Detective Galileo is teaching me Japanese!
I was wondering for a while if I should make one of these posts. Honestly, this subreddit has lead to me finding my groove, so I figured why not. Apologies for rambling here, and for being lengthy. If you don't get to the end of this post then I wouldn't be surprised lol.
I think I'm not alone, in that I tried and failed many times to learn Japanese. Where like I knew the absolute basics of chapter 1 of the textbook, but didn't know the right starting point and was afraid to miss something. And now I have finally found what works for me.
I'd always wanted to learn Japanese, ever since like high school. Lots of my favorite games were from Japan. Friends introduced me to anime etc. And I tried many times to start learning it. Tae Kim was something I've known about for many many years, I'd start reading it, then get bored. I got Remembering the Kanji, and the Genki books, but tapped out quickly.
In 2017 a new co-worker told me about Wanikani (immersion people don't run away just yet!) so I started there. But I ended up stopping all study basically when I moved to Japan, met my now-wife there, and after 2 years moved back home.
I guess due to being married to a Japanese person I had a decent advantage, but I just never could make time to study. Always wanted to play games instead. But this year I finally decided to start studying, at the end of March. And here's my results after ~3 months in.
Useless Attempts
Problem was, where to start? I had this problem where if I started from the absolute beginning of like Genki 1 then everything was familiar, easy and boring. The end of the textbook was unknown to me. Where to start, with any resource? Do I start halfway and then potentially have missed something along the way? I had a lot of anxiety over the years about this, where to start.
My job offered this program called Gofluent. So I gave it a shot, tested into A2 level. But this program is absolutely terrible. Disorganized, teaching business Japanese from the basic level, in Japanese, too early on.
I also tried the bird (Duolingo). I'd started using it randomly back in 2020 when I started commuting to work on the train, but then pandemic and… no more train lol. Duolingo is really great if you want to order green tea I guess but you'll spend ages just talking about that.
Finding My Way
Two things that were kind of working, were, once again trying to read a little bit of Tae Kim every day if I could, and Wanikani. Honestly, I kind of hate studying grammar, so it was hard to motivate myself to read Tae Kim. WK was better, but very slow at the start.
That's when I started reading this subreddit and people offered links to the Moe Way, and to the Lazy Guide. I'd always kinda known about stuff like AJATT which sounded crazy to me. Especially to a guy with a full-time job and 2 kids. But mass immersion started to make sense. I started watching Youtubers, some who taught how to do immersion, and others who gave updates. So, I decided to try and immerse.
Oh, and I started Bunpro.
Immersion time!
This was probably around one month in of trying to learn Japanese again. At this point, WK and Bunpro were going okay. But I decided to start immersing following TMW and the Lazy Guide. Two difficulties here:
1) I'm not technical these days. Anki and stuff like that overwhelmed me. The Lazy Guide really saved me here. It took a lot of steps (the setup is decidedly not lazy), but the writer succeeded in me getting Anki, Ankiconnect and Yomitan set up on my PC, and eventually, on my phone.
2) I'm not really that into anime, manga, light novels etc. anymore. Not that I hate them or anything – it's just while I really liked them in high school and college, in my 30's now, they were less appealing. Plus I really spent more time on gaming.
But I figured, we have the setup, let's channel my inner teenager and let's go.
I started by starting the Kaishi 1.5k Anki deck. This was really, really good – I highly recommend this! It was not too hard for me – I already knew words like 魚, 赤, 金曜日 and so on. So I usually did 20 words a day, sometimes 40 if there were a lot of easy ones.
I started immersing with reading Ranma (manga). Still fun but I still kind of had to force myself. Plus, lots of battle-related vocab lol, 格闘 was one of my first words lol.
I also started watching The World God Only Knows, an anime I never saw the end of but had really enjoyed the manga like 15 years prior lol. Closer to slice of life, and it had more common words.
I was mining, I set it to 20 words a day. Pretty soon, I set everything to targeted sentence cards – I'd see the full sentence, with the target word highlighted. I found that easier to remember, seeing it in context, rather than vocab cards. Usually makes reviews take longer.
But I was still kind of meh on manga and anime, they only really show conversations. Also, usually short sentences. NHK Easy has longer sentences, I wanted more like that. So, what about novels?
What about novels?
