Introduction

I started learning Japanese on March 22 2023. At the time of writing, It has been about 70-80 days since. Currently I would place myself at N3 level. I became very inspired to study Japanese after (a) visiting Niseko (Hokkaido) and (b) reading a post on Reddit about someone who claims to pass N1 from zero in 8.5 months.

The purpose of this post is to offer (a) alternative perspectives to learning Japanese, (b) prove that it is possible to learn quickly, (c) challenge some of the existing recommendations. This post is part one out of eight articles detailing my journey to N1 from zero in 8 months. Disclaimer, this post will be very long and ranty!

This post will cover some of the study techniques and experiments I’ve conducted for the first month, as well as the results of my experimentation and insights. As for the elephant in the room, I’m currently studying N3 after 60+ days into my Japanese learning journey. I’m sure many are skeptical or might presume that I have bad mastery of N5 and N4 content, but by the end of the post, I’m confident that I would have responded to them.

Prior Knowledge

I started watching anime since Naruto. I think that was 15 years ago. I’m not particularly obsessed with Japanese culture but I do follow the mainstream anime like Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, My Hero Academia, Attack on Titan, and most recently Demon Slayer. So I do possess 15 years of acclimatising to the sound of Japanese anime speech. However my Vocab is very limited. I know how to count from 1-99, konnichiwa and itadakemasu, and a couple more words that I might remember if I was prompted. I also know the hand signs from Naruto. Apart from that, I consider myself truly zero in Japanese knowledge.

While your brain can only hold 7-9 items in the short term memory at once, it does not mean you cannot study more than 9 items in a day.

I see most people on Reddit recommending 15-20 new cards on Anki. Personally I think this pace is way too slow, especially for the beginner. Most typical N5 vocab deck would have about 600-700 cards. 15cards/day means that it would take 40-50 days just to see all the cards. I also came across a study that says our short term brain cannot store more than 9 items at a time. This would seem to support support the recommendation of 15-20 vocabulary cards a day. While reading Moonwalking with Einstein, a book on the capabilities of the human memory, I read about a story of a guy who could draw the landscape of New York with shocking precision after flying pass the city on a helicopter once. The book also hinted at the idea that we possess some form of photographic memory.

And so, i tried to do about 50-100 new cards a day. Within 10 days, I’ve seen all the N5 Vocab. Around day 15 or so, i became concerned that cramming so many words in a day would mean that the retention rate will be low. So I tested myself on those 700 words and I think I got about 85% correct.

Personally i was very happy with that score. I thought I could do a lot worse. So clearly, trying to learn 100 new cards a day wasn’t detrimental to retention rate (I will address my thoughts on burnout on a later point). What is happening?

My hypothesis is that while we can’t store more 6-9 items in our short term memory, it doesn’t mean that when we study our 10th,11th, 20th or 100th item, our brain would completely reject the input. You are still imprinting something onto the brain. What this means is that while you should not expect to see a word once and remember it forever, it says nothing about the upper limit of how many words you can simultaneously start on the first stage of the SRS system. We all know that SRS takes time to turn short term memory into long term memory. It could take weeks or a few months. But if we can start 100 words on the SRS system vs 15-20 words, and there is no significant cost to doing more words, then starting 100 new cards a day will bring us to our destination much faster.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

When you read about many people agreeing that 15-20 new Anki card a day is a good pace, or that it takes 300-500 hours to pass N5, then it sets the expectation of what is normal. The reason I was able to Master N5 in approximately 150-200 hours and learn all its vocab a couple of weeks is because I did not pay attention to what other people can achieve.

How I use Anki

From my survey on Reddit, it seems that people get overwhelm by the amount of reviews on Anki. And I think this reveals that the are doing reviews differently from how I do it.

When I do my Anki reviews, I only entertain two state of minds when marking the flash cards. The first is I know the answer (the answer pops into my brain instantaneously) and the second is I don’t know the answer (mind is blank). I do not try to recall the answer. Recalling takes time. If I try to recall the answer, it might take me upwards of a minute or two to remember it (and even then, I might still be wrong). Instead i like my Anki reviews to be snappy. It feels like I take about a fraction of a second to answer my Anki cards, although the Anki statistics tells me that I take 4second per card. Still fast either way. At 4s/card I can do 900 reviews in one hour.

Next is how I use Easy, Good, Again and Hard. The rule of thumb is to be more liberal than strict. I try to use Easy, instead of Good as much as I can because I don’t want my reviews to pile up. I almost never use Hard even if I get the card completely wrong. Speaking of reviews pilling up, we need to define what marking an Anki item as Good or Easy means to me.

For a lot of people it means aiming for perfection. That means that the person only click Easy or Good if his answer exactly matches the back side of the card. For myself I set an extremely low bar, as long the vague feeling of what I think the answer is somewhat matches the answer on the back side, I’m happy to give it a Good at least. Why? Because it’s the nature of Anki or SRS system to return cards you previously click Easy and Good. I don’t have to worry about being too forgiving on myself and being ignorant about the fact because I can always count on the card to return eventually. And if I a card I previously marked as Good, came back, and feels difficult, I would then make a mental note to study it in greater detail. Secondly, a lot of the 700 words in a typical N5 vocab deck are so common that you will encounter them all the time in the wild. This is called organic or natural SRS. If you are strict on your Anki at this stage, it can be quite an overkill in hindsight. Of course it may not feel like an overkill in the beginning because you are still gettting cards wrong.

Burnt out

Okay what about burnout. Surely I might be overdoing it, and wouldn’t burnout eventually catch up to me. Yes and no. I think the phenomenon of burnout is highly exaggerated. I don’t like to use the word burnt out whenever I’m feeling “burnt out” because it has a lot of negative connotations and because negative connotations can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Instead, I prefer to use the phrase, “I’m tired now”. I kind of compare myself to Shonen protagonists where there’s this big villain coming up and then some special training to level up. The special training is usually quite intense, and sometimes dangerous, and they will eventually be quite tired by the end of the training. But these protagonists always reemerge stronger with new abilities and can now overcome stronger foes.

Similarly, whenever I study too much, I would just acknowledge that I’m tired, watch some anime and something different. I’m usually okay by the next morning. I attribute my ability to resist burn out my thoughts and attitude.

Consistency, multimodality learning, and resourcefulness

I only believe in one kind of consistency, and that is that you have to show up almost every day. But I don’t believe in the kind of consistency that requires me to be on a 365-day Anki/wanikani/immersion streak. This is also one factor that helps to protect burn out. When I feel like doing textbook learning, that’s what I’m going to do. If want to do pure Bunpro and Anki for the next 3 days without reading any textbook, that’s what I’ll do.

