I was going pretty well on my lesson plan until around mid-April and things started getting progressively off track.

First, I realized that my estimate for jpod101 beginner vocabulary was about half of the amount I needed.  I initially budgeted 400, but the real number is likely closer to 800 once I weed out all of the words I already know.  The complete list was around 1600 as I recall, but I seem to already know half of the words.  It’s a little bit discouraging to learn that I still don’t know half of the beginner vocabulary list.

Then I started noticing that my rtk workload wasn’t going down over time despite getting decent and increasing accuracy above 80%.  I noticed my pile of mature kanji wasn’t increasing and my mature accuracy was in the low 70s, so I’m guessing I was failing enough mature cards to offset the effect of increasing intervals on younger cards.  I’ve recently decided to change my settings on my rtk deck to get my mature accuracy much higher, but that it going to slow my progress as I’m not willing to increase my study time to compensate.

The worst thing to happen to my progress however was that I got extremely busy at work and wasn’t able to finish many reviews for a little over a week.  I ended up with about 2k reviews to work though and more reviews becoming due each day.  I’ll get through them in a few weeks and I might even spam correct answers on my most mature deck.  However, catching up with the younger cards will end up putting me behind my already behind schedule by about a month.

I’ve also decided to tweek the lesson plan a bit. I’m still planning on finishing the jpod101 vocabulary so that I have something comprehensible to listen to in the car.  That will effectively add time that I am able to do japanese things that I didn’t have before.  After that, I will probably insert some reading and reading related vocabulary study.  I’m not really sure what I’ll be reading, but maybe it will be nhk easy or some easy manga.  If I can find some short things that I can read during downtime at work, I can add a little more study time that I didn’t have before.  That also fits into my desire to focus on consuming as much actual Japanese media as possible.

All this means that it is all the more unlikely that I will be studying for the N3 this year.  I will probably take a few practice tests towards the test time and decide if I should take N3 or maybe N4 if N3 looks unlikely.