One Year to N5: Week 0

For about four years on-and-off I have been trying to study Japanese. In those four years, I have made some good progress in some fields, before I inevitably fail and forget most of what I learnt. This means that my knowledge is extremely patchy and I have to spend lots of time re-learning stuff. The issue was mainly with the fact that I am a full-time university student, along with having a part-time job for most of university. This made me lose a lot of energy for learning as I came back home tired and seeking easy dopamine like funny videos.

However, learning Japanese is something I really would like to actually accomplish within my lifetime. More specifically, I want to be at a level of proficiency where I am able to listen to the radio and follow along with little issue. So enough is enough, and I am setting myself a goal. In roughly one year's time, I will be aiming to take the JLPT N5 with the July 2025 cohort. Therefore, by the w/c 31st March 2025, I should know enough (or more) of the content needed to pass.

Making Learning a Habit

In order to do this, I need to work on making this a habit. After referencing the video by Mattias Pilhede about how to learn, along with reading an excerpt from Atomic Habits, I have decided to try certain tactics to reduce the barrier.

Firstly, by setting up as much of a separate space as possible dedicated to learning Japanese. I have done this by repurposing a low table and positioning it in my room away from both my bed and my computer, along with facing the wall. By keeping a dedicated space, this should hopefully reduce distractions in comparison to working at my desk.

Secondly, I'd like to try and keep a consistent daily routine. This can be done by doing some learning when I wake up and before I leave the house, and by learning before going to bed at night. This should hopefully get my body in the habit of doing some language learning every day.

Finally, I'll try to apply the knowledge of focused and un-focused learning to my surroundings. More specifically, when learning something new I should not listen to any music or have a video playing in the background, and when reinforcing something I already know I am allowed to have some distractions to keep me engaged.

The Game Plan

In order to approach this I need to have a plan. Firstly, when I wake up in the morning, I will be doing my Anki decks for vocabulary and kanji. Before I stopped some months ago, I was around 450-500 kanji deep into Heisig's RTK, so I will be moving the backlog of those cards into a filtered deck to chip away at every day. After doing my Anki, I will then try and stick to learning 20 new kanji. This process will be automated via converting my current deck to include stories from Kanji Koohii and moving new cards in a deck to after the reviews. Hopefully, this should allow me to keep progress good without being stuck in backlog hell.

During the day and when I am doing university work, I will be listening to Japanese radio and simple Japanese conversations via my headphones. Some further work may be done to help better incorporate listening into my schedule.

Finally, before I go to bed, I will aim to learn 1 new point of grammar each day via the Genki book series. Along with this, I should also attempt to finish the questions from both the workbook and main book for each lesson every week or so, depending on how long it takes me to go through a lesson at this pace.

Final Thoughts

I've always been very bad at keeping habits and I thought this would be a good test of how I could build a good habit. This entire idea came together after I realised that I had accidentally made a habit of playing chess every night before bed, along with my housemates current work on organizing himself better.

Obviously I do not believe this year will go smoothly and I expect to have rough patches, especially with my final year project due in soon. However, I am committed to keeping this up for an entire year, documenting what has happened each week and trialling out modifications to the plan.

See you next week for Week 1!