Finish Kanji up to N2 at least. I’ve got a super elaborate plan for this goal involving many study periods and break periods.
Finish Bunpro N3 grammar. Maybe start N2.
Learn vocabulary from not Bunpro, how will be a work in progress for awhile I think.
Read stuff. I want to read my first novel next year. I want to break into the intermediate book clubs and the children’s novel club. I’d also like to play visual novels and other games in Japanese. It might finally be the year I start DQX.
Listen to more sources that aren’t just anime. I’m not a podcast person, but YouTube and audio books might work.
Excercise! If I feel better, maybe I’ll be able to learn more.
Hopefully a trip to Japan with my husband during the summer.
Hi y’all! So excited for everyone’s journeys in the upcoming year, and y’all’s resolve has motivated me to come up with a few goals for myself too.
My goals for 2026 include:
Finish 4th year Japanese at my uni
Get into a program in Yokohama designed for academics learning Japanese
Get proficient enough to where I can research in Japanese language scholarship
Learn how to read colonial-era Japanese documents for my research
Begin the process of digging through colonial archives for materials for my dissertation
Make more Japanese-speaking friends!
Hopefully, if I have the time and motivation, take the N1 exam in December!
These are some really big goals, so I want to give myself grace even if I can’t fully get there, but my PhD advisor is also setting these as my goals so it’s a bit of pressure
ooh so glad to hear that. If I don’t pop by… then I may have missed it, in which case, will you pretty please tag me when you start, I’d love to follow your log!
Is that roughly Meiji/Taisho/Showa? I’ve read a lot of old Japanese stories and essays during my 青空文庫 explorations and depending on what years this might actually be a fast project for you (well, excluding some of the archaic kanji) but I’ll note that newspapers have felt like a different beast entirely
Yes! I’m a historian of modern Korean history, so the years for that are roughly 1907 until 1945, so it crossed Meiji/Taisho/Showa eras! I’ve been warned that it’s quite a beast, since I’ll be working with government records/newspapers/things like that, so anyone I’ve talked to has said you have to learn an entirely new method to read those documents!
@Dunlewy thank you so much, good luck on your goals as well!!
On the flip side, you stopped one thing that hinders mental capacity (drinking) and another thing that harms lungs and vocal cords (smoking), and those are huge wins! So now you’re in a much better position to improve speaking!
When I got started a few months ago I outlined a whole timeline thru 2026 into 2027… looking at it now there are blessedly few adjustments I need to make. I have my quantified weekly goals (listening minutes, reading & writing quotas, study amount across different resources) of course but the big milestones I’m hoping to hit are:
At least WaniKani 50 by the end of the year (if I really push it 60 is possible)
Completing all Bunpro grammar lessons by July
Reading level at Natively high 20s
JLPT N2 in December (taking Bunpro practice tests along the way: N4 in January, N3 in May, N2 in October)
(reach goal) make some friends to practice casually with
It’s a painful realization. I also relate to being negative, though in my case the negativity is more internalized: I’ll rarely express it to others, but I often feel that things are “useless”, “awful”, “too hard”, “not for me”, “not worth the effort”… This negativity easily leads to overwhelm, procrastination, inaction, and regret.
I don’t think it’s useless at all. It is an important first step. It might not be much by itself, but it is a good preparation for N4 and so on.
And yeah, this negativity is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons so many people give up on learning Japanese.
No matter which path you would take, there would always be someone for whom that path is not suitable and who would claim it means that path is wrong, even though in reality it’s just not for them… I think the best way is to ignore such people and instead talk to nyaaaaaaaaaaaaice suppurrtive people like people here on this community!
I’m very glad you’ve realized this and I wish you best of luck with achieving this goal and your other goals!
Take a JLPT exam. Still have time to decide whether play it safe and go for N4 or risk it and go straight for N3.
Read at least a few pages of Japanese every day. Granted, the definition of “page” can be quite vague – a page of manga with a few text is not the same as a text-filled page of a light novel; also, what about games?.. Still, this is somewhat quantifyable and even if I fail to achieve it, this goal would still help me stay motivated.
Finish the freely available story of Final Fantasy XIV.
Apart from JLPT exam, these are not hard goals, but that means I might be able to achieve them… But we’ll see.
