it and find easier materials that use lesser Kanji.
... I'm fed up with being illiterate in Japanese.
Finish Core 2K/6K Optimised Deck
This is the only pre-made deck I'm doing on Anki. I usually dislike learning from lists, or learning words in isolation, but this deck includes not just written sample sentences but high quality audio recordings of the word and the sentences which is great for shadowing.
4K Mined Sentences
I'll also continue doing my sentence mining since this is how I've mainly been learning words before for both Korean and Japanese, this time however, with the help of Anki.
Improve Japanese Handwriting
I just want to be able to write nicely.
Pass JLPT N3
My views on the JLPT have changed a lot now that I'm older, but the official certification will surely be helpful for future gigs. I took the N4 test back in December 2014, and "revised" using the 日本語チャレンジ series. However, because of my inability to get through textbooks, I didn't even revise for the N4 Kanji.
I did the exercises for the N5 Kanji but since I was taking the N4 exam, that didn't help me much. Although I failed, it was only by a very very tiny margin. We're talking 2-3 points. I lost the screenshot for my results though but i found the exam itself really easy if I could just read the Kanji! (´｡• ω •｡`)
Which is why instead of retaking it, I'd rather do N3....plus, it's been 5 years since then!
That's it for this post... see you in seven months.