Rough year in many areas, but I am choosing to be kind to myself and celebrate the small achievements that I found the energy for :)
This year's accomplishments:
The biggest one for sure - I befriended an absolute best friend from Japan at the start of the year. This will sound corny but I feel like I've found a long lost sibling from another part of the world! Of course my language also benefitted from this, I've learned tons of slang, tons of new words, experienced my beloved Osaka dialect from a native, we spoke for hours on the phone. To chat on LINE more efficiently I learned flick input (I had been typing in romaji all these years) and it's pretty neat, even if I'm still not super slick at it. I was able to learn of Japan's problems first hand, confirm my questions from someone who lives there... They also helped me grow as a person. And we're meeting in January as I will be visiting, so it's going to be amazing!
Also, a friend from Sweden visited and I got to ask the same amount of culture and life related questions as well as use my questionable Swedish a bit. Yay.
Went to a gig by a Japanese band, with a lot of Japanese people in the audience, and mustered the courage to chat up a nice lady next to me. She turned out to be from Osaka and was plenty surprised to find a Japanese speaker in a foreign country, let alone a 関西弁 lover.
I started teaching Japanese privately for some bonus income. So far I have two students and it's such a nice new experience.
This year was more of a manga year than novel year (over 160 volumes in total, all in Japanese of course). I got into the works of Fukumoto Nobuyuki. My favourite is Akagi, but I also liked Kaiji and Ten. Another manga that I loved was Seto Utsumi, a manga written mostly in Osaka dialect and focused on comedy. The story underneath the light-hearted surface really resonated with me.
One could think that Fukumoto got me into mahjong, but it was the other way around. I took up mahjong right at the end of the previous year and then discovered Akagi. After having been playing the game for a whole year now, I can say I'm probably somewhat of an intermediate player. It's fun and for the first time in my life I've sunk hundreds of hours in a game! It's also a good field for learning Japanified Chinese words.
Keeping up with learning new vocab in Swedish, unfortunately, took a back seat due to many circumstances that left me low on energy to actively study. That said, I kept listening to Sveriges Radio semi-regularly, so my listening has definitely got better.
I travelled to one of my dream destinations - London! And it was so fun I'd love to go back.
Played Megami Ibunroku Persona wholly in Japanese on PS1, what a fantastic game! I also tried to play both Persona 2 games but it was hard to adjust to a new system so I gave up 4 hours in... Next year I'll try again.
Next year I really want to read my favourite book by Stephen King, Needful Things, in Japanese. The Japanese edition is so beautiful, just touching it and flipping the pages is a joy.