Good advice - we’re all different hey. I’ll give it a shot. At the moment I’ve said weekly but I think monthly could work too. I think if it becomes a chore then I’ll drop it
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I just went and had a look at your log @kittyaphrodite - it’s great! Any advice on the best way to make goals reasonable? I sort of stuck a finger in the air for mine, but maybe that’s ok as a beginner…
Totally! I’m actually here on the community when I should be doing some more lessons ahahaha! 
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thank you! It’s definitely been a labor of love over the past year. I think in terms of making “reasonable goals” without going too deep with it, I think that the best thing to do is to find how much you could realistically do in a month in Japanese (or a week if that’s how you format your study blog), and then put half of that amount as a goal for yourself. So for instance for me, I’ve been averaging about 7 day level cycles for the past couple of weeks, so in theory I could do 4 levels a month (especially as I hit the fast levels), but it would be a lot. So I usually make my goal “go up 2 levels this month”. If I surpass that goal, great! I get a self-esteem boost and I progressed in Japanese. If all I could manage was 2 levels this month because work/stress/illness/exhaustion, then I still hit goal, progressed, and don’t feel bad about myself.
There’s been long stretches of time where I hit the wall, got exhausted, got sick, and my speed dropped for a while. It happens, it’s life. I’ve gone on vacation mode in wk for 2 days at a time at least 5 times in the past year. But I get back up soon because I’ve built a lot of reward into my routine- every month I reach (and sometimes surpass!) my goals and a long list of resources, books, and now games are listed as “complete” which is so satisfying. Japanese is such a difficult language, it takes so long to gain competency in grammar, kanji, vocab, reading comprehension…that I feel it is all the more imperative to build in multiple positive feedback loops for yourself. Part of having monthly logs is that sometimes I have lazy weeks 
and seeing that “oh yeah I didn’t do much this week, didn’t progress in levels, didn’t finish this book or this chapter” would be v discouraging for me as opposed to 4 weeks worth of content where I had overall improvement.
Like many people, I have tried multiple times over the years to learn Japanese and this was the first time it stuck- in 2017 I had made it to my all time high of level 6 before skipping wk for a while and having 700 reviews of content I barely remembered. I couldn’t even wrap my head around Genki chapter 3. It matters more about sticking around for the long haul as opposed to doing all the things early on and getting burned out and quitting for years on end. And you stick around for the long haul by creating a really rewarding interaction with Japanese and your study patterns over time.
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I’ll be interested in others opinions on this too. Fist of all, know your overall aims, strengths and weaknesses, this helps define and clarify your most important focus
My advice on making any goals coming out of that reasonable:
Every now and then, look at what i am actually doing compared to the goal. For too long I set my goals such that it would have taken 10x more time to do everything compared to my current routine at the time. Since I now just set one new goal at a time and adjust it gradually according to what I actually achieve instead of what I want to achieve, I have actually achieved more in 1 year than the previous 6-7. It turns out to be way more effective to be lightly consistent on one thing than stop and go on 5 things
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My preference for goals is to choose a general direction instead of a specific thing. “Read everyday” instead of “read 5 books this month”, “Do reviews everyday on WK” instead of “level 20 by August”. That way you know what you want to do and can go for it, but you can’t really fail if you’ve done anything at all. Because if you quantify, and life happens, it’s really discouraging to miss your target and you might stop completely. Or you might reach the target and not push further.
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You’re still in the stage of figuring things out, so I’d say this is totally fine. Once you know how Japanese fits into your daily life, which tools you like, and what keeps you motivated, it will quite likely become easier. Maybe you can even make goal-setting your first goal 
I took a peek at your study log, and the ones you listed already sound pretty interesting!
Previously, I went in without a plan and never got very far. This time, I also wanted to set some goals that would motivate me but not sound too vague or ambitious, so I tried to use the “SMART” technique as a guideline. This stands for “specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound”. I see it a lot on work-related websites, but I first encountered it in the context of mental health and found it really useful. My amateur interpretation when it comes to studying:
- Specific:
“I want to learn Japanese” 
E.g. your goal “I want to be able to read these sutras”; “I want to be able to handwrite all JLPT kanji”, “I want to reach the required level to study in Japan”, etc. - Measurable: “I want to be fluent” Anything that lets you check your progress (or completion) - counting how many JLPT kanji you wrote correctly, how much of the sutra you understood, your WK accuracy, your test score, etc.
- Achievable: “I want to reach native-like fluency within a year” E.g. “I want to pass JLPT N2”, “I want to get the gist of the story when watching anime”, “I want to make casual conversation with Japanese friends”, etc.
