I made a simple goal.

Study ten sentences per day that I have in both audio and writing. Type them and write them out by hand. Then at night, get tested by my girlfriend. She says a vocabulary keyword from the sentence and then I spout the sentence off by memory and then the English meaning. I repeat and pause the audio a lot in the sentence I study until I have the pronounciation, intonation, and pacing down.

So far, I have done it and am happy with my progress. I actually have one "failed" week because I skipped two days. Other days where I had a tonne of stuff going on I made up by doing 20 the next day or 15 for the next two days.

I used the website stickk.com to commit me to my goal. You enter your credit card information and if you fail to meet your goal that week a predetermined amount of money will be taken out and given to an "anti-charity." An anti-charity is a charitable cause that you hate, like an anti-abortion action group or a pro-abortion lobby group. The week that I failed (I studied 5/7 days that week) $5.00 was taken from my credit card and given to environmentalists. In order to make sure you are honest, you can nominate a referee to verify whether you stuck to your habit. I set this up so my girlfriend would be the referee since she knows whether I did my homework when she tests me each night.

I actually want to study more than ten sentences per day, but this is a daily minimum for me. I know that if all else fails, I'll at least get ten sentences done. I will eventually achieve my goals because it is a lot more about consistency and determination than how fast or how hard I can study. That said, I'm itching to increase the intensity after this current commitment contract expires.

I think of Stickk as a tool to make it "inevitable" that I will achieve my goals. The only hard part about Stickk is formulating a goal so that it has built-in reporting to a referee who you can trust. The next thing I'll probably do is to wake up at 7 every morning, sending a text message to my girlfriend at that time.

Dixon Wrote:I used the website stickk.com to commit me to my goal. You enter your credit card information and if you fail to meet your goal that week a predetermined amount of money will be taken out and given to an "anti-charity." An anti-charity is a charitable cause that you hate, like an anti-abortion action group or a pro-abortion lobby group. The week that I failed (I studied 5/7 days that week) $5.00 was taken from my credit card and given to environmentalists. In order to make sure you are honest, you can nominate a referee to verify whether you stuck to your habit. I set this up so my girlfriend would be the referee since she knows whether I did my homework when she tests me each night.

Wow, that is a really interesting way to motivate yourself to achieve your goal (woops, I almost said 'stick to'). I would hate giving to an "anti-charity." I also like your small baseline of ten sentences per day, which you build on when you have time. I have found that being consistent is much better for me than doing sporadic patches of study.

I guess my resolutions are going alright. I haven't done a whole lot of study this year yet since it's already been such a rollercoaster ride (and still is). :/

I finally made the executive decision this week to stop doing my RTK reviews, as I think it's hindering my progress at this point, not helping. I dread doing them even though it's only 10-20/day, and when I finish I usually don't even wanna open up Anki and do anything.

The real reason I'm finally giving up though is that I've diligently done my reviews since I finished in Dec. 09 (I think I've done over 26k reviews by now). What with learning readings for kanji now I'm realizing that I'm failing a lot of RTK reviews because of subtle things like keyword differences. Failing a kanji because of a tiny keyword mistake annoys me when I bring up the answer and go "Oh! I freaking knew that when I knew it by its reading or a word I've seen it in."

I'm hoping dropping the RTK reviews will give me a bit more motivation to work, because my Anki reviews are much more enjoyable than RTK. As for writing ability, I'm not too worried because I've used a production deck for over 6 months now. It's actually my favorite part of the language so far (writing).

Just switched my font for anki vocab cards to "Traditional style", seriously feels like I'm reading a new language (I'm not having too much trouble recognizing, but I kepping my reading field as a different font just to make sure I'm reading it correctly)