For the past maybe year or so, my feed has been inundated with “personal curriculum” posts, and it’s an idea I absolutely love (at least in theory). If you’re not familiar, it’s basically about identifying an area/topic that you want to know more about or a skill you want to improve in and then putting together a tailor-made curriculum or syllabus to direct you in your learning.
One of the nice things about the personal curriculum, aside from its encouraging intentionality, is that these are often carried out over shorter periods (e.g. 6 weeks, a couple of months etc.). Thus, I thought making a personal curriculum for every couple of months or so might make it more feasible for me to dedicate more time to those hobbies and areas of influence that sometimes get forgotten about when life gets busy.
And here we are! Welcome to my first personal curriculum of 2026! This will probably be one of the less curriculum-y curricula of the year, since I am still taking classes for my master’s and have an actual syllabus to follow, so that won’t feature here.
Instead, I mostly want to focus on three key topics (or “classes”) in the first quarter:
Reading and Blogging
Reading and blogging for this first term of the year is going to be a pretty simple ‘class’. Essentially, I just want to see what progress I can make towards my annual reading and blogging goals to see what might need tweaking for the future.
That being said, I do have a couple of quarterly goals to complete.
1: Once Upon a Year (@The Marginalia Writer): Complete 5 of the Q1 prompts for this year-long challenge.
2: Personal quarterly bingo board
In my reading journal I also make a 9-square bingo board for each quarter, picking out some of the key types of books I want to read to ensure some progress is made towards my annual goals. The nine squares for Q1 are:
- a book related to my dissertation (so something related to women in 15th-19th century China and Korea)
- a book that I had marked “paused” on Storygraph
- a buddy read
- a book for the Storygraph Reads the World challenge
- a book by a POC author not from East Asia
- a book that is not in English
- a book by one of the authors I want to revisit this year
- a book about Chinese philosophy
- a nonfiction book unrelated to my master’s programme (so not about East Asia)
Language Learning
The bulk of my Q1 personal curriculum is focused on language learning. For Q1, my high priority is Japanese, followed by Classical Chinese and Korean in medium-low priority. I’ll also do some maintenance work on my Mandarin Chinese.
Japanese is both my most beginner language of the four I’m working on this quarter and also my highest priority for these three months, primarily because I have signed myself up for a night class that is higher than my actual current level, and I refuse to be annoyingly behind the whole time!
My minimum goals for this are:
- go to weekly night class lessons and revise the material
- complete at least 1 textbook chapter per week (on average) from self-study books
- use Skritter to revise words/Kanji – have at least added all the new words to a list
- watch at least 3 hours of content in Japanese (probably dramas)
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Korean is my most advanced language, so it’s often a low priority recently. However, I need to retake the TOPIK Korean proficiency exam in April as my certificate has expired, and although I already have the highest level, I’d like to see if I can push myself to get a higher score than last time. Therefore, it will get some attention, especially in March.
- read three books in Korean – including 이상한 나라의 스물셋 [The Strange World of 23]
- learn at least 30 words/month on average (total 90)
- make and follow a TOPIK prep plan (in March)
Next up is Classical Chinese – I’m also enrolled in a class for this, but it’s sort of an asynchronous class – there are livestream Q&A sessions, but otherwise you can learn at your own pace. Unfortunately, I fell behind when life got busy and then never caught up again. They’re currently on 14/16 and I’m on 5/16… I’m unlikely to catch up in that amount of time, but I do want to actually dedicate myself to working through this programme again, since the idea was to enable me to read some Classical Chinese texts for my dissertation, which I’m now starting to research.
My goals here are simple:
- complete the course (or catch up as much as possible – I’ll be happy if I get through 7 chapters by the end of March – so 12/16)
- find a way to revise or create reference material for Classical Chinese – this is unlikely to be the kind of language I can regularly maintain, so I’d like some sort of cheat database to refer to when needed!
Chinese is the language I use the most at the moment in terms of daily conversation, largely because one of my closest friends where I live now is Chinese and we talk about 80% Chinese to each other. It is Chinese-mixed-with-other-stuff, so I don’t think my grammar or vocab is expanding at all, but it has definitely become the easiest language for me to quickly say everyday things in. At the moment, I’m happy keeping it this way:
- talk to my friend in Chinese at least every week (easily done!)
- watch (finish) at least 3 C-dramas
Health
Finally, I think it’s important to balance cerebral growth and hobbies with looking after your body. Since so many of my hobbies and so much of my work are sedentary activities, I feel a real lack of movement in my life, and especially fun or challenging movement. Therefore, I have signed up for a couple of things and am hoping to (for the most part) follow the following “health curriculum”:
Curriculum focus: Exercise and physical movement
Goal: Get 80% of the way to meeting the NHS physical movement guidelines (150min moderate/75min vigorous aerobic activity + 2x+ strengthening activity per week, over 4+ days)
Syllabus: Aim to do the following activities weekly (in addition to walking)
- Ballet class (1hr 15min) – counts as strengthening activity & moderate aerobic activity
- Swimming (c. 30min) – counts as vigorous aerobic activity, but the way I do it involves so many breaks it should probably be moderate xD
- Weightlifting (c. 45min) – starting with a beginner’s weightlifting class and then transitioning to doing the programme myself… this is obviously a strengthening activity
- Going to the gym (c. 1hr) – a mix of light cardio and weights using machines, so probably something like 15min moderate aerobic activity + 45min strengthening activity
Hopefully, the variety (and the lack of a running requirement, which is both something I struggle to do and also find not very fun in the freezing cold weather we’ve got at the moment) will mean I can enjoy completing this P.E. part of my syllabus 😀
And that’s it! This is obviously a very late post, and some of this I’ve already started (or should have already started), but I came up with it pretty late as well, since I was busy with all my other year-end/new-year posts. Fingers crossed the next one will be slightly more on time hehe.
What are you trying to work on this quarter?
Keira x
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