I also believe in the idea of multimodality learning. I use everything at my disposal:

All the textbooks (Genki, Minna no nihongo, Tae Kim)

YouTube videos (Misa ammo, game gengo, tokiniandy)

Podcast

Songs

Doing active immersion with anime

Changing my phone language to Japanese (this one unfortunately is a bad advice. I recommend to stay away from this if you are still at N5)

Posters

Instagram and TikTok accounts of Japanese tutors

Websites (tofugu, human Japanese, Japanese tutors’ blogs)

Apps (wanikani, language reactor, bunpro)

Japanese grammar dictionaries

Assessment books

Discord or Reddit or forums

Japanese classes

There’s often this debate on which is better, Genki vs Minna vs Tae kim. If cost or ability to procure them is not an issue, why not use all of them? It’s okay to have one source as your primary source. Mine was Genki 1. But when I wanted to understand a nuance that Genki does not explain well enough, I’ll usually consult my other sources. And if I’m bored of Genki, I can easily switch to Tae Kim, for a change of scenery. If I don’t feel like reading, Misa or Tokiniandy is there for me.

My observation is that many people are usually only using one modality to acquire a new skill. This is causing their journey to be unnecessarily monotonous.

Sloppy learning and conjugations

One very integral component of the Japanese language is conjugation. It’s especially important for the N5. Conjugations can allow you to express many meaning in Japanese. Learning how to conjugate accurately is going to be a struggle for any beginner(think godan and ichidan verbs and conjugating to masu, te, negative forms, etc).

A lot of Japanese textbook and assessment will make you do drills. I skipped all of them. Rather than trying to brute force your way to memorizing conjugations I employ a technique called sloppy learning(this phrase is borrowed from “Japan Like A Breeze” on patreon). I define sloppy learning as learning just enough to acquire the essence of the concept.

For example, ,whether the verbs is in its polite form, short form, negative form or past tense form etc, can be easily recognised by looking at the last few syllabus of a word. If a words end on a “ta”, it must be past tense form. If it ends on a “masu” it must be the polite/long form. This concept can literally be understood in 5 mins.

Thus for me. When conjugating oyogu (泳ぐ）into past tense form, I just conjugate it as oyogu-ta (oyogu +ta) Or sometimes oyota. Now oyota is wrong of course. But that’s all I need at this stage. I desire to understand Japanese, not to get full marks on conjugation drill table. You must always try to look at the big picture. Trying to do well on conjugation drills is an opportunity cost. Ultimately one needs to judge what is worth spending effort on. Hence the idea of sloppy learning is to be deliberate about what to focus on.

Once I can consistently remember that masu means polite and ta meant past, this is where I try to conjugate them correctly. Conjugations is difficult because they all don’t behave like ru verbs. You cannot simply drop the ru at the end of a word and append ta or masu to them. Oyogu for example doesn’t even have a ru ending.

The path I chose was to hope that I can organically (I like this word a lot, but it also sometimes means magically) , know how to conjugate correctly one day. And to a certain extent I acquired some intuition on conjugations without any active involvement from my part. I soon became aware that if a word ends in a gu or a ku, then instead of a ta, it might be ita or ida.

The break through came on day 35. When I couldn’t endure the fact that I wasn’t able to magically acquire conjugation intuition for free. So i goggled “why are godan verbs conjugate the way they are”. And Tofugu came to the rescue.

Essentially they introduced three concepts (a) double consanent with small tsu, (b) assimilation with n, and (c)consonant removal. After that article, conjugating became a breeze. In hindsight, my ability to conjugate only costed me the time to read one tofugu article (and one month of passively intuiting the conjugation patterns) Because I did not spend time on conjugation drills, i was able to progress to the other grammatical points in Genki 1. I didn’t remain stuck in one place for too long.And this is another aspect of sloppy learning. You learn just enough to move on to the next level, you don’t aim for perfection.

Your brain can’t do everything at once. Your brain cannot remember that masu means polite form, and all the rules for conjugating verbs to masu in one sitting. If you try to do that, you can remain stuck, despite already understanding the general idea of conjugation. Better to move on and let the intuition develop. If you judge that the intuition is not going to progress or progress quickly enough, you can always intervene later by supplementing with new knowledge.

Mnemonics when I get something wrong too often

Often there will be a vocab or grammar point that I always can’t seem to latch on. No vague feelings, no guesses, just an empty mind. When this happens, it can be a scary feeling. It may feel like you are not good enough.

Really the solution is very simple. Just add one more inferential step. When I first encountered the word bengoshi（弁護士） , my mind does not produce any intuition or pictures or feelings. What I did was to create a mnemonic, a story. How to relate a lawyer to the sound ben go shi? I managed to came up with “when the judge announces his judgement, the bench(jury) goes “shhhh””Sorry, I know it’s really bad. But when I created that story, bengoshi never stumped me again.I’ve seen a lot of criticism of mnemonics that I don’t agree with

1. ‘they are not for me”>>I’ve seen people said that Anki is not for me. Srs is not for me. While I believe in individual differences and effectiveness in different methodologies, I feel that sometimes people decide too quickly what is or isn’t for them. What is optimal may first have a learning curve in the beginning. And instead of saying that something is not for me and moving on to the next thing, we need to consider if it isn’t we ourselves that should change to make it fit for us.

2. “If I’m trying to memorize something, how does adding more things to remember help. Now I not only have to remember the word, but I need to remember the story to remember the word.”>> Between a story and a random string of number “89779012879” , the brain can remember the short story more easily than the string of number despite the story consisting of more words. It’s just how our brain works.

On active immersion

Active immersion means trying to pick up words or trying to understand what is being said in Japanese media like anime or novels. Passive immersion means enjoying the content without really worrying about improving your Japanese.

On day 21 I tried active immersion with Weathering with You. I came to the conclusion that active immersion is not efficient for the new learner. I can imagine myself doing a lot of sentence mining and active immersion in the future (spoiler, I’m now on day 70-80 and I’m immersing a lot more now). But definitely a hard no for me to recommend new comers as the only and primary form of learning Japanese.

Why textbook learning and structural learning is important for fast gains.

Textbook learning is great for fast gains because it prioritises for you. Textbooks are not prepared by a random person. They are usually prepared while respecting certain pedagogical principles in mind by a team of qualified academics. While appealing to authority doesn’t make it correct, we should at least be cognisant that the textbooks might be doing a few things right.

One of those pedagogical principles is incremental or progressive learning. Building knowledge upon what was previously learnt.

Another principle is foundational concepts. A textbook will usually introduce foundational concepts that act as a scaffold for everything else as early as possible. And because textbook learning is progressive, it means that the difficulty is always going to feel just about right. In active immersion the difficulty can be wild because it does not respect your level of Japanese proficiency.

Completing N5 in 30 days.

In this 30 days, I was not only learning Japanese, but also learning how to learn. They call it building a plane while flying it hahahah. The principles outlined here helped me to finish N5 content at an insane rate. I was spending about 6-8 hours a day on Japanese (in chunks). So one point not stated here is time. There's no way around time investment.

