Improving My Japanese: Reflection and Revisions to Goals and Methods

I'm now in my eighth week of Japanese at Princeton, and things have been progressing pretty well. Japanese is still by far the most challenging course for me, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. That being said, the goals I posted in October are still a major focus for me:

• Recognizing changes in pitch and distinguishing between similar sounds.
• I think I've started to get a pretty good handle on the latter part of this goal, but I could still use some work on distinguishing changes in pitch.

• Speaking and comprehending speech up to speed.
• This. Right now, I think this is my biggest struggle with Japanese. When listening to the せんせいs talk, I can usually only pick up on part of what they are saying, which makes it really difficult to respond properly to questions. I seem to be getting better at picking up on speech, but I could still use a lot of work.

• Remembering words and phrases correctly.
• I'm getting better at this, too, but I could again use more practice. Many words are coming more naturally to me than they were a few weeks ago, but there are still quite a few words that simply refuse to stick in my head.

Perhaps I would be doing better if I'd followed the methods in my original post more closely; from the list I posted in October, here's what I have been doing:

• Watching an episode of anime with subtitles every day.
• Well this part's easy; anime is fun to watch! I've also been paying more attention to what the characters are saying and how they say it. I can actually understand some of what the characters are saying without reading the subtitles now!

Unfortunately, that's the only thing from my list that I've truly stuck to as much as I intended. Although there is one bit that I've kind of been doing:

• Flashcarding
• I have made flashcards for all the new vocabulary terms we've learned, but I haven't practiced with them every single day. To be perfectly frank, I don't think I will be able to, either. Many days I get consumed by other homework and extracurriculars and don't get around to using my flashcards. I will try to use them more frequently than I have been, though.

Of course, that means I haven't been doing the rest of the things on my list:

•  Watching an episode of anime without subtitles every day.
• Again, I don't think I'll get around to doing this, so I'm going to have to drop it from my list of goals.

• Attend しばたせんせい's office hours on at least a biweekly basis.
• I fully intend to start attending office hours next week; I'm going to alternate attending しばたせんせ and さとうせんせい's office hours so that I can get some extra practice every week, not just every other week.

Hopefully I can stick to my revised goals a lot more closely than I did my original ones. I think this revised version is more manageable than the previous one, so this time I will try exceptionally hard to stay on track!

ビデオブログ！