Hey, another one of these…
Background of where I was back in 2023
- In 2015 I took 2 semesters of Japanese 101 and 102 at my university, which ended at chapter 10 of Genki 1
- In 2016 I studied abroad at Akita International University for 1 semester, taking a 1 hour Japanese class every weekday. We started at ~chapter 6/7 of Genki 1 ended at chapter 3 of Genki 2.
- Afterwards I started getting involved in my university's Japanese culture club, and started working at the study abroad office. I got to meet a lot of Japanese exchange students but didn't really study or try speaking in Japanese with them.
- Graduated in 2019 and kept telling myself I was going to start studying Japanese… only to start up Apex after getting home from work
- Went to Japan for 2 weeks by myself in 2020 (came back 1 week before lockdowns started!), again didn't really speak or read Japanese to anyone
- Had a really rough year in 2021 and ended up getting a new software dev job & moving across the country in mid 2022 as a result
- In August 2023, I decided to start learning again for real this time, with the goal of passing the N3 that December.
Every time I attempted to start learning again, I would try to use Genki/KKLC/Wanikani… but after maybe 20 days or so I got bored and stopped. So I wanted to start this time by doing something I sort of thought was only for crazy people – immersion.
Before I explain my journey, I think it's important to know that I was relatively confident on the following things:
- I was still confident that I could read all hiragana and most (~80%) katakana characters
- I still remembered some kanji that I drilled Anki flashcards for back in college, such as the days of the week, numbers, 人, 開く, 聞く, etc. words that I would probably consider N5 level or so
- The first few chapters of Genki 1 were still relatively fresh from the amount of times I kept trying to start from scratch
I'd imagine if I didn't know these things it would've taken me about 2-3 months longer to get where I am now.
2023
- I started with a Tango JLPT deck, doing new cards a day, going through the first ~30 videos of Cure Dolly, and reading Sakubi
- I signed up for an online Japanese class hosted by the Japan Society of Northern California.
- Initially for immersion I started reading Yotsubato – main reason was because I bought a physical copy of volume 1 when I was studying abroad and always wanted to read it. I read the manga digitally, using mokuro so I could add cards to a mining deck. At the time I was trying really, really hard to get N+1 type sentence cards in the deck, so I didn't add most stuff. I probably didn't understand most of what I was reading, but I accepted that fact and kept moving on. I think I finished volume 3 before stopping
- A friend of mine also started learning Japanese again at the same time, we decided to study together one day and that eventually lead us to watching the first episode of Yuru Camp. My friend studied abroad in Japan for 1 year and also had a weird business masters program where he had to take Japanese classes remotely for a year (lockdown prevented him from going in person). We watched episode 1, then went over it line by line, trying to make sense of what was being said. It took us around 3 hours doing this, but it was very helpful in identifying some mistakes I was making when trying to understand sentences.
- I decided to try reading コンビニ人間. The book was recommended as being very easy and a good pick for someone's first book. I was initially going to hold off reading it until I finished more Yotsubato volumes, but on a whim I decided to spend a night at it. Reading this book was brutal – I wholly recommend this book as a first choice, but if I could go back I would've waited longer before attempting it. The first night was about 2 hours and I think I had maybe read like… 1 or 2 pages. I wasn't really bothered by how slow I was going, but for some reason I was committed to finishing the book… after around a month or so of reading for 90-120 minutes a day, I finished it. I did use Google Translate, quite a lot in fact at the beginning, but as I got near the end the book got easier to go through, and I was able to lower my usage of MTL. Special shoutout to this video by Cure Dolly, it explains a way to understand complex sentences and it helped me so much in understanding why Google Translate was spitting out the result that it was.
- About that Japanese class I signed up for earlier – the first class was about 2 weeks after I started reading コンビニ人間, and I wasn't really feeling it. We were using Quartet 1 but I got the vibe that if I kept trying to read this book, I would make way more progress than what the class could do for me. So I got it refunded.
- From there it was a cycle of watching Yuru Camp with a friend, watching anime by myself, and reading books. My second book was また、同じ夢を見ていた, then I read 誰が勇者を殺したか and レプリカだって、恋をする、before the JLPT. I think I was spending about an hour a day on Anki reviews, which I hated but stuck with it because the test was coming up.
- I tried a few tutors on iTalki as well – really got my ass handed to me as I realized that input =/= output. The first tutor I had kinda had this look on his face of "you're joking, you have no chance" when I told him I was going to take the N3. The other tutors weren't bad but I didn't really want to talk to them for JLPT practice, I just wanted to talk to someone about random stuff to improve my speaking in general. Eventually I put aside looking for a tutor to spend more time reading for the JLPT.
