To 2022: English version

Happy New Year to everyone!!
     How was the last year? Did you have a great life? Did you make a great deal of progress in whatever you have been doing? To me, the last year was okay..... because I made a little progress.

     What progress did I make last year? Well, as a starter, I learned how to read an academic paper. When I was in my first year in graduate school, reading papers was the last thing I was good at. Simply, I did not understand what each paper claim, or what method researchers used in order to examine a specific phenomenon. What is worse, I did not build up some habit to look carefully at data they obtained in their research. Now it is obvious even to me that it was almost impossible to make sense of what they were doing. However, as I trained a lot in looking at data more carefully, and as I learned how to do stats or how for it to work, I have had more confidence (I hope it is at least marginally significant, whichever interaction or main effects) on how to read data. In other words, I avoided the worst scenario. The worst scenario was that even in spending an entire two years in grad school, what I got would be nothing, or becoming a good pretender.
     Also, my writing in English (I highly doubt whether my writing is better in Japanese) is getting better, I think. As you read up to here, you probably noticed that I am writing a passage of sentences properly, though I am sure, as a second language learner of English, that I have made many mistakes in grammar or some expression, or simply the sentences that I wrote does not make any sense. However, at least, my writing skill, thanks to my supervisor and an academic writing class, is somewhat less annoyingly pointless.
Up until here, I was writing about how I was (or am) bad at everything, from now on, I am going to write about new year resolutions that I should hopefully achieve by the end of this year. Here are new year resolutions I am thinking about (an irrelevant note, I end some sentences with prepositions, but plz ignore them) :

1. Get better at coding (Especially, R language, languages that will be used in a company)
2. Keep reading a lot of books both in English and Japanese (Especially, linguistics and cognitive science, and hopefully some stats books)
3. Do some sports ( because of my injury, I stopped doing some sports, but it is good to restart them)
4. Do not stick with theory too much (I am getting aware that the academic and business world is to a great extent, different with respect to how to think, or other kinds of stuff)
5. Try to communicate with people I did not know very well ( My strength is not talking to people, so I should start training myself to do this)

Above, I wrote some of my goals I probably should get better at (PREPOSITION ending). I wanted to detail more about them, but I am getting hungry, so I'd better stop here.

Thank you for reading my first blog in English this year