Yes, taking that first step is definitely something to celebrate. It’s easy to look at something you can’t finish in one sitting and decide not to tackle it, or wait until the “perfect” opportunity - but doing what you can when you can shows that review pile who’s the boss and who’s just a pile of kanji and vocabulary and radicals that better darn well respect your authority!
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haha that made me laugh, thank you! 
And it’s so true - too often I get overwhelmed by things and abandon them, because for some reason I feel like I need to “solve” the problem rather than just taking it one bit at a time.
Once again, thank you for your comment 
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8月12日ー8月20日
I’m a day late because I was away from home most days in the past week, so I wanted to give myself a bit more time. 
A lot has happened this past week and so most of my attention was on that, and not my japanese studies. So how did I go with my goals?
- Try to get under 1000 reviews in wanikani
I am very happy to say that I am now under 1000 reviews! It took me forcing myself to sit down and just tackle them all at once. Not sure if that’s the best method, but I couldn’t do it in small batches, because I just kept avoiding it. I think I’ll handle things better in the long run if I can make myself do reoccurring and consistent daily study, rather than all at once once a week, but either I was too busy this week to do that or I just didn’t want to. I’ll work on it!
- Attempt anki reviews at least once
I just did the reviews of one of my topics again. I look forward to when I do all the reviews and lessons everyday like I used to. Something is better than nothing though.
- Translate one page of the next ドラえもん comic
I didn’t think I’d get around to doing this and turns out I didn’t. I just didn’t have the time or motivation this week, even with the extra day I gave myself. I won’t always do all my goals and that’s okay.
- If I have time: watch some japanese media
My partner and I watched My Melody & Kuromi again! It’s 12 episodes, each one being less than 15 minutes long by the way. This time I knew the story, so I tried to focus on the japanese that was being used and I think it was quite a good learning experience. Very casual though, of course.
This week I’m preparing for the artist market I’m doing, but I will have more time than this past week. I’m going to try to do multiple sessions on wanikani and anki, rather than just one. And I’m going to try to do the goal that I wasn’t able to do this past week.
This week’s goals:
-
Try to do at least 3 different sessions of wanikani reviews
-
Try to do at least 3 different sessions of anki reviews
-
Translate one page of the ドラえもん comic
-
Watch some japanese media
→ The “My Melody & Kuromi” show but with japanese audio AND japanese subtitles this time. I learn best when seeing things written out so I am excited for this
Let’s see how well I do this week! The market is a big deal to me, so that might be my focus, but I’ll still give japanese study a go. 
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As adult learners I found that having a consistent schedule is often in the rough to impossible range. I try to be regular with the reviews too but my new rule is more “to get next to 0 once a week”. Don’t beat yourself up over daily scheduling 
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It looks like the “checkpoints” you set may not have been completely done but you’ve done a lot of good work! Time and life constraints are going to be an occasional to constant issue for pretty much all of us, but you’ve already taken the big step of trying to work through or around them rather than giving up!
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@YandrosTheSane Thank you for your reply, I found it really helpful! I see other people studying heaps every day, but that might not be realistic for some people. I always feel silly when I make really small goals, but I always thank myself later for being more realistic.
@hrudey Thank you for your message too! I hope to never give up on learning japanese - I may have hiatuses (as much as I try not to) but it’s so important to me to not give up. So if that means trying but not always meeting my goals, as long as I keep going, I will be succeeding
8月21日ー9月3日
So it’s been two weeks rather than one… Long story short, I had a lot of exciting stuff with my business. There will always be something, so there’s no need to be too hard on myself, I think. Good news is that I did all my goals!
- Try to do at least 3 different sessions of wanikani reviews
I am really happy that I’ve done a batch of reviews several times now. It’ll slowly become part of my routine again!
- Try to do at least 3 different sessions of anki reviews
I did quite a bit of anki as well! The vocab reminded me of a lot that I learnt, which I’m glad I haven’t forgotten.
- Translate one page of the ドラえもん comic
This one was probably the hardest for me, because I had no motivation to sit down and study. But I did it, and it took such little time that I find it almost funny that I’ve put it off for so long and saw it as such a huge daunting task.
- Watch some japanese media
→ The “My Melody & Kuromi” show but with japanese audio AND japanese subtitles this time.
I’ve watched this show for the third time, which is a lot of times, but watching it completely in japanese with the japanese subtitles helping me to process what I’m hearing, was such a great experience. Some things started to click for me.
This week’s goals:
-
Try to do at least 3 different sessions of wanikani reviews
-
Try to do at least 3 different sessions of anki reviews
(Same goals because I didn’t technically do it in one week like I hoped I would)
- Translate one chapter of the ドラえもん comic
Is this too big of a goal? I’m not sure. I don’t have to consume any other japanese media this coming week, I’d just love it if I could work on this!
See you (hopefully) in 1 week!
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It’s been a while… I realised that with everything going on with my life, my japanese study goals were too big when combined with things I felt were a bit more important to me. Don’t get me wrong, learning japanese will always be important to me, just not as much as my art career and my mental health. Having too many goals, as little as they may seem to me at first, will mean I’ll get overwhelmed and I just won’t do any of it at all. So I decided that really vague and small goals are all I can do for now until something changes or a habit has been formed.
