It’s been about a year since I started learning Japanese. I’m a middle-aged professional with a busy career (attorney) and time-demanding hobbies like skiing, climbing, and traveling, so I’m not someone able to study six hours a day in a dorm room. I average about an hour a day. Some days are just fifteen minutes to keep the habit alive, and some days it’s a couple of hours because work that day was lighter. The key for me was developing consistency and turning learning Japanese into something like brushing my teeth and going to the gym rather than a second job.
Like a lot of 90s kids, I grew up exposed to Japanese pop culture. Godzilla, My Neighbor Totoro, Battle Royale, Ringu, Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing, etc. Then in college (20+ years ago…) I took classes on Japanese cinema and art. After college I started traveling and visited Japan, but it wasn’t until last winter, when I fell in love with skiing in Hokkaido and Honshu, that I realized Japan is a place I plan to return to over and over for the rest of my life. During that trip I went to the same sake bar nearly every night and enjoyed trying to interact with the host, who could speak decent English.
That became my motivation for learning Japanese: to use Japanese in Japan. To have meaningful conversations with natives, order food without hesitation, explore small towns in winter, etc. When I got home last February, I decided to learn. Early on, I made the classic mistake: I read too much about how to learn Japanese. Reddit threads debating immersion, Anki, pitch accent, SRS, output. I spent more time in the first month trying to optimize study methods than actually learning the language. Eventually I realized that I don’t need the most efficient method, but I need a system I can use on a normal Tuesday when work is busy and I’m tired. So I tried almost everything (apps, textbooks, YouTube, podcasts, etc.) to find what I liked and kept what worked for me. If something didn’t click or was too frustrating, I dropped it.
For me, what provided the highest ROI was WaniKani, Anki, Bunpro, and regular lessons with a tutor. I estimate my vocabulary at around 3,500 words (I’m working through an N3 vocab deck currently), and I’m currently on level 32 on WaniKani and plan to be somewhere in the 40s by this time next year. I know that WaniKani teaches you kanji and not Japanese, but it is highly effective in making Japanese legible. My kanji knowledge expanded faster than I expected, partly because I actually enjoy it. It’s the part of the language that, to me, feels like building infrastructure. Bunpro kind of sucks (I’m not a fan of their SRS implementation), but I find it more helpful than textbooks for grammar exposure. I like being able to whip out my phone and do some grammar review when I have a few minutes.
Anki is not exciting, but it works. It is boring in the way lifting weights is boring. You show up, you do the reps, and you grow. People say that you can’t “learn” stuff with Anki, but based on my personal experience that isn’t true. Exposure definitely cements things, but you can brute force vocab into your head with SRS. WaniKani proved that to me as well.
The biggest gains started late last fall when I began working with a tutor. I had worked through Genki, which I really did not enjoy given its target audience of college students in a classroom setting, but once I had a teacher, the textbook became far more useful. A few live sessions and forced output made more stick than months of grinding through textbooks. My teacher tells me my kanji and vocab levels are much higher than my grammar understanding. 🙂
In the second half of the year, I started adding more input, and that helped a lot. Nihongo con Teppei, Japanese with Shun, and Comprehensible Japanese became regular parts of my routine. I also started reading NHK Web Easy. That shift toward comprehensible input helped cement things and made the work feel worth it. It was funny once I could understand how boring most of what Teppei was actually talking about was. Being sick, the weather, what he was eating, etc. However, being able to understand those things is huge for daily conversations.
On the other hand, Duolingo was useful at the very beginning for building a daily habit, but I couldn’t tell you what I actually retained from it beyond some scattered vocabulary. Wagatabi was fun and engaging, but it didn’t really help me learn anything. It felt like Duolingo in that I ended up just guessing where to put things. I don’t think the “fill in the blank” style method works for my brain in general when it comes to languages. I’m sure those tools work well for other people. I dropped them after a few months.
Some things have also gone much differently than people said they would. Hiragana took me more than a month before I felt comfortable. Katakana still trips me up at times a year later. I also discovered that kanji, while objectively difficult, aren’t the monster I expected. My comfort with them grew steadily, and it’s probably the area in Japanese where I feel the most visible progress. I was in Hokkaido a few weeks ago and while place names and their unique readings are always tricky, I was pleasantly surprised that I could basically just read everything.
Pitch accent was another surprise. I’m not claiming perfect production, but I can definitely hear it. Traveling around Japan and talking to and listening to different people helped with that. Once you can hear it, it stops feeling unobtainable.
Grammar for me has been less about understanding and more about placement. I’ve stopped trying to “get” grammar in a theoretical sense and started letting it click through exposure. After enough reps, certain patterns just feel obvious. This is also how my teacher approaches things. It reminds me of a quote in one of my textbooks, something along the lines of “It’s more important to get used to something than it is to understand it.” I finished all of Bunpro N5 last year and I’m about halfway through the N4 grammar points. I know some people go super fast with 3+ grammar points a day, but I found my retention dropped once I went faster than five to seven a week, especially as I moved into N4. Slower, but it works for me. I don’t love Bunpro, but repetition works for me and it is good enough for now.
I went to Japan twice since I started studying, and that reinforcement changed everything. Menus and signs that once felt chaotic or mysterious started to make sense. I could read enough to feel more at ease. I could order, ask questions, and have small conversations. The highlight of my last trip was driving through rural Hokkaido and stopping to help an old man shovel out his stuck car during that massive storm that crippled Hokkaido. I knew enough to listen to his requests and make some small talk, and he complimented my Japanese in a more meaningful way beyond the classic “日本語上手ですね!” For me, that’s the whole point of this journey.
Year two for me is going to shift slightly away from SRS and grammar study and more toward input and conversation. I still plan to push WaniKani into the 40s and move into N3 grammar, but I want to log between 150 and 200 hours of comprehensible input over the year on top of dedicated study hours. That probably sounds low to a lot of people, but that’s a realistic amount of time I can spend with my schedule this year, which includes ski trips, backpacking, work conferences, etc. I also plan on dedicating more time with my teacher, at least two lessons a week. I’m not a huge reader, but I want to explore some easier manga and stuff on Satori Reader later this year. In general, I’m not planning to go heavy into intensive reading until year three. Again, it might sound like slow progress, but I’m playing the long game. I’d rather be slightly under-optimized but still studying in five years than burn out. I only expect to be busier at work in five years than I am today.
If there’s anything philosophical in all of this, it’s that I stopped trying to compare myself to anyone and “win” in Japanese. I just tried to integrate it into my actual life. I’m a busy adult with other priorities and hobbies. Japanese has to fit into that reality or it won’t last. The tools that survive are the ones that work every day, not just motivated ones.
A year in, I can’t say I’m “good” at Japanese in any impressive way or that I passed N3, let alone N5. What I can say is that I went from knowing nothing about Japanese a year ago to being able to have basic conversations with people in Japan. I hesitate less. I read more. I understand more. For me, that’s realistic progress.
by telechronn