As the New Year came upon us with the strike of midnight, it’s time to set some new goals for 2012.
From last year, I have only achieved about two of the five resolutions from last year. Since my blog turns three years old in February, perhaps I should become more ambitious and try to aim even higher this year. To do that I laid out a few goals I should achieve by the end of this year (Image Source).
Study for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) N5 – It’s a known fact that I have started to learn Japanese because I wanted to play Idolmaster 2. However, that is not the only reason. Before I started learning it, I was at a big disadvantage since I only know one language. Although I might not use Japanese outside of Internet communication, music and playing video games, it’s still important to broaden my horizon with the higher possibility of getting a job. Since I’m not planning to go on any long vacations this year, I will spend that time getting an internship and keeping my Japanese self-study up to date. To prove my worth, I’m aiming to past the first JLPT level, which is the most basic and I should pass it without any problem. Still, I need a lot of time to practice so I can become confident enough to take it.
Write more Non-Episodic content – Although episodic posts remains an important means of sharing my thoughts about the shows I watch, I want to add more unique content to make the blog more interesting. Aside from editorials, I have a video “Let’s Play” of Idolmaster 2 planned for the future, but that is just a thought to make my blog more unique.
New Color Scheme – Just this past September, I gave my blog a theme upgrade so it have a cleaner look and up to date backend. The only problem now is that the color scheme hasn’t changed since the Anime Blogosphere Tourney in 2010, which can cause a slight problem. As my blog turns three-years old, I want my blog to stand out more appearance wise. Therefore, I want to play around with the CSS a bit more to make it look more up to date.
Finish my Backlog – It’s a sad fact that the backlog remains largely untouched and grows every year. This is because I tend to get sidetracked by other Anime, video games and my self-study of Japanese that I forget. Still, finishing some of the backlog remains one of my important goals for years to come.
Get more reliable hosting – There is some good news in the horizon… My hosting contract expires in November of this year, allowing me to obtain a new host. As you can tell by my short rant about the ridiculous downtime in November, you can see my huge dissatisfaction with my current host. Once I get the chance to move, I will probably move over to Hostgator and keep the domain separate from the host.
This pretty much wraps up few of the goals set for this year and hopefully it goes well. Feel free to share your goals for 2012 if you want. ¶
Best of wishes to you in 2012. It sounds like you have some great plans for what you want to accomplish this year. I just can’t imagine trying to learn Japanese, but I admire your spirit for doing it.
The hiragana, katakana and grammar (thus far) was pretty easy to grasp after some practice. Still the Kanji still remains one of the most difficult part of the language. If I knew Chinese, it would be a bit easier since most of the characters are the same (if you are talking about Traditional Characters, not the simplified characters). Still, its fun to learn another language, especially if there is a lot of material one can use to practice.
Good luck to you in 2012! I will visit more often xDD
Hope there is more exciting things for months to come.
I’m trying to learn Japanese too. I took four semesters of it in college, but heavens–the curriculum was pretty terrible. I’ll study more from books and CDs and such, as well as what I glean from anime of course–and try my hand at translating some of these manga and light novels I picked up from the foreign section of a bookstore. Should give me plenty to do this year.
My school doesn’t even offer any foreign languages at all. But yes, supplemental media is great to practice off of, but the only problem is that the colleges focuses heavily on the polite forums when informal forms are used frequently in Japanese media. Still, you still need to know them since they are used for quotations and such in the grammar.
Aside from that, I wish you luck.
Sorry for the late comment!
I passed JLPT Level 3 back in December of 2007. That was before I took Intermediate to Advanced Japanese in college, so I’m sure if I took it again now, I’d get a much better score. I heard there’s a huge leap in difficulty from Level 3 to Level 2, so I haven’t taken 2 yet. I should try to one of these years though.
I’ve been getting back into Japanese self study too – I finally hit 500 kanji (going by the book at least as there are other random ones I know) and have been writing posts on Lang-8. Good luck with your studies too and let me know if you need someone to practice with =)
At the moment, I’m focusing primarily on the Japanese grammar and the basic vocabulary (almost wrapping up the beginning level of the grammar and then focusing on Intermediate next). Once I finish that, which is estimated to be in March, I’ll start on the Kanji and practice translating some of the material I already have. Kanji study (and writing) is mostly going to become my primarily focus this summer since I’m not going on any long vacations, but hopefully it’s more than enough to pass the basic level of JLPT, which can be passed with a few hundred hours of study (150 hours to be exact).