So I’m going to do wanikani every day, or at least regularly. That’s it, that’s the goal. And it’ll do for now, and hopefully I’ll get through my review pile, which would be an achievement of itself! I’ll introduce textbooks and graded reading and all that jazz when I can prove I can do at least wanikani reliably and consistently.
Let’s try to do this!
I don’t think I talked about this before, but my reward for studying japanese to a level where I can read some native material, however long that may take me, (and at my pace, it’s going to be a LONG time in the future) was to buy myself my dream japanese animal crossing edition 3DS LL! I would love to play 3DS and DS games in japanese - that’s the dream. If anyone has any games they recommend for japanese reading practice, or has any experience with getting into japanese games as a language learner that they’d like to talk about, I would love to hear what you’ve got to say! Any input would be appreciated and motivating.
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are you considering something like 太鼓の達人？ There aren’t that many kanjis in it, but if you play through them over and over and over again, it’s very easy to memorize them and have them go to your long-term memory ^^
Aside from that, games like 妖怪ウォッチ have a lot of training wheels, obligatory ポケモン, as it’s one of the first platforms in the series that does actually have kanji in the script, and if you start feeling a bit more comfortable, レイトン教授 and 逆転裁判 will have your back ^^
And then there is a WORLD of Adventure games you might want to tap into if you’re feeling better at Japanese, 極限脱出ADV 善人シボウデス, 新・光神話 パルテナの鏡, ファイアーエムブレム 覚醒, sky is the limit ^^
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Thank you so much for the really great recommendations! I have either played some of them in english and adored them, or they have been on my wishlist for years, so thank you! I appreciate it.
Update: I’m now in the 600s with my reviews! I was at over 1000 due to my hiatus so I’m slowly getting through them.
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I did it! My reviews are finally at 0!!! My hiatus meant they were at over 1000 for so long, so I’m so happy that I finally got through them all (for now)! Tomorrow I will finally continue my lessons! Once I can make doing wanikani lessons every day a part of my routine, maybe I’ll add something else to my study like continuing my graded readers or doing anki reviews. I just am really cautious about the risk of overwhelming myself again. Consistent small study is better than overly ambitious study that falls off quickly.
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Good job clearing down the backlog! Not necessarily for all the reviews you did, though that’s something you should also be proud of, but that big four-digit number gave you plenty of opportunities to decide to quit and you kept coming back and asserted control of your learning destiny. That’s something to take a huge amount of pride in!
When you do decide to ramp up, depending on what other things are on your plate, anki might not be the best complement - if you’re in two SRS systems that can choke out other things. Of course it you’re already doing other things as well, or if you’re really focused on learning kanji and vocab, that may be right for you. As always, what works for you is always the right choice for you!
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Thank you so much for your kind reply! I really appreciate it. The four-digits definitely was scary and stopped me from doing reviews many times. I’m really so happy and honestly, proud that I am on top of it now! Thank you for your advice about not having anki be the next step. Thinking about it, grammar or practicing with reading would probably compliment wanikani (and japanese study in general) better. I do know that wanikani isn’t a replacement for vocabulary study, but if I am being really picky about what I spend my time doing, (at least for now) then maybe another SRS system isn’t the best idea. I didn’t think of that, so thank you!
As a little update, I discovered that changing your switch language to japanese changes everything in animal crossing new horizons into japanese too! That might’ve been obvious, but for some reason I thought I had to get the japanese version for it to be able to be in japanese. I’m going to use this in the future since I love ACNH so much! Might be a fun, free and easy way (since I already have the game) to consume native material, or perhaps to sometimes test my knowledge.
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Awesome news! I’ve moved out for many years now, but yesterday I was randomly given a box of my old stuff that mum found. It most excitingly had some stuff I bought in japan on my 9 month exchange from 2016-2017! (I was 15/16) I thought I lost almost everything I took home from my exchange somehow, so I was so happy to recover some of it. There was some cute sanrio merch, but what I was most excited about was some books I bought! Two books for studying japanese, a beautifully illustrated book about Tokyo (mainly in english), and an actual textbook from my PE (保健体育) class! Since this is my japanese study log, I thought it’d be interesting to share these book finds.
Inside my PE book, I had maths class notes, some drawings I did on top of worksheets from school and my tiny notes from Japanese history class (日本史).
I don’t think I understood everything I wrote down at the time - I remember frantically trying to write down everything on the blackboard in every class - so please excuse any mistakes. I’ve said this before, but I had to start my japanese learning from scratch recently, because I experienced trauma at the time that made things like the japanese language hard to remember. It’s only discoveries like this that opens me up to remembering some things from back then. It’s sometimes tricky to face things like this - so many memories - but mainly I am really happy to recover some wonderful things. Like this!
This textbook with vocabulary for the JLPT N3 has a cool red material that makes the vocabulary disappear when it’s on the page. So cool and useful for study. The other book has fairytales for elementary school students which is also cool!
I thought this all would be interesting to share here. I’m so happy to recover any amount from that time, because I was so puzzled why I couldn’t find many things. Back then was a blur. And now I can use it to study japanese! So grateful hope this was okay to share!
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