Hi, today marks a whole year of every day study since I have returned to Japanese again after a 10 year or so break after I have stopped at an intermediate level. I wanted to summarize my experience and share my insights.
My background
I have started learning in 2009 during my school and uni in a group and with a tutor a little after that. I have managed to get jlpt n2 in 2012 which at that time was a huge boon for a career start since the Japanese were rapidly expanding their eastern Europe presence and basically any level of proficiency could either lend you a job in a factory as an interpreter or in office as a clerk. The starting pay was immense for that time. That's when I managed to get my "second brain" and speaking proficiency and also visited japan multiple times, once for a couple of months in a language school, for a better understanding of the language and cultural context.
Sadly, I was lost on how to learn after n2 and leap to n1 was seemingly too big. That is to say, I had no idea what I was doing. Around 2014-2015 my life priorities have changed, I have burned out on all thing japan.
I was constantly stuck on the "80% comprehension" problem.
During 2014-2024 I have made a couple of attempts to return to my learning, once with a tutor, once with a textbook, once with anki – all those attempts have failed as I had no clear goals, no roadmap, no set schedule, no structure to my study. At that time I also didn't fully understand how to bridge the gap of my understanding or what exactly I wanted to reach.
Fast forward to last year. I had a trip to japan planned for autumn and around that time found about FSRS. I think that was my answer, I have formulated the problem statement as the following:
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Even if I know the kanjis, I cannot read the words or do not understand them.
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Looking up unknown kanjis all the time is too exhausting.
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I get lost on compounds during listening.
And my answer to that problem was "what if I try to learn all the words and see where it takes me"?
Learning the words
During a breakfast on my vacation I looked at the anki shared decks and found this. Shoutout to /u/ChemMixer
This is a deck based on the list of common kanjis and common compounds with them. This was basically the answer to the first 2 of the problem statements. Fsrs has made possible to learn AN IMMENSE amount of words in a very short time. I am incredibly grateful to the creators of that.
The deck consists of 3 parts: base knowledge, extended knowledge, special usage. After around 6 months mark I was around 1600 kanjis marks and was starting to dip into less common or more written language (for reference, during learning I have understood that I dropped learning at around 1200-1300 mark). That's where I realized that the smart way would be to break this deck in 2 parts and learn them in parallel, because no point in knowing what e.g. 謙虚 is, if I don't know what 外科 is, second one consisting of the simple kanjis but cannot be guessed easily, unless you learn it.
I also have a deck for stuff encountered in the wild that is not part of the original deck. For reference, if I encounter some words that are in the original deck, I move them to this new deck. This becomes more of a topic as I am approaching the last third of the original deck.
My cards are typically word + sentence example / translation to english and my mother tongue. If I know the word from the getgo, it's good. If I need to read the sentence, it's hard. Here are my stats if someone is interested.
Reading
My first step at looking how far I am was about after 4 months, I have tried reading dunmeshi and have failed spectacularly lmao. First couple of chapters have resulted in nearly 100 new cards. I have decided that it was still too early.
Now, a year after, reading has become my favorite part. I find it extremely easy now. I can guess the meaning of the words even if I have never seen them or guess their reading. I love it.
What I read:
I do not particularly like anime or manga, but had a blast reading dandadan and dungeon meshi. I slog through Typemoon novels as this was something I liked back in the day.
As all of us are, I am a doomscroller and read japanese news and editorials. Twitter also helps with randomly challenging myself during the day.
I think you only need to know around 1800-1900 kanji and compound, the typical media tends to not use kanji with words after that or uses furigana. It is extremly typical to write ふさわしい instead of 相応しい, unless you read nikkei or some higher tier media.
I will write more about this in my daily routine section.
Writing
I have not practiced this skill. Maybe I can write some 500 kanjis, but this was never what I needed or wanted to have. This goes for both writing kanji and writing texts.
Listening
This was one of my goals, but I started working on it pretty late, at the start of January to be exact. I will write more about this in my daily routine section.
