The New Year is a great time to break disgusting habits and set impossible resolutions…at least, it’s a great time to try to do those things. Most people come out from the rubble a couple of weeks later still smoking, drinking, or using Japanese words in English sentences, but everyone at least gets a little bit closer to their goal. By setting goals and attempting them, you are gaining valuable experience, even when you fail miserably. It’s a wonderful thing to set yourself goals, and New Years is a great excuse to set lofty ones.

With the coming of the New Year, I thought I’d help you set some goals and break some habits. While these aren’t my personal resolutions, I think they could be very useful for you. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll be breaking this article up into two categories: habits to break and resolutions.

Habits To Break:

1. That “Amerika-jeen” Accent

The Problem: For some reason, it’s tough for a lot of people to get that Japanese accent down. I don’t know why it’s so tough; Almost all sounds made in the Japanese language can be mimicked fairly easily in the English language as well. The reason people have accents that resemble a Wisconsin meat packer family is because they never take the time to learn it correctly the first time. In other words, they learn the accent poorly, and it becomes a bad habit.

The Solution: It’s time to go back to your hiragana sheet and relearn your kana. Go through each hiragana/katakana one by one and make sure you are saying them all correctly. Try to soften your voice. A lot of people like to throw weird stresses onto everything they say. Pretend you are Martha Stuart (on a not evil day) and say each letter pleasantly, so as to avoid unneeded stresses in the words. Also, when you are practicing your Japanese, make sure you have something to listen to as well. Get a text book that comes with an audio CD. Listen to the same sentences over and over until you can mimic it properly. Don’t just float over things when you’ve only “kinda” gotten them down. You’re only hurting yourself.

2. Using random (but super Kawaii) Japanese words in English sentences:

The Problem: You know what I’m talking about. “That’s super kawaii, mate!” “That movie was sugoi, huh?” “Stop being so baka, Koichi.” You might think that you are being clever by practicing Japanese in your everyday life, but you’re only digging yourself a deeper hole.

The Solution: Stop being lazy! If you are going to use one word in a sentence, at least finish it out. Instead of saying “that’s super kawaii,” go ahead and say そりゃチョーかわいいね instead. If you are going to learn another language you have to go the whole nine yards, otherwise you won’t get anywhere, and people will look at you all silly like.

3. Writing Kanji with improper strkoe odrer:

The Problem: Writing your kanji in improper stroke order is sloppy and bad. Do you ever wonder why your kanji looks so ugly? Part of the problem might be your stroke order. It’s really amazing how much of a difference it makes to follow the rules even if you think “it doesn’t feel right.” Handwriting as well as how you write is very important in Japanese culture. Have you ever seen a Japanese person write in English? Have you ever noticed how nice and neat it usually is? That’s because neat and proper handwriting has been drilled into them. You should match that expectation and write your kanji correctly, at the very least.

The Solution: I know it’s more work to learn stroke order, but once you get a couple hundred kanji under your belt, there won’t be a single kanji you can’t write correctly, even if you haven’t seen it before. Just make sure you’re careful when starting to learn kanji (and hiragana / katakana, for that matter!) to do everything correctly. Your handwriting and your writing speed will be much better for it (though most likely in the long run).

Resolutions:

1. Stop watching anime, Start watching drama:

Most people think that drama is the stuff of soppy middle-aged housewives. I’m here to tell you that’s wrong. Javier the pool boy will never bother you in the land of Japanese drama. Sure, you can find love stories, but you can also find awesome shows about dirty truckers and yakuza princesses who want to be teachers. People who learn Japanese from anime don’t learn correct, real-life Japanese. People who learn Japanese from drama learn Japanese at least semi-correctly. Also, a lot of drama has separate subtitle files, which means if you’re using VLC (or something similar), you can turn the subtitles on and off. This is a good technique because then you can watch a scene with the subtitles on, go back, and watch it again with them off. Watching just with subtitles won’t get you too far. Oh, and drama is just as addicting as anime, if not more. You should try it out.

2. Start a Blog

Keeping yourself accountable is really important if you want a shot at your goals. The hard part about keeping yourself accountable is that you’re your own judge, and that means you’ll be easy on yourself. One way to keep yourself accountable is to start a blog. The hard part is getting people to come visit you so they can criticize you for not doing what you said you were going to do. Still, there is something powerful in stating to the online public (even if they don’t exist) that you are going to do “this,” “that,” and “thata.” There are some great tools for blogging quickly and easily, if you don’t want to take the whole hosting and domain purchasing route. Some good ones are WordPress and Blogspot.

3. Article-a-Day:

If you are pretty far along in your Japanese studies, why not try to read on a daily basis? One thing that I do (during school times) is read an article from the Asahi Shinbun / Yomiuri Shinbun every day (or something close to that). The nasty part of this whole idea is translating everything. Luckily, if you are using a computer, you can just copy and paste everything into Jim Breen’s Japanese Translator, print out your article, and take notes as needed. After that, you can just go through sentence by sentence until you memorize everything. By doing this, you’ll be able to practice speaking, reading, and kanji all at the same time!

4. Kanji-a-Day:

I bet you didn’t see this one coming. If you are more in the beginning stages of learning Japanese, learning vocabulary is a great idea. This can get monotonous and boring, but if you have a blog, at least you can write about it every day. If you write about it, then you are more likely to remember it too. A savvy combination.

5. Go to Japan (by the end of the year):

Since it’s the beginning of the year right now, why not set a goal to go to Japan a year from now? Having something to work towards will make you work harder. Not only will it improve your Japanese, but it will also reward you for all your hard work. Visiting Japan in winter is pretty nice; at least, it is the least rainy time of year, which means you’ll be able to walk around without worry of getting too wet. Heck, maybe you’ll be able to see the snow monkeys.

Everyone, good luck with your studies in 2008! If you have a chance, tell us about your resolutions (Japanese related or not Japanese related)