Back to improvement

Yesterday was my first day back on my normal schedule, but I prioritized schoolwork so I didn’t do exercise and cleaning. I got my schoolwork finished just after eight, so I actually had time to exercise (and probably should have done so), but by skipping I wasn’t stressed. I had planned to get back on schedule on Tuesday or Wednesday, but on Tuesday I ended up continuing my game as the Elysian Empire and at the end of the day my goal was still not in sight. So, I played on Wednesday as well. At this point, I just got tired of conquering, waiting for assimilation to happen and peace treaties to expire, then repeating. For me the game’s draw is the imaginative potential combined with the visual progress, but if I don’t invest in the imaginative aspect, it gets quite dull.

Reflection is an important skill, and one that I am seeking to improve through writing regularly. I hope it will also motivate me toward achievement. With that in mind, I will now reflect on my short-term goals and their progress.

JAPANESE

On Tuesday, I did some reading from the local newspaper and was impressed at how few words were unfamiliar to me. Even so, I had difficulty assembling the words into meaning. So just now, I had an idea about how to improve reading comprehension. Instead of answering questions, what if I try to write summaries of articles that I read? The summaries would be in English, so they shouldn’t be difficult, but it should press me to work harder at comprehending texts. I’ll think about it.

Yesterday I picked up a book at the elementary school and read a couple of pages, and enjoyed it. I think it would be great if I went to the library (almost) every day and tried reading children’s books. I’m afraid, however, that doing so would make exercise more difficult, because it would have to be straight after work and then my dinner would be later and I don’t like to exercise on a full stomach, and I’m afraid that exercising after 8:30 will disturb my neighbors. The reasonable alternative would be to borrow books from the library, and I have no excuse not to do this except that I don’t know how and learning to do so would probably involve talking to people. Once again, I’ll think about it. Although I think reading the newspaper is helpful, I don’t think it’s the most efficient method to improve, nor the most enjoyable, so I worry that I won’t be able to sustain this habit.

I was reminded that my Japanese study doesn’t have a firm goal, and though I wrote in my last entry that I would think and make a plan by today, I haven’t thought about it at all. Writing summaries might be a good goal, but it would be foolish not to take advantage of the potential production opportunities available now for a limited time. What’s the problem with production? I have no motivation. Is there any production that I would be motivated to do? I am motivated to talk with Japanese teachers (who talk to me), especially at the upcoming end of year parties. However, I don’t feel that I can prepare for this in any effective capacity. So I can’t think of production that I want to do off the top of my head. I’ll brainstorm some possibilities:

Blogging

Speech

Video

Journaling

Creative writing

Summarizing a text

Blogging sounds nice, but given how much difficulty I’ve had with it before, I don’t think it’s a viable option at this point. Honestly, my favorite option might be my idea of summarizing a text. I could do it in English and then sort of translate that summary back to Japanese while referring to the original text. Hopefully this will give me practice on the most mechanical parts of writing, and once I’m comfortable with that I can move on to more creative writing like blogging. The next question is—am I interested enough in newspapers to do this? Are there other options? NHK has a lot of articles, but recently I’ve wasted some time scrolling through them trying to find something interesting.

Another idea that just occurred to me—what if I talk about education? I can use it to consolidate the learning I’m doing in my classes, and maybe I can use it to discuss with teachers, too. It might not be as useful a topic when I return to the states, since I doubt that Japanese students will be studying education at an American university, but that’s something to worry about later.

I think I’ll use both methods, but prioritize education because it’s more likely to be useful in the present, and summarize newspaper articles when I can’t think of anything else. My goal for this next week will be to write at least two sentences every day in Japanese summarizing something that I’ve learned in the most recent module of class. I will have the Japanese checked by someone. If I don’t feel like doing this, I’ll summarize an article from Japanese (with a 3-sentence minimum), and the next day I’ll translate my summary back into Japanese.

5-MINUTE PLANK

The person who inspired this goal considered it accomplished when, on the thirtieth day of her challenge, her combined planking time over multiple planking sessions and different planking positions equaled five minutes. I think that’s cheating, and I think if I tried, I could probably succeed at that standard today or tomorrow. When I measured my baseline plank on Monday, I held it for 2 minutes. On Tuesday, I held it for 2:10. On Thursday I did two sessions of two minutes each. This morning I held it for 1:40 but couldn’t hold it any longer. I’m not seeing any immediate progress, and since I only have nine days left in the challenge I’m not confident that I will be able to more than double my current record, but I’m still going to try.

DANCING

No progress for the past two weeks. I really wanted to dance yesterday though—I was dancing at school and in the supermarket. I plan to get back to it today.

PROGRAMMING

I worked on my program a little last night. I encountered a very strange bug when it corrected my typing mistakes, and I’m not sure how to reproduce that condition. I also decided that I would much prefer that my correct percentage depend on my incorrect words rather than characters. So I have a lot of work to do on that.

BIBLE MEMORY

On Tuesday, I wrote out Psalm 1 entirely from memory with only a few mistakes, which I attribute to having learned this verse in at least two versions which causes some interference. Yesterday I wrote out Psalms 2-5 as well. The first two only required prompting in a few areas, but the latter two were more forgotten than remembered. The first ten Psalms might be more of a stretch than I had thought, especially since I remember nine and ten being long and quite difficult to memorize. My more modest goal is the first eight Psalms, but I think I still have a chance at ten so I’ll keep writing them out and start reviewing the completed verses every day.

CONCLUSION

Having written out these reflections, I note that with planking and Bible memory I focus more on the goal than on the means to achieve it. Maybe this is okay for a first time reflection, but I hope that in general my reflections will concern my processes rather than the goals.