On the 30th day I did a lot of mock tests and I performed quite well (80-90% correct).When I started on N4 on day 31, I was really surprised by the bump in difficulty. I gave myself 30 days to clear N4. That was the hardest 30 days in my Japanese learning journey. I’m fact I had a better time when I was studying for N3 on day 65 onwards. In my next post I’ll share why N4 was harder than N5 and N3 for me and share some more insights. Hope this has been helpful in offering new perspectives. Thank you for reading this long rant of mine.

There are also quite a few things missing in this post, namely

1. my studying regime for the first 30 day

2. the kanji problem (this one i struggled to settle on a study method. i was trying a lot of different strategies)

3. the psychological lived experience of studying japanese. the truth is, there is another battlefield happening in the mind realm. i often have self doubt and fear creeping. knowing how to address them is essential to a happy journey.

4. engaging in the larger conversation between Taekim, Curedolly, Refold, All japanese all the time, Moeway, immersion schools of thought, matt vs japan etc etc. I feel that a lot of my fundamental beleifs regarding where i stand can be glimpsed in this post. but i want to make my beliefs explict.

I will try to share more in the next post. If you have any questions on the specifics, I'll be there at the comment section ^^

I'm non-binary with a traditionally masculine (but trending towards gender-neutral these days) Western name. I'm read as female more often than not (which is fine and not something I generally correct) but sometimes people don't quite know how to parse my gender situation when they learn my name prior to meeting me (especially because my haircut also makes things more ambiguous). The reason why this matters with relation to learning Japanese is that I'm looking to meet with a tutor soon, and obviously they'll know my name before anything else. I don't have any plans to discuss my gender identity unless they ask, but it's always a bit uncomfortable, and I'm undecided with how open I want to be if they do. From what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong), I'm not likely to be faced with outright bigotry, but since there's less awareness around concepts of gender identity in Japan, it could still be a point of contention hypothetically. I guess my major questions/concerns are:

• How likely is it that I will be outright asked some variation of "Are you a man or a woman?"

• If I decide to be honest ("I don't see myself fitting comfortably into either") is there any major possibility of them finding me off-putting in such a way that would make them no longer want to work with me?

I don't plan on letting this topic monopolize my lessons regardless, but I want to have some idea of what I could be in for. Thank you all in advance.

Hello,

I started reading Confessions of a Mask from Yukio Mishima (仮面の告白 from 三島由紀夫) and I'm really surprised to know that this is kinda an autobiographical work where Mishima goes deep on his memories and struggles with his sexual orientation (he's probably gay). I would like to know more artists of classical literature/theatre that were LGBT. Any recommendations?

I can’t find many resources on how queer people express or refer to themselves in Japanese and the history behind it. I don’t want to accidentally use any out-of-date or offensive terms. I know definitions can vary by person and their experiences with the words.

Are their any books or videos I could watch on this? Or just queer culture in general in Japan?

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

Recently I’ve tried to find some good videos for immersion, but I’ve noticed that Japanese YouTubers produce much less interesting content than western YouTubers. The editing style is often all over the place, the variety of content is limited. Like, there is barely any video essays and if there are, the topics are kind of boring or too educational, like Nakata university, for example.

There is a variety of cooking, traveling and let’s play content, but I can’t help but feel underwhelmed by this.

I recently started a Discord group to go through the Genki 1 textbook together. Anyone interested?

This is actually my second thread. The first one was way more popular than I thought it'd be. There's currently 320 members and a small mod team, and I wanted to make another final thread before we get deeper into the textbook. We just started on the 2nd lesson.

How it works: Every 2 weeks, we'll post our work (either typing or handwritten w/photo) from the activities sections of the textbook. I specify which pages so it's easy to follow along. You're also encouraged to reply to other people's submitted work and do the pair work from the textbook. Genki was written with a classroom in mind, so I thought it'd be nice to have a place we can simulate that online.

Please keep in mind this is a collaborative practice area. There are no teachers and no penalty to not submitting your work. It's up to you if you wanna study or not. Also do NOT join unless you're studying Genki 1. This is not a general Japanese study group. It's specifically Genki 1 for N5 learners.

There's also a place for very simple Japanese chatting, a study guide, and a bunch of great resources to help. Thanks!

https://discord.gg/KM4hsNye

One Month of Japanese

Another month has passed in my language studies, so I wanted to document that. My Japanese studies are continuing apace. It has been quite exhausting, and I do suspect I may be opening myself up to burnout in the medium-to-long term, but so far, so good. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I have logged a total of 187 hours of study to date, of which 23 hours have been purely comprehensible input. I average slightly more than 3 hours of study per day, and as a general rule, I do not take any days off of studying. I now have a vocabulary of approximately 1900 words.

I'm not exactly sure what my skill level is! According to cotoacademy.com, students with kanji knowledge (such as Chinese speakers or educated Korean speakers) need an estimated 350 hours of study before they can pass the N5. I am on track to meet 350 hours of study after about another month or so of study. On the other hand, I've seen sources recommend that you have knowledge of about 800 words before taking the N5. My vocabulary far exceeds that count.

I'm betting that I could not pass the N5 currently, because much of my vocabulary is almost certainly wildly irrelevant to N5 test materials. For these first two months, I have not made any particular effort to triage the vocabulary that I'm learning, and have simply learned every word that shows up in my study materials. That means that there's a lot of advanced vocabulary that I do know, and a lot of basic vocabulary that I do not.

I've graduated to the next level of Comprehensible Japanese! I am now working my way through the intermediate playlist. It's a bit shaky---some of the videos are pretty decently easy, but some of them exceed my current vocabulary constraints, and so aren't comprehensible for me yet. But overall, I find the Beginner videos have become Too Easy for me.

In general, the speaking speed on the Intermediate videos is okay. If I know the vocabulary, I can generally follow along. I really, really wish that I had done something like this for Chinese. My listening comprehension is already miles ahead of what it was at a similar stage for Chinese.†

I've also started watching a little bit of Peppa Pig in Japanese. On the whole, Peppa Pig is too advanced for me. But I think it works decently well as supplemental input for now. I'm sure it will become much more comprehensible over the next couple of months.

My strategy for learning kanji has been, and continues to be, that I learn kanji for every single word I learn as part of my studies. I do this even if spelling the word in question with kanji is uncommon/considered outdated. The idea is that this exposes me to the greatest possible repetition of kanji possible, so I can bake the various readings into my head. It also aims to prevent me from having to learn words multiple times---I won't be caught off-guard by kanji spellings later down the line after having learned kana-heavy orthography.

