Well as I mentioned in a previous post I was going to learn to read Hangul 한굴 this year well days after that post I went ahead and re-learned the Hangul probably took 1-2 days to memorize them all and a little longer to get the pronunciations and irregularity's correct, still probably not perfect but can read quite well now I just need to speed up. After getting the taste of Hangul my attention turned to actually wanting to learn Korean itself as I've always had an interest in Korea and its culture other than Japanese its by far my next favorite language, so for a while I'm going to switch my attention to learning Korean especially after my long hiatus from Japanese its very daunting to re-start 1700 sentences that haven't been reviewed for 5 months or so. Although to not forget my Japanese I'm going to were I can translate my Korean sentences into Japanese and avoid English as much as possible the great thing about Korean for anybody who has studied Japanese is the many similarity between the two languages. e.g. 저 - jeo = Similar to 私 씨 - ssi = similar to さん Mr, Mrs, Miss 은 / 는 - eun / neun = Topic Marker similar to は 입니다 - nida = similar to です　"to be" 이 / 가 - -i / ga = Subject marker 저는 학생입니다. = I (topic marker) student am a - I am a student The sentence structure is pretty much the same too as above. Now that I know the writing its just a case of learning the vocab and grammar so should be pretty quick to match my Japanese ability and to pass it, currently the thing I'm finding most difficult is getting the pronunciation correct but that just needs practice. So I intend to keep these regular logs on my Korean progress and also for a place to list things I've learned which will hopefully be beneficial for myself and anybody else that's interested in or learning Korean. Oh and one last thing to finish up I'm also going to set a few mini goals (as suggested by Squintox) each time I make a log as a way to keep pushing myself along and as a guide of my progress. - Finish Beginner series 1 of Korean Class 101 - 5/31 - Add 200 vocab/sentences to Anki - 62/200 - Watch at least 1 Korean movie a week - 0 (3-iron has arrived ^^) - Listen to more audio 20Mins today so far (still collecting things together for this) Feel free to follow me over on Twitter - Tibul

Next up is how I'm getting on with the weight training, since I started back in February I think it was, I've come a long way from being a skinny bean pole who could barely lift anything that could be considered to have a substantial weight, when I first started I was curling like 8kg and doing way too many different exercise per session 4 times a week I was basically running my self into the ground even with the small amount of weight I even had the complete wrong idea on how to do sets, basically after every set you should take about 60-90 second brake (good for Hypertrophy) for maximum testosterone production then go on to your next set after completing your sets for one exercise you jump to the next.The big mistake we were doing is we did each set of an exercise concurrently, no rest, then we would rest for 60 seconds and start the next set of all exercises we were doing more harm than good basically wrecking havoc on our nervous system. Anyway the mistakes we made and the things we learned over the past 5 months or so can wait for a future post as there were more ^^Any woo I gained a few pounds of muscle over the first few months of training averaging about 1 pound of weight each week which is about what your aiming for if your wanting to gain muscle and not fat this was helped by my increase of calorie and protein intake helped by the weight gainer protein shakes took some time to get used to the banana flavor but its grown on me.Then typically when I was starting to see change in my physique I injured my right deltoid may have been caused by not warming up adequately or just from general wear and tear as weight lifting for hypertrophy puts a lot of strain on your body, this took about 3-4 weeks to get back to shape although I did no weights in that time I kept my weight/muscle by keeping my protein intake high and calories clean.Then finally I could start again this time reading much more into what routines, exercises were best for me being a hard gainer, the basic idea for us hard gainers and beginner weight lifters alike is to do mostly compound exercises for the first month or so these include the bench press, deadlift, squats, military press etc on alternate days 3 times a week the idea is to build over all mass and increase strength rapidly then later when your bulked up you define the muscles by doing the non compounds e.g. bicep curls etcOne tip if its strength and size your after you need to constantly be increasing the weight you lift find your perfect weight that you can only manage around 6-8 reps per set with and each sessions try to add a little more weight from everything I've read over the months this is ...