- Relevant: Anything “extra” you do because you feel you have to, but will likely never need or use Anything actually relevant to your life (like reaching the level of Japanese you need for a job, being able to hold a conversation with Japanese people around you) or interests (like understanding specific vocabulary and concepts used in Buddhism, anime, or (in my case) sumo and Noh).
- Time-bound: This can be a bit tricky, but helpful for keeping oneself motivated and increasing accountability. (I admit I do have a few “would be nice…” goals left
) “One day I want to…”, “It would be nice to…” “This time next year, I want to watch my favourite anime without subtitles”, “I want to pass N4 before the application period for the exchange is over”, “I will learn to write a new kanji each week”, “I will do one batch of reviews daily”, etc.
And the most important thing: Sustainable! A goal that is not compatible with daily life, that will not weather ups and downs in engagement, or that mainly leaves you stressed and annoyed instead of motivated is not a useful long-term goal. Especially when you’re not under time pressure, it’s fine to adjust goals that don’t work for you - and that includes adjusting them upwards when you find that you have more time and energy than you thought or have discovered a new interest that motivates you.
…Ahem. I swear I was not trying to write an essay, but this always happens 
Maybe I should put “learn to be concise” on my list of goals…
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This varies a huge amount from person to person. Humans in general are creatures of habit, so building up inertia to do things is really successful - this is why apps like Duolingo have a streak system. So I try to maintain my “streak” of coming to the forums and wanikani in general and doing reviews (and updating my study log). This keeps the “learn Japanese” idea active.
The last time I got really sick I stopped coming to the forums and doing reviews and then I felt horrible about losing my streak (and it was 2020 and my mental health suffered from the lockdowns) so I took a huge break. I do worry that if I caught an illness today that I would feel bad about not keeping my pace with my routine. But it might be worth going into a “review only mode” for a bit if I can manage to do just that. I have more support now than I did in 2020 so if I did get really ill things would be different.
I do try to make space for my mental health, because my consistency varies wildly. Some days it’s all I can manage to get my reviews done. Some days I can spend 6 hours on reading + do 30 lessons + do all my reviews + watch a grammar video. All reviews are progress. wkstats tells me that I’ve done well over 100,000 reviews by now. All reviews make that number go up, and a higher number just means I know more things.
This is why I broke my list of “things to do” down into checklists. Do reviews? Get down to 0 lessons at one point each level? Try to read this week? I have a table of all the days of the week and put on the success days. I even put the anime I’m watching, because I’m watching enough shows this season that it’s helpful to remember if I’ve watched this week’s episode or not.
I also am planning to join a couple upcoming book clubs because I’m not great at consistently reading. I’m hoping the schedule of “commit to reading X pages per week” will help me establish it as a habit.
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it’s amazing how many grown-ass professional adults have problems with this one at work. This isn’t work, but same concept.
Thing is, metrics and objectives are hard to design and foreign to think about for a lot of people. Even writing a simple training lesson - “by the end of this lesson the student should be able to: [blank]”. A lot of people will say “know the -te forms of godan verbs.”
How do you KNOW if they know? What observable action can they do? Recognize the correct answer when shown? Select the correct answer from a list? Respond with the correct answer when prompted? Use -te forms naturally in conversation? Those aren’t all the same level of comprehension and maybe it’s safer to do it in stages to keep it “achievable”
Anyway, I like irodori’s “can do” lists for their lessons (although the “how do you know” depth isn’t quite up to my professional expectations lol - the concept is there) which are right up front in the table of contents.
Example: “Can-do 01: Can exchange greetings with a person you are meeting for the first time in a long time”. You rate yourself, they have qualitative standard meanings for 1-3 stars.
I slightly tailor their “star” meanings to (did this lesson but still suck at it) / (can do it with some thought, like in writing at my own speed) / (can do it naturally in real time conversation)
This is the part I like most: it doesn’t specify any individual words or phrases. It doesn’t say “know how to use お久しぶり in a sentence.” Because that’s not the ultimate point. People use different phrases, conversations aren’t scripted. YOU might know only a few set phrases at this point, but you have to be able to UNDERSTAND when someone goes off-script and asks the same question a different way. also, my pet peeve - “know how”… how do you know if they know how, what can you see objectively
Anyway, slight derail on goal setting, oops.
