What are your goals for Japanese in 2025?

I don’t directly track most data outside the day I’m doing it to know how long a session was and etc, so my goals are a little more vague but here are some things I’d like to manage in the near-ish future:

  1. Any level of comfort speaking. I’m getting solid-ish on comprehension but my output is abysmal. With time I can make my text good enough; it’s probably full of unnatural points but totally understandable and I have more important tasks than to iron out those kinks, that’ll get better with continued input anyway. But I’m barely capable of talking. Gonna keep up the input as well as I can and try to commit to proper shadowing regularly, at least a little. Then I can spend more time talking to a few Japanese Splatoon friends I have, whenever I feel up to it again.
  2. Start reading Muramasa - this VN has a reputation for being one of the hardest but I got it in my mind I want to give it a shot, and it’s texthookable, so hey why not. I bought a copy and it’s ready to go on my computer. Might sample it soon. Just unsure if I’m gonna slowly crawl through it in the very near future, or decide it’s a pain and give it some months. But by the end of the year hopefully I’ll feel up to it if I don’t sooner.
  3. N1 practice test? I want to think I’d be able to pass this already, but doing it properly is an annoying big time sink so I haven’t bothered. Would just be a neat little milestone to say I did it, but it’s a low priority goal cause ultimately it doesn’t mean anything compared to doing more real Japanese and working on proper skills. I don’t need it.
  4. My nebulous goals are just to get faster and obv more comfortable reading. If the material isn’t too tough I can push a little over 10k characters per hour when focused, and Japanese fatigue for reading and listening are largely gone if I’m not straining myself on hard stuff. Just want to see it get easier.

That’s probably good for now. It’s nice that loads of stuff that may have been goals in the last few years, reading various things and playing X videogames and whatnot don’t feel like big goals anymore cause yeah, I’m just gonna do them. For average stuff I’m fairly confident I can manage and it’s just what I do. :slightly_smiling_face:

Listening could use more work, though I’m seeing it get much more comfortable recently. That’s probably number 5, but it’s the same sort of nebulous zone. Probably work more on audiobooks to train my ear a little better, that sorta thing. Would be great to break into movies being easier to get closer to full comprehension on this year.

24 Likes