That’s a lot of Japanese to read. I’m somewhere around the level 20 quests in the msq. I stopped somewhere with the dryads in the forest. At least they aren’t wet ads in the marshland! I was enjoying the story I think, I just stopped it for some reason.
I say go for N3. You’ve got either ~6 months to prepare or a (almost) whole year and if N4 feels safe already then it shouldn’t be a hard push to N3 when you’re reading some manga every day.
I think it’s a beautiful goal! It gives you at least some baseline (“a few pages” does mean “more than nothing” in any case ) and on the other hand it gives you enough flexibility. Had a hard work day? Don’t feel very energetic? Maybe caught a cold? A few pages of manga are just right and still count towards your goal. But if you’re full of energy, then why not tackle a light novel. If you stay honest to yourself then this gives you enough of a guardrail without being painful.
You got this
2025 was a year when I started consuming Japanese content for the first time. In 2025 I managed to:
Read 4 different mangas,
Read 2 visual novels,
Finish 4 games in Japanese,
Watch 5 different anime (well, actually 4, but I’m close to finishing my 5th one),
Started reading my first book, 魔女の宅急便 (although so far I’ve only read 3 chapters).
My goal for 2026 will be to at least double all of that, so:
Read 8 mangas,
Read 4 visual novels,
Finish 8 games in Japanese,
Watch 20 different anime (this is not doubling but quadrupling the amount, but I think it’s very doable since I’ve only started watching anime a month ago and I already completed almost 5),
Finish at least one book
Though this seems like a big jump, I think it’s completely realistic for two reasons:
In 2025, I was just starting to consume Japanese content. Because of this, I was struggling A TON. My first manga, Death Note, took me half a year to complete, and I was reading it almost every single day. Although I don’t consider myself good at Japanese yet, I’m definitely a lot better than I was one year ago and reading a simple manga won’t be this painfully slow.
According to my calculations, If I keep going at my current pace, I will finally be done with WK in March or April. Though WK is a really valuable tool that has helped me a lot, it’s also really time consuming and took a lot of free time that I could use on immersion instead. For example, sometimes I would come back from work late in the evening, and I had an hour to spare at best. Instead of spending this time on watching anime or reading something, I would have to do reviews on WK for over half an hour. Or sometimes, if I got really unlucky, I’d have like 200 reviews waiting and I just wouldn’t feel like doing anything related to Japanese after that. So, I will definitely be able to do more in the future.
As a bonus point, I’d like to finish Quartet 2 which I was supposed to do in 2025, but whenever I had free time I preferred to do immersion. After I’m done with WK I’ll try to do that textbook consistently.
Fun thread! Great to hear the variety of goals. Similar to some others, getting SMART with goals starts to feel depressingly corporate for me (as effective as it might be). My favourite antidote to that for reflecting at new years is CGP Grey’s video here suggesting picking a “theme” that guides choices rather than goals to work towards. I also echo what @ChristopherFritz said above - systems and processes being just as (or more?) important than the goals.
Having said all that… here are some for me. I still feel so early that things can change a lot in six months, so I’m going to set some first-half-of-2026 goals and then reevaluate depending on progress (and what’s happening in the rest of life too).
I’d like to:
finish “reading” また、同じ夢お見ていた (my second book - at 30% ish currently)
“Read” one more novel
Participate in a children’s book club (I will allow myself to double count this with the above!)
Finish watching all of しろくまカフェ and figure out what next for broadening my slice of life listening
Get to level ~40 on WK and then reevaluate next steps with kanji / vocab
Decide whether N3 in Dec is something to aim for
At some point I would love it to feel less like “reading” (with lots of lookups and pauses and checking grammar and deciphering) and more like actually reading. But that’s going to take a while longer I think.
Wild card: if we book a Japan trip I will slow down on some of the above in order to start italki for some speaking practice (eek).
So now you’re in a much better position to improve speaking! 
) and on the other hand it gives you enough flexibility. Had a hard work day? Don’t feel very energetic? Maybe caught a cold? A few pages of manga are just right and still count towards your goal. But if you’re full of energy, then why not tackle a light novel. If you stay honest to yourself then this gives you enough of a guardrail without being painful.