I’ve been thinking a lot through the last few weeks about my goals, as is evident in my last post. I bought a proper planner for this year, and in the last few days I’ve been filling in the goal-setting section.

I won’t share all of them because some are very personal. But here are the relevant or loosely relevant ones:

• Be able to hold a conversation in Ukrainian by the end of the year
  • Stretch goal: to be able to hold a conversation in Ukrainian and another language, and change the title of this blog to fit the URL!
    • 3-month goal: to be able to understand A2-level Ukrainian enough for it to be comprehensible input with no additional context
• Finish what I’ve called “career foundations”—setting up all my blogs, the nuts and bolts of my big fiction project Relativity, get my personal admin system in order
• Get into regular posting schedule(s)
• Further my education in subjects relevant to my writing

German?! No, not yet …

I was tempted just before Christmas to introduce a little German into my schedule, but had to put my foot down. For now I’m continuing with Russian (as a stepping stone to Ukrainian) as my main focus, with very small amounts of Japanese and Spanish. (French is still music-input only at the moment.) Since my planner has a “Reward if achieved” box for each three-month goal, I’ve put introducing German down as the reward for being able to understand A2-level Ukrainian.

German was not originally on my bucket list, though like with French, it’s a language I (briefly) studied and so feel like I would like to at least understand the basics. But considering my revelation about using Russian to progress with Ukrainian, it would come in useful for other Germanic languages.

Upcoming posts

Going back to my writing projects, in the early days of this blog I did draft some posts in relation to the languages aspect of my writing, but didn’t post them. They’re out of date now, but I’m going to try to re-write and post them, to introduce a bit of variety to this blog and also give readers a broader sense of who I am and my interests. I also haven’t posted on the polyglot conferences yet; I’ll try to get to them soon.

Written for Bloganuary Day 1: What is something you want to achieve this year?