- Passed N3 with a 100/180 (Vocab/Grammar 32, Reading 38, Listening 30). Honestly looking back on it, kind of impressive, considering I didn't really study for the exam specifically. I half-assed read through Shin Kanzen Master's grammar book and watched a few Nihongonomori videos. I was completely unprepared as I didn't know the type of questions they were asking – had I looked at a past exam I think I would've done better.
2024
- Started the year out with the goal of reading 15 books. This was a mistake IMO – for one, not all books are the same length, so by making a goal specifically on the number of books finished, I'm encouraged to pick easier, shorter books instead of… books that I would actually want to read. Two, since it's just books, technically doing anything else with the language doesn't count, which kinda pressured me into doing only reading. And three, since the goal is to finish books, it means that I was at risk of reading a book that I hated, and forcing myself to stick with it.
- Made big changes to how I was doing Anki – this is somewhat controversial, but I stopped grading myself on reading + meaning. I only grade on reading, and then I re-read the meaning on every card. This made the number of cards I had to review everyday plummet as I was maturing cards faster. My thought process was, I should be able to still remember the meaning because I see the word a lot through immersion. I also decided to fail fast – if I can't figure the reading out after 4-5 seconds then I should just fail it and move on. Nowadays I finish Anki in 20-25 minutes a day, still doing 20 new cards.
- I also planned a 3 week trip to Japan by myself – this was huge for my confidence that what I was doing was working. My speaking was still bad but I had little problem reading signs and ordering from menus that were in Japanese. I was able to ask store workers questions in Japanese and understood them. I met my friends and was able to have conversations with them in Japanese. I stopped at a bar in Osaka and tried speaking to the bartender and the locals there for ~3 hours. Not to say that I was good at speaking – my accent is off, I forget basic grammar when in the moment, and my vocab has the Anki-ism where I know some pretty uncommon words more than I do the more common ones (a friend was genuinely stunlocked when I said 長閑 to describe a park she took me to). But I was having a lot of fun, even with all the mistakes I was making. It was genuinely an amazing time.
- Afterwards I went on Meetup and found a Japanese language exchange program in my area, that happened every other Sunday. There were quite a few native Japanese speakers there, and the non-native speakers had a much better grasp on the language than I do when it came to speaking. I stopped going near the end of the year due to some personal health issues but I plan on going back soon
- One month, I think it was May. I gave myself a stupid challenge of watching 120 episodes of anime in that month. Did it help my listening ability? I think so, sort of. But it's hard to tell.
- Tried watching more youtube videos, I made a special account that I use on a webbrowser that's completely setup in Japanese, so that the algorithm won't give me videos in any other language. Unfortunately for me, I haven't found a content creator in Japan that I like, so I kind of have to force myself to watch these videos. It's good listening practice so I do it for that reason.
- For JLPT, I made sure to study harder this time – the month before the exam I went through past exams, the entirety of SKM N2 grammar, and tried reading news articles to get used to the style of writing that the exam might have.
This leads me to my exam result, not an impressive score but it still counts as passing. I usually do Anki first thing in the morning while I eat breakfast, then after work I read for anywhere between 1-3 hours depending on what I'm doing in the day. I try to watch at least 1 episode of anime/30 minutes of youtube in a day as well but don't sweat it if I can't. I don't have any kids or responsibilities outside of work.
Going forward I want to do the following
* Continue reading more, watching more anime/youtube
* Start speaking more often
* I want to be able to understand and speak about programming related topics in Japanese
* Pass N1 by the end of this year, maybe?
* I want to improve my understanding of grammar – particularly interested in understanding 国語, although I know it's not needed to get better with grammar
Some things I've understood in this journey:
- Stop comparing yourself to others, it's just going to get you down
- Anki is a great tool and makes learning vocab way easier than just repetition, but try to keep it under 30 minutes a day. The easiest way to cut down on the time you spend on it per day is to cut down the amount of time you spend on a card before passing/failing
- Monolingual dictionaries are nice but are not needed. Right now I prioritize them instead of Jitendex in yomichan, but when I add a card I have yomitan setup to display the English definition first. I found that if my anki cards have the J-J definition on the back first, I'm more likely to ignore reading it.
- You don't have to always do this, but spend at least a week or two logging the amount of time you spend studying. I was surprised to see that on days where I felt like I did a lot of studying, it ended up only being like 60 minutes. I admit that I have a broken internal clock (What I think is 10 minutes is probably more like 40) so recording the time helps me stay honest with how long I've been at it.
- I am in the camp that believes KKLC/Wanikani/RTK is a waste of time. You suffer at the start and eventually it just starts clicking within your brain. The key is to be consistent with your studying and to give your brain 2-3 seconds to try to read the word before looking it up with yomitan
by gunwide