ATTN MODS: If this is inappropriate outside of the daily thread, let me know and I'll move it. I wasn't quite sure how this fits in given the sidebar rules, since it's a little more than a study plan, but not technically a question.
For context, my language journey looks something like this:
Early 2017 I started learning hiragana and katakana. By late 2017 I'd started the Genki I curriculum before moving to Hokkaido for a year in 2018. I continued Genki while living there, but found it more practical to just throw myself to the wolves and learn what I needed to learn to survive, which I did reasonably well. I got comfortable with japanese menus, navigating the transit, chit-chatting in izakaya, etc. I continued learning out of Genki but never finished. Once returning home in 2019, I continued my study off and on via Genki before switching over to online platforms like renshuu and jpdb. The frequency and cadence of my study dropped dramatically due to work and life in general, but I never stopped fully.
During this trip:
I recently spent a week up north in Hakodate (I feel like their squid festival is such a slept on experience for westerners. Highly recommended!) before traveling south to Sendai for hanging out with friends and doing tanabata things.
Speaking: For my very modest knowledge level, I think I stayed above water very reasonably. I had little to no issues whatsoever ordering in restaurants, bars, and izakaya. I was able to navigate the check-in and check-out procedures at my hotels with relative ease, and that includes requesting a room change after they put us in a smoking room despite the initial reservation to the contrary. I was able to small talk with people at the counter and make them laugh on occasion (often being self-deprecating about my language skills). And I could easily get my ideas and intentions across to my friends' kids (age 6, 8, and 14).
Reading: Hiragana and Katakana are not an issue for me. Kandji of course is tough, but I had no issues identifying entrances and exits, menu items, restaurant signs, and street signs, including station names as they were listed on transit. Like every westerner, Kandji are the bane of my existence in many cases, so there's always room for improvement here.
Listening/Comprehension: NOPE. Big ol' goose egg, as far as I'm concerned. I can talk, but when they talk back, my brain goes sideways on me. While there, I spent a lot of time watching NHK E, which in a lot of cases, speaks at a much more manageable pace for me to follow along in real time. I also watched a lot of Doraemon and Shin Chan with my friends kids while visiting, and those were fairly easy to follow as well. Trying to understand what hotel staff, my friends' kids, and station attendants were saying was a huge challenge for me. Any time I "understood" was what being said, it was mainly due to hearing specific vocab that I was familiar with, and putting the rest together with context clues and body language. So this is where my biggest deficit exists, and my inclination is to to a few things:
1) Go back through the curriculum I've already learned, and pay special attention to the listening comprehension sections.
2) More graded readers with supplemental audio. I'm not proud and will use children's content if/when necessary.
3) Try to find more watchable content that matches my skill level (the kids content was honestly pretty decent for this)
4) Finish Genki I, getting into Genki II (I got it for Christmas this past year, just haven't broken into it yet), and finally and start practicing with N5-N3 level listening exercises.
I hope this little anecdote is valuable to someone else out there around my skill level, and if anyone has any suggestions or resources they might point me to to get me back on the horse, I would definitely appreciate it. This recent visit really revitalized my motivation to git gud with the language, and I'm looking forward to further studies, practice, and making new connections and friends!
by SubKreature