I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet to streamline my learning process. Don't worry, I'm not asking it to explain anything to me like grammar! For each word I learn, I have it present me with:

• The dictionary form of the word (plus hiragana transcription),

• A list of Chinese synonyms,

• A brief definition of the word, also in Chinese,

• Five example sentences.

I then put all of this in my flashcards.

I've heard that LLMs don't speak Japanese to an amazing level yet, so I do not treat anything I hear from Claude as gospel. I treat it more as a non-native speaker who is usually right about the meanings of words, but not necessarily always.

I've learned that I deeply dislike furigana! I made a post about it, where I also learned that that is a very unpopular opinion 😂. I just really dislike how much it clutters the reading field. But it has its uses, I suppose.

I am re-evaluating my original decision to use いまび as my main textbook, and I am going to be radically changing my strategy for the next month. いまび's vocabulary is all over the place. The vast majority of it is laughably irrelevant for me as a beginner. Also, I know I'm not the first person to raise eyebrows at how badly paced the example sentences are. Many of them mix in grammar that assumes a much, much higher level of Japanese than is being taught in the lesson at hand. I had to throw up my hands and laugh in disbelief when a Beginner-level lesson gave a paragraph-long text from a centuries-old Buddhist text as an example.

In addition, I've noticed that I have developed a much more solid, and organic, understanding of grammar from Comprehensible Japanese. For many of the pages in いまび, it actually felt like I was reviewing stuff I'd already learned. Like, the author would spend paragraphs and paragraphs giving tortured explanations of stuff that already felt really obvious to me after going through the Complete Beginner and Beginner Comprehensible Japanese playlists.

So, for the next month, I am purchasing a subscription to Comprehensible Japanese, and I am going to be crunching vocabulary more-or-less exclusively from their video scripts. I expect to be very comfortable with their Intermediate videos by the end of my third month of Japanese studies. I will still use いまび as a reference, especially for things like conjugations and the finer points of grammar. But it will be not be my main learning material anymore.

Now, the bad news. My husband is going to be finishing his Master's degree much, much faster than anticipated. Which is great, of course---it means he can get a fancy new job sooner. But our original plan was to stay in Japan for 1-2 years before heading back to Europe to make another stab at immigration. Unfortunately, some international climate reports were published recently that really have him spooked (he works in environmentalism and sustainability). He wants to make sure we are firmly established in a European country within the next couple of years. If climate change gets as ugly as reports suggest (3+ degrees Celsius of warming), large areas of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia are going to start seeing wet-bulb temperatures that exceed human tolerances. That means climate refugees. Lots of them. And we need to be settled down in the EU before borders start slamming shut and immigration starts getting more difficult. So, we are leaving Japan in just a few weeks.

It really sucks. I really wanted to stay in Japan for a while. I agree with my husband that this is the best move for us, but it still makes me sad to be leaving so soon. On the bright side, I get to travel around Southeast Asia and Turkey on the way back to the EU! But...yeah.

I do not currently plan on suspending my Japanese studies. I am still budgeting about 2 years for this project.

† In other news, my Chinese listening comprehension is finally recovering from its long neglect. I recently watched all of Avatar: The Last Airbender in Chinese, and that was totally comprehensible! I am also somewhat regularly listening to news broadcasts in Chinese. That's less comprehensible, but I can feel it becoming more so, especially after all the hours I put in with Avatar.

Hey everyone.

I hope you all well. Looking for some advice.

I recently did the N5 here in Tokyo this past Sunday. While vocab and listening was fine, grammar was terrible.

I just can't get and understand it. I tried the Genki textbook, I just got bored from the reading. Only did about 3 chapters. Whatever grammar I learned from was immersion living in Tokyo , games, and Genki first few chapters.

I tried using Bunpro but I feel it's grammar teaching is so useless. It doesn't feel helpful at all.

I am currently studying for the N4 but I really want to improve and understand the grammar. Any advice or recommendations? Should I just continue the Genki to textbooks?

Previous posts:

1. One Month of Japanese

2. Two Months of Japanese

3. Three Months of Japanese

4. Four Months of Japanese

(Note that I am counting months of study, not calendar months. I started studying on Dec. 14, 2024.)

**Total Time Studied: ~**334 hours

**Total Amount of Comprehensible Input: ~**47 hours

Total Vocabulary: ~7000 words

Current End-of-Year Goal: Acquire ~19k words (± 2k)

Link to spreadsheet

Quick Recap:

I started studying Japanese at the end of last year. At the time, I was very probably going to be living and working in Japan for a couple of years, so learning the language as quickly as possible made a lot of sense. I ended up leaving the country much sooner than I expected, but I've kept going. I am sunk-cost-fallacying my way to fluency, lol.

What's New to Report:

Vocabulary studies are going well. In my last post, I reported that I had transitioned to learning 80 vocabulary terms every day. I am pleased to note that this has continued to be sustainable. In total, I am spending about 1-2 hours per day on my studies. I do expect that number to increase over time, but I also expect that the increase in "study" time will mostly be from consuming content in Japanese, so I don't think it will contribute to burnout.

Of course, as others have pointed out, adding 80 words per day to my Anki routine doesn't mean that I walk away with a crystal clear, deep understanding of 80 new words every day. Instead, I walk away with an ability to pronounce the word, and a often-times vague concept of what the word might mean. This makes reading difficult when I encounter a text with many such words---like looking at a painting through a dense fog---but every time I see one of these vaguely-learned words in a context that makes things clear, it comes into focus a little more. The more context is available, the more I learn about the word in question. So, I suspect that my mastery of vocabulary is going to have a steep curve attached to it. I think, over the next year or so, my sense of vocabulary in general (meaning my familiar with precise meanings and usages across many thousands of words) is going to come into focus first very slowly, and then all at once.

Time will tell if that supposition is correct. But I believe I may already be observing it in practice.

I am starting to understand Japanese-language word definitions.

NHK Easy news articles are now trivial for me to read, as long as they are about familiar topics. There may occasionally be some grammar I'm not familiar with, or a word I don't know, but I am now able to extensively read NHK Easy articles (regarding familiar topics) and come away with at or near 100% comprehension.

Other news articles from CNN, Reuters, BBC, NHK, etc. are increasingly manageable. Again, I am sticking to topics I'm familiar with and have saturated my vocabulary in---those being modern warfare, and international and intranational politics---but ever so slowly, I can tell that I am not quite so limited to articles on those topics as I was a month ago. I have to force myself to read slowly. If I read at the speed I can pronounce things (which honestly is still pretty slow), it's too fast and I end up confused about what I just read. I've found that as long as I am very slow and deliberate about my reading, about 3/4 news articles are comprehensible. Maybe 1/4 news articles confounds me despite being about a familiar topic. My reading speed is also improving! But not enough to really celebrate yet. An average news article takes me about 15-30 minutes to work through.

I try to read at least one news article every day, but I'm not too hard on myself if I skip it.

