How’s everyone doing at the halfway (ish) point? I only set first half goals so thought I’d check in here.
first half goals
finish “reading” また、同じ夢お見ていた
“Read” one more novel: ムーミン谷の彗星
Participate in Soggy’s children’s novel club - see Moomins above
Finish watching all of しろくまカフェ - sad it’s over, will certainly rewatch
figure out what next for broadening my slice of life listening - pending
Get to level ~40 on WK and then reevaluate next steps with kanji / vocab - see block below
Decide whether N3 in Dec is something to aim for - decided; not going to be focused on this
pausing WK
On WK, not that anyone is paying attention to my little level marker, but I paused progress entirely in about Feb. I was having an extremely busy period at work which put in sharp relief the relative time inefficiency of WK. The amount of leeches and inability to deal with them, the relative obscurity of much of the vocab, the review periods, and honestly also because my kanji knowledge had far outstripped any other Japanese skills I had. I have kept up with reviews, so I can restart at some stage if I want to. Unlikely in the short term.
As an alternative I went through the Kaishi 1.5k Anki deck - skipping most of it that WK covered but doing a few hundred words that it hadn’t. That consolidated some basics, but I finished it a while ago and still haven’t really worked out where to go next after this. Partly that’s because I decided to… (see next block)
doing lots more listening
I spent a lot more time listening, primarily through podcasts and YouTube, than I have done before (plus of course shirokuma cafe mentioned above). Progress is harder to track with this, but it’s very clear when some things that a year ago felt challenging now feel much easier. Akane is the best example of this for me because she speaks relatively fast compared to people I’d listened to before that, which felt very difficult at first and now she’s one of the easier podcasts. I also did the first three stages of Pimsleur, and snuck in a couple of Italki lessons. Not enough to really have an impact, but they were fun.
Fave YouTube / podcasters have included:
- Akane
- Haru
- Yuyu
- Mai
- Tomo
I’ve been using Migaku - with varying amounts of success - as assistance. Mostly helpful, sometimes broken. When it works, it allows quick, easy audio flashcard generation on iOS which is the killer feature for me. It also (used to) allow very quick easy subtitle generation for videos that didn’t have them (or only had the terrible YouTube autogenerated ones) but this feature is mostly broken now.
the next 5-6 months
So what next? Well I’m still in the midst of a busy period personally and professionally so really this has been fully relegated to “fun hobby” rather than anything more significant. To that end, goals are pretty open ended. I’d like to:
continue listening - find a shirokuma cafe replacement and work my way through it (suggestions of light hearted slice of life aimed at adults welcome)
“Read” at least 2 books - current children’s novel pick plus continue plugging away at かがみの孤城
Later in the year, come back to the Q of how to continue to progress my kanji knowledge and reading vocab without WK. (This isn’t conceptually difficult, it’s just a Q of focus and time to making the setup low effort and easy)
I’ve not mentioned various other things of the last few months that I’ll keep going with on the side - eg Yotsuba& has become a great bedtime read for me, now that much of that is relatively easy to read extensively. If I don’t understand all of it that’s fine, I can still enjoy it without looking up everything. (Which is kind of cool? Would like to get to that stage with the children’s novels) [1]
We’re planning to go back to Japan for a bit in a few weeks time which will be excellent. But given how busy life is, the focus there will be relaxing rather than powering language learning. Eating food, exploring new places (including Okinawa which I’m excited about) and lots of sleeping. Can. Not. Wait.
So a fun half year of inching forwards where the most important thing is that I’ve continued to enjoy it. No idea where this ends up and I do sometimes wonder whether it’s a giant waste of time. But then what else would I be doing? The time passes anyway. Happy summer all.
Editor’s note: the very next double page spread that I turned to was two adults having a conversation at the start of a chapter and I have no idea what they were talking about and had to look up a bunch of words. Way to keep you humble. ↩︎