2015 goals

It’s a new year! I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution in years, but I decided to make a list of goals for 2015, mostly foreign language related. Since I’m done with my Japanese major, I’m not taking any Japanese classes right now. This has given me the chance to reevaluate how I study Japanese and to commit to using some of the Japanese learning material I’ve gathered over the years.

Lately, I’ve shifted my Japanese learning focus to kanji. I would like to learn all the Joyo kanji by the end of this year and study for the JLPT N2. In order to reach my goal, I’ve been using flash card apps with SRS and playing video games in Japanese. I’m almost finish with the 漢字の館とお化け達 games (I only have to do 6th grade kanji)! By the middle of this year, I want to learn middle school kanji and since I don’t have a high school kanji list, I’ll just study the rest of the kanji from my new and old joyo kanji flash card list.

I’ve also been doing a lot of listening practice via YouTube and Bilingual News. I enjoy using video games as a study tool. Many words appear repeatedly throughout different games and a lot of the vocabulary and kanji correspond with either Joyo kanji or the JLPT. I don’t force myself to study and I enjoy how relaxing ‘studying’ is. I made a few specific deadlines for knowing the meanings of kanji and how to write to write kanji, to keep my kanji studies on track though.