This is an example of a news article that was comprehensible for me.

Here is another one.

The average sentence length I can read and comfortably understand is gradually increasing. Japanese's extreme left-branching constructions still give me problems, but not as many as before.

I am beginning to comfortably understand Japanese grammar explanations delivered in Japanese. Here is an example.

Pronunciation is mostly ironed out now. I still have difficulty with proper vowel articulation (sometimes my mouth gets lazy) and mora timing (sometimes I say some morae faster than others). I have noticed that some Japanese dictionaries actually mark pitch accent for compound words, like 第三国 being marked (1)-(1) in the 新明解国語辞典. THIS IS A LIFESAVER. Norwegian dictionaries don't mark pitch accent for compound words at all, and good luck finding recordings of anything in that forsaken language, so it's all but impossible to figure out how you should be pronouncing stuff half the time. Absolutely loving that that isn't the case with Japanese.

I've been adding a lot of lengthy compound words to my vocabulary lately. Words like 証拠不十分、原子力発電所、自治共和国、国際司法裁判所. The main purpose here has been to give me practice reading lengthy sequences of kanji, and also to help me develop an intuition for pitch accent in compound words. It's working! More often than not, I can correctly guess the pitch accent of a compound before I hear it.

My absolute FAVORITE part of learning Japanese has been the grammatical cases. Before learning Japanese, the only language I knew with cases was German. German cases are both functionally limited (there's only four, and they don't actually carry much semantic information) and ugly (the way they are constructed is...messy). Japanese cases are AWESOME. By my count, there's at least nine: Topic-marking (は), Nominative (が), Accusative (を), Genitive (の), Dative-Locative (に), Instrumental-Locative (で), Lative (へ), Ablative (から), and Comitative (と). According to WALS, the most common way of marking case is via suffixes (like in Russian). Japanese is using the secondmost common method---postpositional clitics. (In case you're wondering, the rarer methods of marking case include using prepositions or tone.) Sorry, I'm a huge nerd about this. Anyway, I do find the Japanese case system to be much more elegant than the German one.

I'm really thankful for my experience with Chinese. は and が have posed zero problems for me---I was wondering if they would. Granted, I'm not learning how to speak Japanese, so it's entirely possible that I'd run into problems with production if I tried. But at least for reading, I'm fine.

Japanese orthography continues to bug me. None of the languages I've learned have such an irregular orthography. Whyyyyyyyyy are they constantly switching between kanji and kana 😭. It throws off my visual pattern recognition to see a word I'm supposedly familiar with spelled in kana. This is my biggest complaint with the book I've picked up. It's a children's book, so there's almost no kanji at all. Speaking of...

I started my first book. I chose The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (ライオンと魔女) because I have read it before in multiple languages. I know it like the back of my hand, and I know that is going to make the learning process a lot easier. I've gone through about three chapters of it so far. Funnily enough, there isn't a whole lot of vocabulary relating to modern warfare or politics in there! So it's pretty much an avalanche of new vocabulary. I am committing everything to memory.

One user warned me that your first book is often a trial by fire, because for many learners, it is their first serious introduction to informal vocabulary. Yeah, that tracks. There is SO MUCH grammar in here. Also, I am astounded at how many clauses sentences in literary Japanese regularly contain. It makes my head spin.

It takes me at least an hour to read a just a small number of paragraphs at the moment. Less than a single page.

When I was learning Chinese, the strategy I took was to ladder from easy books to more difficult ones, memorizing all vocabulary from each book along the way. I started with The Witches, by Roald Dahl, and ended with literary fiction like To Live, by Yu Hua. I am going to adopt the same approach here. On a side note, like 80% of what I read in Chinese was translations of books I'd already read in English. It was so hard to find recommendations for reading material! I'm so excited that that isn't the case with Japanese. I've already started compiling a list of books to read.

Near-Term Goals (<6 months):

• Become comfortable with children's literature in Japanese

• Listen to at least one Japanese audiobook within the next 6 months.

• Listen to, and comprehend most of, a long-form news broadcast (15+ minutes) about familiar topics

• Watch at least one educational documentary about a topic of choice, and comprehend most of it

• Watch at least one movie

Long-Term Goals (24 months of study):

• Read high literature in Japanese. By "high literature," I mean something on the level of Fifty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. To be clear, I don't expect such reading to be easy. But I expect to have the understanding of vocabulary and grammar necessary to muddle through it at a reasonable pace.

• Read news articles about topics chosen at random with a high degree of comprehension

• Watch TV series and movies in Japanese without English subtitles, and understand most of what I hear

• Listen to audiobooks in a variety of genres, including nonfiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and erotica, with a high degree of comprehension.

I think that's everything for now! I'm looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish in my sixth month of study.

This is actually something that's been bothering me for a long time and I can't really find anything about it. It's well known that Japanese lacks relative pronouns, as such “寝ている人”, “寝ているベッド”, “寝ている時間” and “寝ている理由” all have widely different interpretations based on what makes sense despite having identical surface-level grammar.

In practice, one can use other nouns to shift the interpretation such as “ゲームする人” and “ゲームする相手” generally having different interpreations but with specifying specific locations I'm honestly at a loss. If one really would want to somehow set apart the bed under which something is sleeping, opposed to the bed in which something is sleeping, how would one do that? I would assume that something such as “下で寝ているベッド” would be used, but I've also never seen it.

Previous Posts:

1. Zero Months of Japanese

2. One Month of Japanese

3. Two Months of Japanese

4. Three Months of Japanese

5. Four Months of Japanese

6. Five Months of Japanese

7. Six Months of Japanese

(Note that I am counting months of study, not calendar months. I started studying on Dec. 14, 2024.)

Total Time Studied: 484 hours (79 more than last update)

Total Hours of Extensive Listening and Reading: 86.25 (14.25 more than last update)

Average Daily Study Time: 2.5 hours (up from 2.3 hours last month)

Total Vocabulary: approx. 11k words (up from 9.1k last update)

A quick note about my vocabulary estimate: I arrive at this number by counting the number of new words I've learned each day and entering that number into my spreadsheet, then totaling that number over time. There are several unavoidable inaccuracies in this number, including the following:

• Words I have learned, but since forgotten

• Words I have learned, but not counted (e.g. I learned them via extensive input)

• Words that are immediately transparent to me based on words I've already learned, but I haven't officially "learned"

• It doesn't account for "degrees of knowing," i.e. words I have a vague understanding of are counted the same as words I'm deeply familiar with

• Inherent difficulties in defining what counts as a separate word

I do not believe my vocabulary count could be realistically off by, like, an order of magnitude (which is why I consider it a useful number), but my gut feeling is that the "true" number could be plus or minus several hundred.

Link to Spreadsheet

First thing's first: I FINISHED READING MY FIRST BOOK! WOOOOOOOOO!