I found this one Youtuber, Hullo, who mostly read light novels. Back in the day, I enjoyed reading translated versions, but these were far rarer than manga. I also wanted to read "serious" novels, but figured light novels would be easier.
I found this great site called Learn Natively. You can choose if you want to sort by novel, or light novel, and can sort by difficulty. So I looked up light novels (at this point I was getting more interested in anime-ey things again), and started with 何故か学校一の美少女が休み時間の度に、ぼっちの俺に話しかけてくるんだが?
It was super cringey, and I wanted them to just hurry up and get together. But somehow, I made it work, after a bit over a month of trying to learn Japanese. I didn't stress out about grammar, pretty much looked up most words using Yomitan, and understood most things by the gist of it. I was mining words with an i + 1 approach. I got through the first couple novels.
I found that starting novels was challenging, but really rewarding, and the more you read them the easier they get. I also got those longer sentences.
After finishing the first novel I read some more manga, watched some more anime, then read the second one.
Grown-up novels time
This was before I figured out Ttsu reader for my phone. Usually on the weekend I'd be setting with my phone out in the living room and wasn't really immersing much. Most of my immersion was after kids were in bed, on my PC (let me tell you, reading books late at night makes you struggle to stay awake sometimes lol). I'd watched this youtuber, Bunsuke, who recommended learning through literature. He had a link to こころ, by Natsume Soseki on Aozora Bunko, a site that hosts classic public domain books.
Armed with Yomitan on my phone, I figured what the heck, let's try and read. And was super slow, but I kind of was getting it.
My wife was like "if you can read that, why not read a normal novel?" One she recommended was Higashino Keigo, a mystery writer. I was never big into mysteries, but figured they'd be better than like fantasy. So, (on my PC) I started reading 容疑者Xの献身.
It was insanely slow reading, constant lookups. Really intensive stuff lol. He uses kanji a lot. Also, a lot of the vocab I was learning was super morbid and specific lol. But I slowly, but surely, over more than 3 weeks, made progress in this book. It was exhausting, but I picked up speed a bit as I got used to it. I got really, really into this book by the end, and have become a fan of Detective Galileo as a result. I've seen a bit of the drama and a couple of the movies as well now (the first one being the adaptation of this book). I went a little crazy with mining on this book but it was really the point that I was enjoying reading a lot for the first time.
Meanwhile I figured out Ttsu reader on my phone and for the weekends I decided to find a super easy LN to read on my phone, so I started with わたしの知らない、先輩の100コのこと1
I thought it would be standard LN slop, but it was surprisingly wholesome and easy to read. However, I found that like with all new books, I had to get used to the writing style and the vocab. So, I read this on the weekends here and there. Basically a girl on the train gets interested in a boy who always reads, so she convinces him to have them each ask one question to each other every day. And like most LN's I'm like how long till they get together lol.
2 months in: More novels
I was a bit tired out after finishing 容疑者Xの献身 so I decided to read some easier LN slop from learn natively, so I found 経験済みなキミと、 経験ゼロなオレが、 お付き合いする話。
My wife says this book is super hentai
This book starts out super horny lol, but calms down quickly. Boring boy confesses to popular girl due to his friends egging him on and she says yes. This is pretty much every nerd's wet dream lol as somehow she realizes that the dull, nerdy "nice guys" can be better than jocks. Woo.
After finishing this book, I was a bit tired of teenagers so I decided to go to the start of the Galileo series with 探偵ガリレオ.
I've discovered that in the end, I do have a soft spot for the high school slop, which is also fairly easy to read, but also easy to get bored with. Galileo was more interesting, really. The first book is a collection of short stories about Galileo and Kusanagi solving mysteries. If you see the drama then some of them overlap. Good stuff and I was reading that for quite a while there.
Listening Immersion
I've really mostly spent time on reading more than listening – at the start my reading was worse and I really wanted to be able to know how to read. At this point, it's the opposite a bit and I'm getting a bit worried about bad pronunciation. But I have done some listening, particularly passively. I enjoy me some Yuyu's 日本語 Podcast. Plus some other podcasts and Youtube videos.
Within the past couple days, I decided to finally start listening to audiobooks while working, so I started また、同じ夢を見ていた
Not the most challenging stuff but I figured better to go with something easier while passively listening. And now I'm halfway through and can mostly follow it.
