My biggest goals are to graduate from short stories to novellas and to reach B2 level of grammar. As an aside, my goal to complete 2 WK levels per month may be too ambitious. The details of my goals are spelled out at the top of my study log.
I wish everyone the most success in all they attempt to achieve.
22 Likes
read 10000 pages in japanese
pass a N1 mock test
pass the real N1 test Will I ever pass it…
finish 10 video games or visual novels in japanese The problem is that most video games and visual novels are way too long.
pass an advance level japanese test It will probably be a test of business japanese. I will have more chances to use my fake keigo.
read more books in japanese
use japanese more to interact with people
21 Likes
Not to derail too much, but the good news is if you start getting into native material (if you haven’t already), imo Ace Attorney is on the very easy end of that. Replaying the very first game in the series was one of the first things I did in Japanese. They go lighter than most normal writing does on the kanji, and also the textboxes are really small so sentences can’t ever get very long. There are some odd speech patterns and whatnot but that type of thing is inevitable and it’s nothing too crazy. And back then I was using an OCR to imperfectly grab the lines but now it looks like if you have the original trilogy on PC, they can be texthooked for instant lookups too. You can probably do this sooner than you think.
15 Likes
In 2024 I had two simple goals: read 5 novels, and read 3 manga each month. And I hit both!
For 2025 I want to expand on that and:
-
Read 5 novels
-
Read 52 manga (Averaging to 1 a week)
-
Listen to 400 hours before my August Japan trip
I might end up reading more novels, I just want to make sure I’m enjoying reading through them and actually getting benefit, rather than speed reading just to hit a number. And I will definitely get more than 400 hours of listening total for the year, it’s just that my smaller goal has a deadline of before August :))
21 Likes
Oh, is that so? For whatever reason I thought that it’s one of the more difficult games to play. I guess your argument with the textboxes is reasonable - if sentences don’t get really long, then it’s probably easier to figure them out.
but the good news is if you start getting into native material (if you haven’t already)
So far I’ve played Pokemon Emerald, and right now I’ve just started reading the Death Note manga. I was planning to maybe play some more Pokemon, or look for some other games to play, but now that you say Ace Attorney isn’t that hard I might give it a go after finishing Death Note 
Though, one more question: what about kanji? I’m currently level 21, should I wait until I’m like lvl 30ish before I give it a go? Or does it not really matter if I have to look words up anyway?
12 Likes
Yeah you’re looking at textboxes like this, so it’s never very dense.
I feel like I was around there or so when I started it? Maybe it was closer to 30, hard to remember, but somewhere in that zone. Like I said they go a little light on kanji (you can see right there in the screenshot they’re choosing not to use 失礼), and a lot of words repeat frequently like 凶器 (きょうき, basically murder weapon) so you’ll probably get those kanji down early from lots of exposure. In fact I found the structure really good for learning – a core type of vocab you’ll always see that ingrains itself really well, and then within that, the case structure taking you to different places with different sorts of people gives you new sets of vocab to work on with each new one.
You’ll definitely be looking things up regularly enough, but I think the sentence size keeps it to a few lookups at most per sentence, which is a huge benefit. And the writing style outside managing some of the speaking quirks is never too intense. If PC is an option, those instant lookups will go a long way to making it easier, too. It’ll be slow going but so is everything at that phase, heh.
I hear The Great Ace Attorney subseries is a little harder due to its setting, but I haven’t read that for myself in anything but English. Have actually only done AA1 in Japanese, but I’m about to start the two Investigations spinoffs soon.
