howdy
March 12, 2024
tags: Life
So I've been studying Japanese for around 700 days, or 2 years straight since January 9th, 2022. I say “studying” instead of “days since I started learning” because I actually started trying to learn Japanese before then. I originally started trying to learn all the way back in 2013 when I was in high school. I still remember downloading “Human Japanese” for my 4th generation iPod touch, which for a while was my go to learning method.
Despite having technically started over 10 years ago I never managed to stick to a consistent study routine. There would be times where I would get a burst of motivation large enough to compel me to pick it back up, but it would never last more than a month at a time, often less.
Learning Japanese ended up being more of an aspiration rather than something I was actively doing. I'd often feel guilty about not staying consistent and tell myself how much I would have known had I stuck to my goal, which I realize now is a rather unhealthy outlook. Even if I could never stay consistent, I would still watch videos and read blogs about learning, and doing so introduced me to the immersion learning. Methods that I have been using.
Jump forward to early January 2022. 2021 was a particularly bad year for me for reasons that I will keep to myself, but it was around that time where a friend invited me to their discord server. I, my friend, and a few other people in that server were all interested in learning Japanese, and happened to share some other similarities and life experiences. It was there that I got the encouragement to start doing Anki again and to post my daily stats along with others as a form of encouragement and accountability.
I started doing Anki again on January 9th, 2022, and have kept up with it daily since then.
It’s been quite the experience for me, and so I wanted to try and document my experience for my future self to look back on. I’ll go into detail on the methods I have been using, my experience over the last 2 years, and a self-review of where I think I need to improve my Japanese skills.
The Journey
The First 6 Months
I decided to use the Improved Core3K deck I had downloaded back in 2020, and so from January to July of 2022 I focused on making sure I kept up with Anki. Since I had used this deck in my previous attempts at Anki, I had around 200 seen cards with some review history on them that had to be cleared out. This wasn’t too difficult however, as just about every iteration of the Core2K/6K decks are sorted based on frequency and simplicity, and so these words were all vocab I was mostly familiar with.
Along with clearing out the backlog, I also started taking in around 7 new cards per day. For all of my previous attempts at Anki I had tried to take 20 cards, which would end every time in my review count spiraling. The reason I kept wanting to take 20 new cards a day despite constant failure, is that at the time almost all advice would encourage people to do 20 new cards per day to maximize gains, and would make this sound like a reasonable goal. Having personally experienced failure from trying to take too many cards, I decided to take a small number that I thought would be too easy, so that I wouldn’t dread the idea of doing my daily reps.
For the first 6 months, this is actually all I did;
Having consumed a lot of beginner textbook content such as Tae Kim and Human Japanese in my previous attempts, I had an okay grasp on topics such as particles, verb conjugations, etc. and felt as though my vocabulary was holding me back most, relatively speaking. Feeling this, and in order to keep the barrier to daily studying as low as possible, I solely focused on completing an anki vocab deck as the first order of business, and considered everything else optional.
In January and February when it was still an ongoing trend, I would play one of the many “Japanese wordle” clones; sometimes I would
One of the things I started doing in that server was posting my daily stats after finishing my reps. Looking back on it, I’m really glad I started doing that, as I now have a log of how good or bad I did every day, along with whatever small snippet of conversation I had at the time where I would express how I felt about that day’s rep and talk shop with my friends about Anki. As I progressed through the Core3K deck, I’d also sometimes post images of my card counts and other stats whenever I was coming up on a milestone such as 1000 or 2000 cards, or when I had officially seen over 75% of the deck. These milestones were a strong form of encouragement that made me want to keep going, and made me realize just how much I like watching my numbers go up.
Victory Lap: 7 Months and Beyond
On July 28th, 2022 and after 208 days of daily Anki usage, I had officially finished the Core3K deck. I took a few days after this to take it easy and bask in my accomplishment a bit as I slowly started introducing consistent immersion into my routine. I started off by watching some “easy” shows like yuru yuri and nichijou, read some manga ( ギャルと恐竜 ), checking out some social media posts here and there, and mining when something felt relevant. All of these felt challenging, and there was still a lot that I didn’t understand, but I was really amazed at how I was finally starting to understand the language.
After finishing Core3K,my original assumption that vocabulary was holding me back had ended up being true; it was clear to me that vocabulary was still going to be my biggest hurdle, but I had proven to myself that I could continue to overcome it by keeping up with my reps and mining.
Reading
Around late September to Early October, I started attempting to read my first novel. I had decided on reading GJ-部 for a few reasons: I had watched the anime adaption many years ago and so I had a vague recollection of events and characters, which is always helpful. The light novel itself is a relatively relaxed slice of life, but most interestingly, it was written to be what the author calls a “4コマ” novel, which is to say the book is broken up across many small episodic chapters and mimics how 4コマ structures story. These latter two reasons helped ease the fact that as a new reader, I was likely to miss key details or have sentences and meanings go over my head, and made reading a lot less daunting then it had originally felt.
I got through GJ-部 sometime in late November of 2022, and in early December moved onto reading Orange. Unlike GJ-部, Orange was a normally structured light novel with a linear plot progression that focuses on character and events. Thankfully the book was written for children, sparing me from drowning completely, but it definitely threw me for a loop. I finished Orange in early January, and by then my attention had shifted away from reading and towards my university classes. When I had time before class I would take 10-15 minutes to read using my Kindle; I managed to get through 日常の夏休み by late February doing so, but after that my attention to reading had gone entirely cold.
Come late June, and a fast approaching summer had come to defrost my reading habits. I spent a few hours each week during July and August reading through copcraft along with a book club. The book is a hard-boiled crime thriller that’s rated to be N1 difficulty on natively (and around 7/10 on JPDB), and it definitely lived up to its ratings. Each chapter would net me anywhere from 40-70 new anki cards, and took around 2 hours to complete. I decided to read along with the audiobook, which turned out to be an incredible idea, and one I’ll touch on later in my strategies section.