One tip that I have found that has actually worked was shadowing. I always imagined shadowing as repeating what I heard aloud and that was never appealing to me. But no, this actually works even if you repeat it in your mind – spectacularly so. This has helped me to start bridging the gap between learned words and words I hear. Come to think of it, I have used it with other languages already, without thinking about it or realizing it. Even more so, when you are speaking to someone in a foreign language, you can see them repeating what you have said and suddenly coming to an understanding. Shadowing is what they are doing. Use it!
Kanji
I am currently at 2085 mark and most of the kanji have an "aftertaste" feel to them. As written above, everything above 1800 is not expected to be known or commonly used I feel like. There is however a massive amount of kanjis that are not part of the list and are still expected to be known / learned.
I always though of kanji as the final boss of the Japanese. It is not. The subtleties of the language that you tend to hear about (e.g. the Japanese never say "no") are also not the final boss. THE CONTEXT and the flow of the information is, the facts the are never directly presented. But this is the case with every language, is it not?
Tools / daily routine
Words are of course anki. I try not to go above 150 reviews per day while still adding around 10 new cards per day.
Chatgpt has basically substituted me a tutor. You MUST use it in order to have any sort of modern day efficiency, even it's a free tier. It's a language model and that's what it does best. I use it for example sentences in my cards, use it to explain particularities of the words (what is difference between 精度 and 命中率? How are 疾患, 病気 and 病 different?), I ask it to quiz me, I ask it to write me texts to read, it's the best 20 bucks a months you can spend for learning purposes.
As mentioned above, I read editorials, they are an endless source of texts that is free and uploaded daily. If you are around n2 level, you should read them too. Mainichi is very easy and approachable. It is written for the "common folk". If you are looking for texts that feel like they are aimed at the older folk that "teach them youngsters how to live" with harder sentence structure and vocabulary, yomiuri is very good. It also likes to use kanji where possible. It is however sometimes hard, because the japanese media expects you to know the context and does not lay it out. This is easier if you follow the news media in your mother tongue: they always talk about bigger stuff like AI, war in Ukraine, American politics. They will not present you the way their parliament work or give context on territorial disputes with Korea. In that sense, I would have liked to climb to nikkei level, but still not there. I tend to read 1-3 articles per day.
I use ann and jnn for listening. Those have generally 3 formats: 1 minute videos are actual news (very hard, they pack a lot, this is what I aim to understand), 3 minute videos are opinion pieces and pundents and are easier to understand as they use simpler language and speak slower, 10 minute videos are either entertainment and very easy to understand or opinion pieces, which depends. Best case I try to listen around 10 minutes of active listening per day.
Listening to youtube shorts (I do not use tiktok) is also a great way to pick up sphere-specific vocabulary. I recently get recommended a lot of rent property videos, they are fun.
Burnout
As was a topic in my opening passage, burnout is a huge issue. So far I have encountered it 3 times:
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After I have tried my knowledge after 4-5 months period and found it too hard.
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After my vacation in japan, it was just too much japanese. I have also not learned anything new during that period as learning on the go is too hard for me.
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Right now. Reading and listening everyday for 2.5 months straight has burned me out haaaard. The reason to write this post is also a way for me to look back (awesome movie btw, seen it in the theater in japan) and overcome it a little bit.
What got me through the burnouts was consistency. As evident, I have never once stopped reviewing the words. Everything else came with that.
General problems
It is now very hard for me to discern between fun and study. Basically anything japanese I encounter turns me to the study mode where I try to focus too hard and pick up anything I do not understand. I am not sure how to overcome that and even if I should overcome it yet.
I sometimes still get lost during listening, since as I am processing what is being said, some new thing was also said and now I have a stack overflow. However, this problem seems to go away with more practice.
Going forward
After dipping my toes into the japanese news and written media, the language has presented itself in a way I could never imagine. It's amazing how beautifully it is built and how it presents itself. The textbooks and intermediate media does not present it in such a way or omits the complexities that make it beautiful.
I have tried a couple of n1 tests from the previous years at the end of the last year, this has pushed me to actually start reading and listening more. As of now, I find them generally manageable or easy. Stuff I do not know I cover with my kanji knowledge.
I also want to try learning to write once I am done with the kanji deck and more confident with my other skills.
All in all this was one of the my most consistent study journeys. Thanks for listening to my ted talk. Here's to one more year.
by zxcgsdfgdfs