15 Likes
Hello,
Sorry if it is a bit off-topic, but what is this character 
? Is it そ ? I’m not familiar with the font
7 Likes
Yep, that’s what it is. I never got into handwriting stuff so can’t comment on this one more specifically – I know there are some cases where these characters look different in font than how they’re commonly written, and other times it’s just variations that are all accepted as the same thing. But it’s like how some English characters work:
10 Likes
I started this year with the goal of doing WK every day with the aim of reaching Level 60 in three years. That habit quickly stuck & then I got into the reading & listening challenges here & they’ve been a game changer for me. So my goals for 2025 are:
- Reach Lvl 40✅
- Read all 15 volumes of よつばと (or another manga series)
- Read my first light novel
- Read all the remaining SR material (I’ve read all beginner & intermediate level material now)
- Complete “Essential Japanese Kanji”handwriting book (or similar text)
- Continue to listen to or watch something in Japanese every day
And to achieve all of the above, continue to participate in the reading & listening challenges here
21 Likes
I personally am hoping to focus in a somewhat different direction than I had been going in the previous year. While I had been focused on trying to maintain relatively equal levels of skill in all areas of Japanese (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), I realized that my ability to learn new vocabulary was limited by my understanding of kanji, hence why I started daily Wanikani. By focusing more heavily on reading, I am hopeful that I can reach the point of engaging with texts I am personally interested in faster. I plan on continuing to practice speaking, but I have reconciled myself to slower progression in this area. The precise objectives I have for the new year are written in my personal study log elsewhere.
18 Likes
I intend to do at least two grammar lessons a month, and find someone locally to practice speaking with.
20 Likes
そ can be written with one or two strokes. Actually, I’ve been writing that with two for a while.
I think し is another to be seen written slightly differently, but I have never alternative strokes being mentioned.
10 Likes
Oh, huh. That looks way less daunting than I thought it would. Rain Code (Danganronpa spiritual successor) used more difficult language than this, with everything being on timers. I dunno why I expected AA to be the harder to parse of the two, but I assumed AA was the actually more mature one for some reason.
I guess teenage edgy overcompensation looks less mature to me than something aimed at a slightly younger audience.
9 Likes
To be fluent…or as close to it as possible
11 Likes
I had some fairly ambitious goals for 2024 but due to life, I pretty much failed. But 2025 is a new year!
- Finish Genki II
- Possibly finish Quartet I
- Finish N4 (grammar and vocab) on Bunpro
- Finish 5 manga volumes
- Reach 200 hours in listening (excluding anything with English subs-anime, games, etc)
- Finish going through Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar
(Yeah… this is just a copy and paste from Natively forums 
)
I just started Wanikani (again) and this time I’m going to get lifetime and stick with it. I don’t know what a realistic yearly goal would be for me (especially since I’m pretty slow), so I’m going to not set a goal for this one.
22 Likes
This is where I am… some practical and specific goals, but some are more vague
- Study the 中級の教科書 that have been sitting on my shelves
- Read at least one book from The Chronicles of Narnia… in 日本語
- Read as many volumes of おじさまと猫 as possible
- Read online in 日本語 more often
- Pay more attention while listening to podcasts in 日本語
- Possibly take the JLPT (probably N2)
- Level up my Japanese fluency
23 Likes
I have some more detailed goals which I’ll put in my study log at some point, but my general goals for next year are roughly this:
Specific goals:
- Read 20 novels (finished my first 3 so far in Nov/Dec so wanting to carry on this pace at least
- Pass N2 (hopefully in July, otherwise in December)
More vague goals:
- Read 20+ manga (minimum - maybe a lot more, or maybe not. Don’t yet know)
- Try to watch about 1hr a day of stuff on JP Netflix - not going to bother tracking this
- Play a bunch of games (pokemon violet first, then whatever I feel like)
- Get better at speaking and try to make 1 or 2 actual japanese friends
23 Likes
Wanna join Ojisama to neko book club?
6 Likes
Really I shouldn’t set any goals except “be consistent” but I’ll say JLPT N3 in the summer just to have something semi-realistic semi-unrealistic to aim for.
19 Likes
In 2025:
- Don’t stop, and to that end keep tracking the days I’ve studied for the most part
- Slowly increase variety in both reading and listening
- Get into speaking, and I’d also like to talk in Japanese within text chats
21 Likes