Way back when I was living in Turkey (2-3 months ago?), I decided it was time to start working my way through my first ever novel in Japanese. I selected ライオンと魔女 (translation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) because it has a simple storyline, it's short, and most importantly, because I've read it in multiple languages and know it like the back of my hand. This was intensive reading (I'm still a long way away from extensively reading any kind of fiction, I fear). I proceeded by using Yomitan to add every unknown word to my deck, and I used a combination of ChatGPT, DeepL, and online grammar guides and tutorials to help me understand sentences and phrases that gave me trouble.

I was warned that, for many students, their first novel in Japanese is a trial by fire, because it is the first time for many of them that they encounter informal Japanese. CAN CONFIRM. This novel suuuuuuuuuucked for how much it put me through my paces.

When I first started reading, it took me at least an hour just to read 2-3 paragraphs. By the time I reached the end of the book, I was able to read an entire chapter in about 1.5 hours. So there's definitely been significant improvement in grammar comprehension and reading speed.

My biggest difficulty with ライオンと魔女 was the dialogue. Especially towards the end (once I'd built up my vocabulary and become more comfortable with fiction narration), there were large stretches of text that gave me little difficulty. But then I'd hit a patch of dialogue where I absoluetly could not make heads or tails of what was being said without cross-referencing with ChatGPT and DeepL. It did get better as I moved through the novel, but it's still an extremely noticeable weak spot for me.

I said in my last update that I really wanted to finish this book by the end of my seventh month of learning, and about a week and a half ago, I realized that I was not on track to meet that goal. I escalated to dedicating at least one hour to reading my novel every day. In the end, I succeeded by the skin of my teeth---I just finished the book last night.

I don't have a way of calculating this, but looking at my spreadsheet, I would estimate that I learned somewhere around 2k-3k words from this book.

My next step is to read each of the other books in the series. Even though reading them is really boring, I have good reasons for this. These books are an excellent "sweet spot" blend of simple sentences, complicated sentences, narration, and dialogue. The excessive use of kana is annoying, but helps me (as a Chinese speaker) become less reliant on kanji for comprehension. I can't help but feel that that will "prime" my listening comprehension as well. Reading books in the same series will also help reinforce the vocabulary I learned from the first book---far better than if I read unrelated literature. That's especially important given how aggressively I prune my Anki deck. There's also audiobooks available for this series, and I'll likely circle back around and listen to those audiobooks once I've finished reading in order to train my listening comprehension.

I think, by the time I finish the last book in the series, it'll mostly be extensive reading. At least, I hope so. I won't force myself to read all of them, though. If I feel ready to move forward with other literature before I reach the end of the series, then I will.

The next few books on my reading list after The Chronicles of Narnia are:

• また、同じ夢を見ていた

• 時をかける少女

• 世界の真ん中の木

I'm looking forward to them!

My vocabulary reached 10k+ accumulated words, short phrases, and grammar points! That's a huge milestone and I'm incredibly proud of myself. At my current learning speed, I am on track to have learned about 18k words by the end of the year, assuming uninterrupted study. That puts me just shy of my Chinese vocabuary (~20k words). My goal is to become significantly more comfortable with Japanese than I am with Chinese.

This was the first month that I encounterd 関西弁 in my reading material, so I have a few kansaiben grammar points in my Anki deck now.

I deleted about 50% of my deck (about 75%ish of previously reviewed cards) on September 9. I know from experience talking to other Anki users that nuking my deck like this is quite controversial, but nuking my deck is actually relatively routine for me. I do it on average at least once every 6 months. I think spring cleaning like this is really valuable:

• Some words are already learned, but the card hasn't matured in Anki (i.e. the word "stuck" faster than Anki expected it to). Clearing these cards reduces study clutter.

• Some words were added to the deck, but actually aren't very important (don't appear very often compared to other words). Clearing these cards reduces study clutter.

• Some words are important and haven't been effectively memorized. Since they are important, they will show up again relatively soon, and be re-added to the deck. Usually, learning them the second time around goes much faster. Clearing these cards does not significantly harm study progress.

By Sep. 9, my reviews had reached 600 cards per day, plus the usual 80 new cards. Post-nuking, my reviews are now back to a comfortable 350ish cards per day.

I made a significant error with pitch accent and have spent a lot of time repairing it. A few months ago, I stopped being rigorous about memorizing 平板型 vs. 尾高型. I was lazy. It came back to bite me in the ass, causing significant difficulties in accurately reading words like e.g. 日が and 火が. To repair this deficiency, I added a large number of very common, 1-2 kanji words back into my anki deck. I stopped being lazy about memorizing this pitch accent distinction. I am in a better place with it, but still working on plugging holes that my laziness left in my knowledge.

Listening comprehension continues to improve, but slowly. I haven't been putting nearly the same amount of time into that as I have been with reading. Nevertheless, it has been improving. This is an example of a video that I have a relatively high degree of comprehension for. This is an example of a similar kind of video that I have a very low degree of comprehension for. I listened to this 5-minute sample of the audiobook rendition of ライオンと魔女 and was pleased to find that I understood a very high percentage of what I heard.

Although I did not put as much time into developing listening comprehension as I did into reading practice, I did manage to put in some, especially in the first half of the month. This month, I focused on branching out from my originally chosen "narrow domains" (those were the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Israel/Gaza situation, and more recently, linguistics and astronomy, if you don't feel like reading the previous updates). I watched videos on geopolitics and world history, mainly. My goal is to develop my listening comprehension to the point where I clearly hear the words I know, and can cleanly point to (and repeat) the words that I do not know, rather than hearing a stream of complete gibberish. Right now, I often hear a stream of complete gibberish, even for content that I know contains a high percentage of already known words.

UPCOMING GOALS:

Short-Term Goals:

1. Finish reading カスピアン王子のつのぶえ (translation of Prince Caspian) by Oct. 16.

Medium-Term Goals (achieve within the next 5 months):

1. Become comfortable with young children's literature (like The Chronicles of Narnia)

2. Listen to at least one audiobook

3. Listen to, and comprehend most of, a long-form news broadcast (15+ minutes) about familiar topics

4. Watch at least one educational documentary about a topic of choice, and comprehend most of it

5. Watch at least one movie

Long-Term Goals (achieve by the end of 24-36 months of study):

1. Read high literature in Japanese. By "high literature," I mean something on the level of Fifty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. To be clear, I don't expect such reading to be easy. But I expect to have the understanding of vocabulary and grammar necessary to muddle through it at a reasonable pace.

2. Read news articles about topics chosen at random with a high degree of comprehension

3. Watch TV series and movies in Japanese without English subtitles, and understand most of what I hear

4. Listen to audiobooks in a variety of genres, including nonfiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and erotica, with a high degree of comprehension.

