As an introvert, I don't really get much speaking practice. In most situations where I am expected to be social I am almost mute. I speak only when spoken to, and the times when I am required to speak I usually keep my sentences brief. That is unless I get triggered to go on some long lecture about a certain interest of mine. That isn't necessarily because I am socially anxious. I mean, sure I can be. But I really am just a quiet little reclusive freak. So you can imagine in my language learning journey, I don't really get any opportunity at all to practice communicating versus comprehending which is what I am spending all my available time on.

That being said, it is the New Years and it's a common tradition to set up some kind of promise to yourself going into the New Year. I never really engaged in this tradition because well, most people don't even take it seriously to begin with and in addition to that, if you really did want to make some kind of promise to yourself, you wouldn't need an entirely new year to fulfil that promise. But, being that I started my language learning journey just a couple months ago and the fact that I have gotten myself to a pretty decent level to watch most lower difficulty anime that you would see listed on JPDB with little difficulty, I actually think it's quite appropriate to make a resolution for myself.

That New Years Resolution is to write posts in Japanese!

Now, being at the level I am at, I don't plan for these blog posts to be very complex. However, my goal is in fact to steadily increase the difficulty of the posts over time. Whether that will take me one month or several is up for time to tell. This way I can actually get some input training, which I believe is equally important as output training.

What these posts will consist of is essentially going to be very mundane. These posts will be 癒し系 as fuck. I really enjoy going on winter night walks, so I intend to just be going around my town, taking photos of interesting things and describing it. I came up with this idea on my final winter night walk of 2025 when I started sharing photos of my favourite spot with my friend. It was really comfy.... and I figured it would be easy, and engaging enough for me to actually do.

My game plan is this:
1. Make a short outline entirely in English.
2. Starting from the beginning, write the actual post in Japanese.

The outline won't be an actual blog post. It will simply be a short summary of what I will be talking about. I will include this with the blog post in the beginning.

I fully expect myself to misuse vocabulary and make grammatical errors, but, it's all part of the learning process so I don't really care. As I consume more native content I trust that I will be able to spot those errors over time and correct them. So, as of January 3rd since I am now finally free from the holidays, I will be making these posts every so often. If you are interested in the Southern Ontario winter landscape then stay tuned...

If you are wondering what I got for Christmas, I got some Alpaca socks, European snacks, a punching bag, and of course, some cheap knockoff Vocaloid merch with AI generated art on them. I have a bit of an interest in shitty knockoff flea market otaku merch, so this is actually pretty dope. My favourite gift however is most definitely the punching bag.

Anyways, Merry Christmas, and Happy Nyu Years! The amount of readers I have may be in the single digits, but I love them all.