February Goal Summary

Today’s the end of February. I’ll be spending most of the day working on my final paper for my class, but I’m confident that I can write it quickly. For once, I’m more concerned that I will have to trim my writing rather than expand it.

Looking back over my habits, I accomplished them for the following number of days out of 29 days in February:
Bible reading/prayer: 13
Exercise: 10
Cleaning: 9
Schoolwork: 18
Reading: 12
Programming: 10
Japanese: 17
Writing: 16
Bible memory: 7 out of 10 days since I started
No video games: 16
No fanfiction: 24

Obviously my eleven-day video game binge really put a hole in the month’s progress. As I said before, I need to find a rescue mechanism in the case that a reiteration appears to be imminent. Even so, I don’t feel like I did too badly. Ten days of exercise is one day in three, which is kind of my baseline goal. I’m quite satisfied to have averaged writing every other day. I was surprised to see that I only read 12 days total because it felt like more, but looking back it seems that my memory might be incorporating January, in which I read 24/31 days. Wow, that was a lot.

JAPANESE
I have learned 94 words, so I’ve averaged over three words a day. That’s not too bad, especially considering I slacked off for almost half of that time. I think I will continue this goal in March, though I will be less strict about finding six or seven words every day—the difficulty became a little intimidating after a few unsuccessful days.

I also wrote six sentences in Japanese—far below my goal. Rather than feeling motivated to try again, however, I think I’m ready to give up production. Anyway, while I may use a bit of Japanese in the days to come, it’s looking like even the drinking party which was my strongest source of motivation might be canceled. On a related note, I finished a fanfiction yesterday that was nearly 600k words. The author claims that English is not his first (or even second) language, and yet as far as I can tell he uses it just as well if not better than a native speaker, and he uses many English words that I’m not familiar with—lucubration, for instance. I think that’s amazing and I would love to be able to do the same, but right now I don’t have the drive.

Instead, I’ve decided to return to the reasons that I wanted to learn Japanese in the first place, as these are most likely to motivate me even after I leave Japan. First, I wanted to learn kanji. As of now, I have familiarity with all the general-use kanji, and if I see a kanji I don’t know I can almost always identify its parts so that I can look it up. I would like to be more comfortable with writing, so I might later set up a short routine of writing a certain number of kanji every day, but on the whole I feel that I have satisfied my goal in this area. My other aim was to be able to read visual novels, especially ones that aren’t available in English. My drive to play these games has dimmed along with my youth (hah), but is not yet extinguished. Thus, my goal for March will be to read a visual novel for at least 15 minutes every day.

5-MINUTE PLANK
I didn’t do any planks between Tuesday morning and Friday night, when I barely did 2:15. I made it to 2:40 this morning, but it was painful. At night, my minimum goal was 2:20, and once again it took a lot of effort just to make it that far. I did a lot of sit-ups during my work-out, which I blame partially for the difficulty.
I suspect that two minutes of the plank will take a while to build up to. Truly though, I enjoy planking because I always feel like I’ve accomplished something and I can do something else during the few minutes it takes. I think I will extend my five-minute plank goal to the end of March, but for better accountability I’ll also say that I want to be able to do 3:30 by March 8, 4:00 by March 15, 4:30 by March 21, and 4:45 by March 28.

DANCING
No progress since last post.

PROGRAMMING
No progress since last post.

BIBLE MEMORY
I think I reached my goal of at least 90% accuracy for Psalms 1-10. I’ve been using scripturetyper to review verses, which is convenient but has several attributes which make the statistics it reports inaccurate. Until I get my program running, though, it’s the best tool that I have, and according to it, my goal was achieved. Looking back, this goal was a bit too modest. I neglected practicing for three days this week, and still felt quite confident about meeting the goal.

There are 121 verses in Psalms 1-10, and I had ten days to review (though I only used seven). I think my next goal will be In Psalms 11-25, in which there are 214 verses. Although I’ll have triple the number of days for fewer than double the verses, I’m also sure that I don’t remember these verses nearly as well. In fact, when I did a quick test of Psalm 25, nothing even came to mind, as if I was trying to memorize it for the first time. So I think this will be a challenge. To make sure that it isn’t too easy though, I’m going to go through all the Psalms in the first ten days, and do a test on March 15. If I can remember at least 90% of at least 160 verses, then I’ll add to my goal.

RUBIK’S CUBE
I skipped practice from Tuesday to Thursday. I realized this morning that I can do F2L with very little backtracking, though my methods are not always most efficient. For this week then (through March 7th), I have two goals. First, learn the last 2 PLL algorithms (I’ve forgotten one since I first learned it), practicing the patterns 20 times a day and identification and use 5 times a day. That might sound like a lot, but the pattern only takes a few seconds, so all of this shouldn’t take more than ten minutes total. My second goal is to go through every possible F2L case, examining my intuitive solving and comparing it with the ideal solution to see if learning the algorithm makes a significant difference.