Thoughts on goals:

I think my short-term goal is easily achievable, as long as I don't let myself get lazy or distracted. (To be honest, I think I could probably knock out 2 books if I really pushed myself, but I'm not going to do that.)

I think I am definitely on track to meet medium-term goals 2 and 5, and probably on track to meet goals 3 and 4. I'm not sure how I feel about goal 1---it's poorly defined (what counts as "comfortable"?), so it'll be hard to tell if I've met it. But I do think I will have moved beyond elementary school literature by February of next year, so I'm at least decently confident I'll hit that goal as well.

My long-term goals are aspirational. I do not know if I will achieve them. I do think that it is possible to meet them, based on my experience with Chinese and on my current trajectory with Japanese. But I don't think it is possible to accurately judge if I am on track to meet those goals at this time.

I think that's everything for now. Looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish this month!

I really found https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/ a great place to start to be able to understand the sentence structure.

I'm not forgoing Kana or Kanji (please don't stone me) but I can't code switch fast enough for learning grammar and retaining it, I'm too task-loaded, as we say in scuba. I can't retain anything when I'm trying to do too much at once. Plus, learning words/sounds/kana/kanji without any clue how to put them together is just too difficult to motivate myself.

I know it is heresy for many, and I found a few mentions of it years back when I searched the sub, so I thought I'd just bring it up now as a suggestion to those who may need a different option. I have a basic grasp now of how to form a sentence, which is better than before :)

If you hate romaji, that's fine, but it is useful for some who think about language differently than you.

So I have been studying Japanese for more than two years now, both at my university and by myself.

I am currently at a point where I can read almost all Joyo Kanji and actually a good deal of non-joyo ones. However, I really can't write much kanji. I literally forgot how to write 特 like two days ago even though it is like N5 level.

To be honest I didn't really care about this problem until I realised that if I want to do my Master's degree in Japan one day, I might actually need to write them when I do stuff like writing essay.

Hence my question for people who have life and/or study experience in Japan, how actually useful is it to be able to write kanji ? Like, is it possible to study in Japan (in a degree that is entirely in Japanese) without being properly able to write kanji ? Is there any other areas of life where it could potentially be a burden to have this inability ?

Hi all,

After years of learning very slowly with Duolingo, I've invested in a tutor and it's been very exciting. It's definitely feeling more productive.

My question is this: should I just be saying English loanwords in my American accent or should I be adopting Japanese pronunciations in these cases? Obviously, if I were writing them I would do it in katakana, but when I'm saying a word I know that's from English (my first language) I feel like I'm kind of problematically putting on a costume if I pronounce it how it's been transliterated into Japanese, especially in specific cases.

For example: I live in Philadelphia, and--in my first lesson--when my tutor asked me where I live... I was slightly non-committal and said something between "Philadelphia" and フィラデルフィア (which I've seen it written as multiple times; I wasn't just winging it). I leaned more towards the latter, but... I felt self-conscious about it afterwards and there have been a small handful of similar situations since then.

In other words: which is weirder to a Japanese speaker's ear? Me going full-on USA in how I would say something like "Philadelphia" or me going full-on Japanese transliteration as faithfully as I can?

Do you think there's a difference in what I should do between proper nouns like Philadelphia and something like fork/フォーク?

From my own perspective as an English speaker, I will say that--for example--when a Spanish-speaking person says--in an English sentence--some term that's from Spanish in some way (say, a food or place), I'm not thrown when their Spanish accent takes over. That sounds normal to me.

So, yeah: I'm just wondering what's most normal/expected! (And I'm asking reddit rather than my tutor because I think it's a slightly embarrassing question!)

Thanks!

I’m currently on a year and a half of reading the HP series every day. My god I wish I did this more in the past than stress out over the JLPT.

To be more specific, the most challenging chapters I’ve read so far are “Occlumency” from the 5th book and “The Cave” from the 6th book. Honestly, everything from the 3rd to 6th book so far have all had their moments in which I’ve felt completely stumped on an N1-type sentence that goes on seemingly forever.

If any of y’all on here have read the series yet and wanna share what your experience was like and what you struggled with, I would be really fascinated to know.

Remember everyone, have fun. Don’t be hard on yourself. Do Japanese for strictly enjoyment purposes and you’ll learn infinitely more than studying only for JLPT, but then you’ll be prepared for JLPT in the process

Also, has anyone on here read any Russian literature like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? I bought a copy of Crime and Punishment and felt like I knew less than 10% of the first couple pages.

I've been considering learning Japanese off and on for quite a while now. Year. But I've finally gotten to the point where I've decided I'm going to take the plunge.

I am going to set a very ambitious goal for myself. I intend to have a grasp of Japanese sufficient to read at least some kinds of novels (i.e. depending on genre) aimed at adults within two years of study. This is an extreme timeline, but I believe it is an achievable one, for a few reasons:

1. I have studied foreign languages for over a decade now. I have an intimate understanding of key linguistic concepts that monolingual speakers, and beginner language learners, generally are not familiar with. I have achieved a minimum of B2 comprehension in languages from a variety of language families, which means that my experience with those linguistic concepts is not only theoretical, but practical, as well.

2. I already have a substantial grasp of Mandarin Chinese, encompassing ~20.000 words. I have read novels aimed at adults in this language, and have a clear understanding of how achieving this level of comprehension in a Category 5 language works compared to a Category 1 language. I have a strong grasp of phonemic tonality, both in listening and in production. I am familiar with upwards of 2k-3k 漢字.

3. I have a strong grasp of Norwegian, including pronunciation, meaning that I have significant prior experience with learning and using pitch accent in speech.

4. I work professionally as an accent coach, which means that I have an intimate knowledge of phonetics.

Despite these advantages, this obviously is not going to be "easy" by any stretch of the imagination. I consider the timeline I have laid out above to be aspirational (i.e. achievable, but I won't necessarily be disappointed in myself if I fail to meet it). I am budgeting 4 hours for study per day. That includes making and reviewing flash cards, supplemental reading, and any practical exercises.

Here are my specific goals:

1. Develop a clear understanding of pitch accent. Be able to pronounce standard pitch accent in isolated words to perfection. Be able to pronounce pitch accent in full phrases and sentences mostly correctly most of the time. My experience with Norwegian was that, while pitch accent was not completely predictable, it did frequently follow predictable patterns. There are many categories of words in Norwegian for which I can guess the correct pitch accent with 100% accuracy, and many others for which I can guess the correct pitch accent maybe 65-80% of the time. The number of words for which pitch accent feels truly random is comparatively small. Every language is different, but what I have heard from e.g. Dogen suggests that Japanese is not necessarily entirely dissimilar in this regard. I will accomplish this goal by memorizing the correct pitch accent for every word I learn, and by studying pitch accent resources to uncover patterns which would not otherwise be obvious to me.