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Which, back to the “study log”. My assessment of those can-do ratings might change. I might think I’m “three stars” at "Can exchange greetings with a person you are meeting for the first time in a long time” – and then I get flustered and have to “what?” or revert to English when I’m talking to someone. I’d make a note of that in my study log* and decide if that was a fluke or if I need to study that some more. If I’ve written that more than a couple of times, I can’t really fool myself into “just a fluke”, so it’s a kind of self-accountability tool as well. If you’ve got an occasional actual teacher or iTalki session, that kind of data from the study log is an excellent thing to bring up and practice with a real person,
* which as discussed, I keep only in my mind, but since I’m in this mind-set and analytical habit, that works for me. Some people like to write it down and/or share with others.
“Don’t confront me with my failures; I still remember them” – Jackson Browne
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My study log basically changed my life, so for me personally, the answer is “yes!” I’m not sure I’d still be studying Japanese without it. I’ve met some really amazing people through keeping a study log, and it has helped me structure my studies and find the motivation to keep going.
I do put a fair amount of time into my log, but I consider the log itself (as well as browsing this forum) to be a hobby, and as long as it keeps being fun, I’ll keep coming back, haha. I think the forum community is generally very pleasant and I get a lot more out of hanging out here than I do out of doomscrolling social media, so I don’t consider it a waste of time at all.
My advice is to think very, very small-scale, like more in terms of what you can do during one day than in terms of yearly or even monthly goals.
For example, when I was actively doing WaniKani still, my average level up pace was two weeks, and this was because I did a set amount of lessons daily that let me meet that target very reliably. I also ended up roughly at a two week pace per textbook lesson as well, because I would try to work on my textbook a little bit every day, and what I had the time/energy to do often worked out to be a pace of about one lesson per two weeks.
So I could set goals like “one more textbook lesson and one more WK level by the next two weeks” because I knew that my daily workload pace would let me easily achieve that. Then it just becomes a matter of motivating yourself to get your daily workload done each day. And as long as you choose a reasonable pace for your lifestyle, that shouldn’t be too hard.
So yeah, I totally second Akashelia’s advice here:
“Read every day” and “do my daily WK lessons and all reviews every day” are both achievable goals within the unit of a single day. So it’s much more likely you’ll achieve them because you can’t put them off until another day. And those types of goals will add up, so you’ll achieve things like leveling up in WK or reading a bunch of books just as a natural consequence of completing your daily goal over a long enough period of time.
Since my study log is on a two-week clock, my goals tend to be me setting the direction I intend to take within the next two weeks. I don’t really do much planning beyond that because it gets harder and harder to predict what my life will be like, so I’ll just pick something to focus on for the next couple weeks.
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Haha exactly my feeling, it’s always well spent time, and borderline productive time 
without this community, I have no idea how my Japanese learning journey would have looked like, I don’t think I would have found out about all the things I did while being here and I might have dropped it completely, in any case I don’t think I would have made so much progress so fast and had so much fun. I’m so sad that Wanikani has decided to remove the list of latest posts from the dashboard, it’s the thing that made me come here because it seemed to be so active, I don’t think I would have ever clicked on the current button:
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To put thought into this, I think having an everyday achievable goal is important. But not automatically achieved. It does require some effort.
I wouldn’t beat myself if I miss a day, but it’s a slippery slope, so I’d rather not to. Or then somewhat first thing in the next morning.
But not every goal is so small a goal, or easy to achieve every day for months or years. So, I’d set weekly ones. It’s easier to see the perspective of a week than a month, and so to adapt accordingly.
Time slotting and allocating time may help. Places and lifestyle too. After that, put energy and attention into learning well.
After that, there are many things that need to be kept going for at least months. Say, three months minimum, or a season. That would be about knowing how to exert, while continuing to do so.
I wouldn’t fear of burning out, but rather work to near burn out, and know how to tone down. While there is no need to hurry to learn a language, or even practically impossible to hurry; there are so much to prepare, to later use in practice.
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In general, the best sort of goals to set are effort based rather than attainment based. So: “I will listen to 4 hours of podcasts this week”, “I will spend at least 30 mins a day reading, 5 days a week”, etc, etc,. To make them reasonable you’ll have to work out how much time you have to spend and then allocate it.
It’s also best to make the tasks habitual so they are triggered by normal daily events - this can be either time based - watch a 30 min Japanese drama before bed, or if life is more chaotic than that, event based - driving to work / doing housework, listen to an audio book.
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Are you referring to something else? It’s still there for me.
Yes, referring to something else 
It’s gone now so I can’t show you a screenshot, but when I started using WK back in July 22, when you were on your dashboard (so the page https://www.wanikani.com/), instead of seeing the screenshot I posted above, you could see the recent threads. A bit like Natively still does:
Now it’s been replaced by a static image, not reflecting the fact anymore that it’s an active community, with many ongoing book clubs and other cool things
Edit: found an old screenshot in an old thread
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