Well over the coming days I plan to do post some updates on my progress with my goals that I listed a while ago, to recap these were.Learn JapaneseTo keep improving my Japanese and hopefully step it up a gear.Weight TrainingTo improve my overall physique to basically not look like a beanpole.Healthy Body and MindGenerally to improve the way I live and eat always believe you should look after yourself as you only get one body no point when your 50 starting to eat healthy because your obese and can barely move from all the crap you've eat and drunk over the years same goes for the mind.SavingsOne thing that I've always had trouble with is saving now that I realise I've gotta save if I ever plan to live my dream of going to Japan for a year to enjoy myself and job hunt.Other goals I planned to set were to expand my reality in general experience as many different things as I could and to also network more in and out of my career.- Body and Mind -For the first post I'm going to do a quick rundown on my body and mind goal, overall this is going pretty well most days I've kept with the eating healthy at least having some fruit and veg everyday, although I have had a bad habit of taking trips to KFC and the local Chinese a few times a week as they tend to be more convenient and a quick way of getting my required calorie/protein intake to keep adding more body weight this needs to be pretty high especially as I tend to be pretty active with 3 weight sessions a week and lots of cardio in between.I've also started to take much more care on the way I look for years I had the same set of clothes and would only buy new clothes when they were worn thin but now if I see something I like (or my wife does) I'll go out my way to buy it, caring about the way you look doesn't just help change what people think about you it also makes you feel better and more confident.On the mind front I think this has improved from before I'm generally feeling much happier and have a huge renewed interest in my Japanese language studies, web development and technology in general. Everyday I get closer to my trip to Japan even if it is years away planning for it now helps stop my interest waning and keep me motivated and happy.Next up Weight Lifting

Well i often here people saying that its generally a bad idea to set yourself too many goals or resolutions whatever you want to call them, but in my opinion setting yourself many goals can actually be advantageous.The general consensus on why setting more than a few goals for yourself at time is bad tends to be that you get over worked, burned out etc and end up completely giving up after only a short period of time, now if we look at two common examples of resolutions people set lets say smoking and losing weight pretty common as I'm sure you will agree people will often set these goals at the same time often at the new year, which they are both pretty big lifestyle changes giving up something that your body is so used to, thus why a lot of people find it difficult to complete both goals they would be better off setting only one and the other later. Obviously everybody varies and people with greater will power may be able to manage this.Now onto why I think its a good idea to set many goals all at once say for example something like my own personal list I have keeping fit, learning a language and saving money to name but a few which many of these I set around the same time after hitting a stage of wanting to improve myself, so far I've managed to stick with these although I have dropped some along the way i.e. a while ago i set myself a goal to learn powershell scripting not hugely difficult but my interest waned and without even realizing it became a failed goal. There's also been a few others I set around the time of my self improvement phase which I've lost site of but all in all I've kept going strong.To say I set myself around 10 goals or so of which I've only dropped around 3-4 of those over the last 5-6 months and the others are still going strong, I think I've done pretty well now if I had only set 1-2 goals which might have taken say 2-3 months to do for a short term goal with the possibility of one of those being dropped I don't think I would get as much self improvement in the time than I would with multiple goals so potentialy wasted time.Choosing your goalsHow to choose your goals for the best retention this can be down to each persons willpower and motivation but a general idea is to keep them varied maybe have 1-2 that could be called major lifestyle change like not having a daily trip to Burger King order everything large and instead having a salad, then perhaps set the rest of your goals as mini ones i.e. get an extra half hours sleep a night and/or setting yourself long term self improvement goals like learning a language, saving for a holiday or improving your image the ones that don't take ...

Well at the start of the year i set myself a few goals of achieving things or just improving myself in some way so were better to jot these down and see my progress over the year than on my blog so here go's.Current set goals1. Learn JapaneseThis is probably my main goal for the foreseeable future something that I have now been doing since mid last year and wont stop until I'm fluent and my year trip to Japan in the not too distant future.So far this is going strong once I have a few things sorted out I'll be powering this again like over Christmas.2. Weight Training Started this a few months ago and was making good gains increased how much I could lift and my body weight in a matter of months but after a shoulder injury this came to a halt but is now sorted so I'll be back on this with full throttle.3. Healthy body and mindThis is allot down to changing my diet and go's hand in hand with the above I've never been the most healthiest eater but have been doing pretty good recently having 5 portions of fruit and veg a day at least 3 servings of fish each week (love fish) I feel much better after eating more healthy seem to have more energy and just better in general this seems to be having a positive effect on my Japanese study and weight training.On the mind aspect I've been trying to think more positively although some things are going against this over the past week or so.4. SavingsSomething that I've been wanting to do for a while but always been held back by being in debt up to my eyeballs :) but recently have started saving ready for my year long stay in Japan.Goals I plan to set1. Expand my realityYou can read more about this on a great article over at glowingfaceman.com but basically the idea is to learn new things whether its a new language or how to make the perfect cup of tea lol you expand your reality by learning new things as until you actually know about them there not in your reality you become a much fuller strong person by learning new things.2. Network MoreBasically get to know more people whether its around the language learning community or work related expanding the network of people that you know gives you many more possibilities and potential opens up many more doors in your everyday life and career for reaching those long term goals.