SRS Overload
At this point I was still doing Wanikani, Bunpro, and Anki every morning. Plus, doing WK and BP throughout the day. I was spending way too much time on SRS, as I have limited time to immerse. Every TMW/AJATT type also audibly groans when they hear Wanikani mentioned. For me, I found WK useful, but insanely slow to work through things. But the way of creating mnemonics and differentiating radicals was useful. Bunpro was more useful, but really more for output – I didn't really need to grind reviews of grammar to understand the grammar of what I was reading. Also, I tended to rush Bunpro too much, not spend enough time on the lessons.
So, I quit both of them. Yay more money. Only difference is now I'm reading 1-2 sections of Tae Kim daily, and a little Yokubi on the weekends (it's like Tae Kim but a bit better imo). Grammar seems to stick better through immersion, with just a single time getting it actually explained somewhere.
I finished the Kaishi 1.5k deck about 2 months in though, yay! Almost everything is mature by now as well, like 90% retention or more.
Recently I started this phonetics deck which has been helpful as well.
Anki still takes up too much time – after I finished 容疑者, I burned through like 200 new words, and my retention massively fell. I'm kind of regretting that. After finishing Kaishi, I learned 30 new cards a day (I really mine way too many lol). It's been hard to make them stick, but sometimes I do a custom study of forgotten cards which helps and I think I'm getting it under control.
3 months in – Wood Job
Some point in the second month I started trying the monolingual transition and… it's kind of bumpy lol. I should figure out more Yomitan settings, that'll make it easier I think. As it is, I try to look up words in a monolingual dictionary more often, and if the definition is comprehensible, I add the monolingual definition first. This does add to the Anki review time though.
We're almost up to the present – this past weekend I finished 探偵ガリレオ, then yesterday finished わたしの知らない、先輩の100コのこと1 (volume 1).
There's a movie called Wood Job that I've enjoyed about a dude who goes to work in forestry on a mountain, so I started reading the source book for this, 神去なあなあ日常
Too many mountain/forest words!
Honestly, this book is really testing me lol. I went from like 5k characters read per hour, to like 3-4k lol. I learned a lot of mystery related vocab from Galileo, but this book has a ton of forest, mountain and lumberjacking vocab. Also, the choices of what words have kanji are confusing. And there's some dialect mixed in. So it's super intensive, but I'm working on it. For the weekend I'll start volume 2 of わたしの知らない、先輩の100コのこと1.
Summing things up
So anyway, that brings us to right now. If you've made it thus far to the most rambly 3 month update ever, then thanks! I think my overall point, is that if you ever gave up on learning Japanese, if you feel stuck in that N5 phase, then I think the immersion approach works. I think the Kaishi deck and jumping right into immersion is a good method, even if it's not super comprehensible. A few stats related things:
WK before I quit – around 500 kanji, and 1,500 words in there (kinda inflated since there's like 一つ、２つ etc.).
Bunpro before I quit – about 3/4's of the way through N4 content. I did 5 lessons a day for N5, then 3 a day for N4.
Tae Kim and Yokubi – never finished either but I'm close to finishing reading both of these.
Anki:
Note that a number of words overlapped between the Kaishi deck and the mining deck! If I learned a word from Kaishi, but kept on not recognizing it while reading, then I would just mine it like normal lol. Or since I started mining halfway through Kaishi, I mined words that later showed up in the Kaishi deck. There's also 122 cards from the phonetics deck which is helpful since like 60% of kanji have useful 音読み.
My new cards backlog is growing exponentially again lol. Kamusari doesn't give me a ton of i + 1 sentences.
My current plan now is to finish reading Kamusari, then either relax with some LN's or read more Galileo. I also want to listen to more audiobooks. I'm considering taking the JPLT in December but doesn't seem like it's too helpful unless I can at least pass N2 which seems ambitious considering my schedule. I need to study for a cert for my job. Also, my job hasn't been too busy for a month or so, so I've had more energy, but it can be hard for me to read without getting sleepy. I aim to have like 1 hour of Anki first thing in the morning, then immerse for 2-4 hours at night. And whatever passive immersion I can get in the day.
My piece of advice is that if you make immersing in Japanese your hobby, and just immerse whatever time you can, you will make so much progress.
Thanks for reading! Maybe I'll make a (hopefully less lengthy) update in a few more months!
by Belegorm