To be a good student, one must show up to class. This was my downfall in 2024. To be fair moving and buying a house literally blew up all my goals, but so did my intention to grow my Instagram. With these distractions, Japanese was not my priority for three-quarters of 2024, and I’m ashamed to say 2024 was a wash for progress.

But there was one bright spot in the year, I found a new learning app for Japanese called renshuu. With renshuu, I was able to dive into learning Japanese syntax and begin learning how to think in Japanese. It helped me see phrases and sentence structure so when I was watching videos with Japanese subtitles or listening to Japanese spoken or sung, my mind was primed to notice the familiar building blocks.

Another feature I liked about renshuu was its user-friendliness. The renshuu app developers seemed to care about learning, ahem, compared to the green owl, my learning nemesis named Duo. renshuu has Kao which looks like a mochi-based character which is our language learning guide.

Like I believe I mentioned before, I spent the fall watching Haikyuu for language immersion and a little Nana. In addition, Stray Kids’ Giant album was a Japanese release so I have been listening to music in Japanese too. The songs ‘Falling Up’ and ‘Night’ I played on repeat after their release with the new season of anime, Tower of God. I’m hoping I learned more passively than I believe. It’s hard not to feel discouraged by my lack of focus. I like excelling at things, but I can’t excel if I don’t try. My focus for my language learning in 2025 is simply to do it, no more excuses.

Are you learning a language? How do you stay focused? I wish you well on your language-learning journey, be a better student than me! Until next time, thanks for hanging out with me today. You reader, keep me accountable to keep learning Japanese.