One Year to N5: Week 1

This is a continuation of my previous blogpost, titled 'One Year to N5: Week 0'. It is advised that you read all blogposts in order before reading this one, otherwise certain points may not make sense.

Today marks 7 days since I have restarted learning Japanese, and it has been a tougher start than expected. As mentioned previously, I had designed the learning plan to be simple to execute but still having continual movement forward. While I still have learnt this week, some changes are necessary to the plan moving forward.

Successes this week

This week, I have completed all the grammar points for Lesson 3 in Genki I. Tonight will be spent on doing the questions for the grammar learnt in both the textbook and workbook. Along with this, I have been able to keep up with the Anki deck used for Genki vocabulary.

Along with this week, I have moved from kanji no. 430 to 547 in RTK 6th Ed. A total of 117 kanji learnt and a total of 1093 reviews in total. I am closing in on where one of my previous attempts got to (kanji no. 663) and should reach this by next week.

Failures this week

I had missed one or two night-time grammar sessions due to either forgetting or being distracted by my phone. Along with this, the morning kanji sessions take too long (around 1h-1h30) and I end up splitting them throughout the day or moving them later, which will not be an option once my university goes back to teaching after the holidays.

Rectifications

In order to rectify these problems, I will be reducing the target amount of kanji learnt per day from 20 to 15. This will hopefully keep the reviews and amount of work lower. Along with this, I will allow myself to not do the full amount of work, as long as I sit down and do at least 2 minutes of work each day. This is based on some pointers from James Clear's '30 Days to Better Habits', an email course about making habits.

Along with this, I will be cutting back on my phone usage by setting screentime limits on apps with TikTok-like content. In the long term, this should help me seek out more productive forms of spending my time (such as learning Japanese).

Final Thoughts

Ideally with these changes, I believe I should be better equipped to keep the habit of learning Japanese for a longer time than previous attempts. I've also been using this attempt to learn more about how to start and maintain habits, which will help me be more productive in my daily life. Overall, I still feel confident that I will be able to reach the level of proficiency needed to take the N5 test in 51 weeks time.

See you next week for Week 2!