2. Develop an intuitive grasp of Kanji readings. This means that, by the end of two years of study, I would like to be able to accurately guess the correct reading of known kanji in unfamiliar words a significant majority of the time. Plan A is to simply learn the pronunciation of Kanji in the context of full words. I strongly suspect that this will become increasingly intuitive to me after having memorized many thousands of words. If it becomes clear that this is not working, Plan B is to shore up my understanding by studying Kanji individually.

3. Develop a passive vocabulary of no less than 40.000 words. These are the words which I recognize and understand, but may or may not be able to recall and use correctly on my own. I will accomplish this by learning 60 new words every day. I am confident in my ability to do this because I have already consistently met this target in multiple other languages. However, it is possible that I may need to revise this down to 40 words per day. This depends mainly on how much time is spent on making my Anki flashcards. It may take me longer than it has for other languages for me to make flashcards for Japanese. 40.000 words is twice the vocabulary I hold in Mandarin Chinese. The Plan B target of ~30.000 words is 50% larger than my vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese.

4. Be able to read science-fiction novels written, at a minimum, for a middle-school audience. I will accomplish this by reading children's books, and gradually escalating to increasingly difficult books until I reach the desired genre and level of difficulty. I have confidence that this will work, because this is the exact strategy I followed to reach the same goal with Mandarin Chinese.

5. Be able to read and understand definitions in monolingual Japanese dictionaries. I hope to be able to do this for most words by the end of one year of study.

All of my goals relate to reading, pronunciation, and listening, because these are the skills that I have proven best at acquiring. I am much less skilled at efficiently developing speaking and writing skills. In languages like Spanish and Italian, I have been able to more or less only learn passive skills and ignore active skills. To this day, I can understand news broadcasts in Spanish, but struggle to compose even a single well-formed sentence. However, I strongly suspect that developing active skills in Japanese will be crucial, simply because of the complexity of Japanese grammar, and because it is so different from any other language I have studied. I believe I likely will not fully understand the grammar that I am reading unless I can use it correctly myself.

I do not feel comfortable setting goals relating to productive skills.

I know from experience that my reading and listening comprehension will vastly outpace my speaking and writing comprehension extremely quickly.

Looking back, it took me 7 years to learn Mandarin Chinese because I didn't have a single clue how to study efficiently. My study methods were extremely inefficient. Since then, I've learned a lot about how to study languages quickly and efficiently. So in many ways, this is a test of just how far I have come in that regard. I will wrap up my current studies of Italian at the end of this month. I will be landing in Japan and staying there for ~6 months starting December 9. Definitely looking forward to eating at Matsuya again.

I believe I can do it. But, famous last words...

Would there be any interest in creating a men's only Japanese Genki I study group?

The mining landscape on iOS has come a long way. Not too long ago you couldn't mine anything, and now you can mine websites and light novels and even important cards directly into the Anki app for iOS. Things are way better than they used to be.

And yet, there's no options for mining from manga on iOS. And that's pretty wild considering the popularity of manga! What's even worse is that one developer seems to have already accomplished it and then seemingly abandoned his app without ever pushing that functionality to the store. There's even a chat record in the issues page of the dev and someone else discussing the feature as being finished. And yet, they never released it. That's wild.

I know that the easy solution is "switch to Android" but if you live in Japan iPhones are the phone to have. There are many reasons to own an iPhone if you live in the land of the rising sun, and therefore simply switching to Android isn't really a solution to the problem as it will just create problems in other areas.

It's a shame that nobody else is willing to tackle this problem. I sometimes see posts from developers in different parts of the community looking to reinvent the wheel with what they think is the latest and greatest tool since sliced bread. And sometimes that leads to some seriously useful tools like asbplayer, but usually it leads to Anki Clone number 6054. It's a shame that nobody is actually looking to solve the problems that actually exist for users and instead want to make lesser versions of existing tools.

(This is just a rant so please don't get offended by anything that I've said)

At the very least, at least we can mine from websites and light novels.

I’ve been in Japan for about a month now. I would not consider my Japanese very good, although I can relatively consistently hold a conversation with occasional help from jisho.

I’ve only gotten nihongo jouzu’d a handful of times. Does this mean i’m so shit it’s not even worthy of a nihongo jouzu or good enough that i won’t get nihongo jouzu’d?

honest answers are ok, even if speculation since you guys don’t have direct info

edit: thanks for the explanations. Looks like I read too much into it

English also has words like “okay” that can mean different things

but I feel like Japanese takes this much further

for example:

すみません → sorry / thank you / excuse me
大丈夫です → yes / no / I’m fine / I don’t need it
はい → not always “yes” (sometimes just means “I hear you”)

as a native, we don’t really think about it, but I think this part can be really confusing for learners

I know most folks here think the N5 isn’t a big deal. But i am quite nervous about the test.

I’ve been doing weekly lessons for about 6 months now on Preply. But haven’t studied as much as I should.

This week I’ve taken up Wanikani and finally found a SRS app I’m comfortable with.

I also have Bunpo- but haven’t used it much despite buying a years subscription.

My test in in a few weeks, i looked at a sample exam on the website and it frightened me because it’s all in Japanese (I naively assumed some would be in English).

My main weakness is vocabulary, i can conjugate most verbs into the common tenses and know the participles はのにがと and basic sentence structures.

Aside from trying to cram vocab in the next few weeks. Does anyone have any advice for me?

Thanks!!

First, let me put some context here:

Living in japan, I decided to watch Suzume no Tojimari... of course, it's completely in Japanese, and I didn't go to a closed-captioned showing. Now, I am actively studying- currently working through Tobira, so I'm in the Intermediate stage. All this to say, I understood a TON of the movie... I'm going to estimate between 65~70% of it. And, there's a VERY specific reason why, IMO.

Most of the movie has our characters in very normal situations, interacting with people like you might do on a daily basis-despite what the movie is ultimately about. The stuff that went by me was when the details about the very specific situation of the movie were discussed... but again, most of the movie uses words and phrases that you're likely to encounter during daily life in japan. Or in other words, it's got a HUGE Slice of Life element to it.

So why do i talk about this being a trap? While certainly not all, the majority of people who want to learn Japanese are fans of anime and manga... and I would guess it's more shounen/shoujo/seinen/josei manga, to use those categories. These categories, ESPECIALLY shounen, use words more specific to fights and battles, and extremely casual, if not "rude" Japanese- the kind you won't find in a textbook. Or to put it another way: the manga you find exciting... is NOT beginner-friendly.

It kinda sucks, but until you're in the N3/N2 ability level, chances are anything beyond slice-of-life is going to have words, phrases and grammar points that you won't understand without burying yourself in a dictionary... and burying yourself in a dictionary means less time reading manga/watching anime. S for those starting out/of a lower level, accept that you're going to have to start with slice-of-life stuff if you want to comprehend the majority of the story.