June 2023 – Kaeru’s Japanese Learning Goals

This is what I hope will be a monthly series where I outline what I’d like to do for the month and how I’ll do it. For context of how this all fits into my overall goals, you can visit this post! I’ll update this post at the end of the month and post the next one early next month!

Vocab, Kanji, and Sentence Flashcards

This month I’m in “catch-up mode”. I took some breaks from studying and now my flashcard reviews have piled up. So, my goals for this month are…

1. Battle down my backlog so that I’m reviewing only ~200-250 vocab words per day at most.
2. Once I’ve done the above, my next goal is to re-start learning kanji meanings. To do that, I’m going to commit to learning the meaning of one new kanji per day (at minimum).

Grammar

My current Genki progress is at chapter 14 (grammar point 2). Since I have some more time to do exercises more frequently, my goal is to at least finish the exercises for chapter 14 by the end of the month.

Writing

I recently asked my tutor to assign me sentence writing homework that I called “カエルの日記” (Kaeru’s Diary). Since now there’s a guarantee that my sentences will be checked, I’m trying to use it to test out new grammar points and vocabulary I’m having trouble with. My goal to start is to write “diary entries” for at least 3 days a week.

Listening

My biggest problem on the last JLPT was the listening section. I have some basic listening textbooks that I’m working on now, and my goal is to do them at least 3 times a week. At that pace, I’ll finish わくわく文法リスニング１００ in about 7 weeks and 毎日の聞き取り５０日上 in about 5 weeks.

Reading

I recently joined a translation group that was specifically created to get translation practice – Stray Cat Cafe. The project I joined was one that is trying to translate 姫乃ちゃんに恋はまだ早い. At time of joining, the goal was to finish translating chapter 9, so I’m focused on that. My goals once I finish that are to slowly catch up on the rest of the chapters so I have more context for what’s going on.

Speaking

I’ve always just done my tutoring lessons on time and on-schedule. (To the best of my ability, at least. Sometimes people take my usual time slot! I know right? How dare they.) So to some degree, it feels like my speaking goal is to just let it build over time as I do my lessons. However, that doesn’t really feel like it’s enough… but I think this month is kind of packed already. In the future I’ll probably add shadowing to my task list but that time is not now!