This is an adaptation of the script for my video of the same title, which is yet to be uploaded. Enjoy!
365 days (and counting) of Japanese
It’s been a year since I started learning Japanese! I’m sure you could tell by the post title and subsequent header, but in case you missed those, there you go! When I started learning the language, I wasn’t even sure if I’d still be learning the language by the one year mark, but here I am. Certainly far from fluent, but substantially better than I once was. I also feel like fluency is an attainable goal now rather than some far-off idea that I couldn’t actually conceptualize. That’s enough boilerplate though, I’m sure there’s something you’re probably more interested in if you clicked on this: stats.
Statistics
In one year, I’ve tracked:
- ~450 hours of immersion
- 4300+ words in Anki
- This includes mining and the JP1K deck
- ~100 hours in Anki
This totals to about 500 hours spent interacting with Japanese in some form over the past year. In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t sound like much. That only equals out to a little over an hour a day, which is a relatively small investment for something as learning a language. Despite having spent only that amount of time per day, I feel like my progress is much better than I expected and I’m quite happy with it. To sum it up briefly, I used to not be able to consume any Japanese media at all. Now, however, I can consume a lot of Japanese media somewhat comfortably. Most slice-of-life anime are a breeze now, and even some shows that I thought would be very difficult, like Steins;Gate, were actually relatively comfortable to watch (not easy though!). So that’s where I am now, and if that’s all you wanted to see, then I hope you enjoyed. If you’d like to hear a little more about my journey to this point though, keep reading!
A once bitter beginning
The first 3 months of learning the language were something that I used to really look back on with contempt. I remember when making my 6-month video that I felt like I’d been really wasteful with my time in those 3 months since I made relatively little progress. Since then, however, I’ve grown to look back more fondly on those beginning months. What I mean by that is that I started looking at those 3 months like a test of endurance.
A test of endurance
I’m sure anyone who has tried to learn a language or really any long-term skill in general can relate. The start of the journey is always the hardest part, and for me, that start was comprised mainly of trying to actually figure things out. Starting from no knowledge of language learning at all meant that every piece of advice given to me was equal in my eyes. I had no knowledge or intuition of how learning a second language works so I had zero clue what would be best for me, or if the advice being given to me was even reasonable. Because of that, in the past, I’d given up on some long-term goals. Being able to push through that for Japanese, however, was crucial, because that meant that learning Japanese wasn’t just some dream of a skill that I wanted to happen upon one day, it was something that I truly wanted to work towards and achieve. And what that gave me was flexibility in my methodology. I tried stuff that I ultimately didn’t like, and stuff that I liked so much that I couldn’t imagine progressing without.
What’s important is that the stuff that I didn’t like didn’t deter me from continuing the journey. I just either moved back to what I liked, or moved on to something new for my routine entirely, and that determination to continue learning the language was definitely worth the 3 months I spent finding it.
Moving away from perfectionism
Basically, in the past, I looked at this beginning part as a fault of mine, so much so that I literally referred to it as a “mistake” in the video title. Since then, I’ve moved further away from my obsession of perfecting the process and being as optimal as possible, leading my perception of my “mistakes” to change into a more positive reflection on my strong desire to learn the language. If you relate at all to my futile attempts to learn something in the perfectly optimal way and burning out before you even start, then my advice would be to slow down, narrow your focus to one step at a time, and take that step, even if it’s not the optimal choice. One small, seemingly insignificant step is leagues better than no step at all. In my opinion, consistency is more important than efficiency, so don’t be afraid to make choices that you’re uncertain about if you think you’d be able to maintain it as a habit better. Recently, I’ve made a change to my routine that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit.
Developing a reading habit
A huge part of the reason I started learning Japanese at all was because I wanted to understand anime without it having to go through English. As I continued with the language, however, I’ve really come to grow fond of a medium I never thought I’d get particularly invested in, that being reading.
The benefits of reading
To be honest, prior to starting Japanese, I just basically never read for enjoyment. I obviously read a ton in school for assignments, but I just almost never read because I wanted to past the age of like 12. A few months ago, though, I read my first visual novel, 君と彼女と彼女の恋, and had a realization that not only is reading fun, but I personally reaped many, many benefits from it. First, I was immersing way more than before, which is good for obvious reasons. Second, I believe it also helped me solidify grammar I was uncertain about since I was forced to slow down and really think about the sentences, thus leading to a faster increase in my comprehension. Third, and probably most significant of all, is that reading content has substantially more of the language in it than other types of content. The obvious reason is that the art is for the most part in the words themselves, so I naturally started learning more and more vocab and could easily sustain 20 new cards a day. Vocab size isn’t everything when it comes to actually comprehending sentences, but it still is a pretty significant part of it, so having a larger pool of vocab makes parsing sentences much easier and also makes pretty much every form of immersion more enjoyable, which is the most important part. While I’m still pretty limited in the amount of content I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed it so much that I can only see myself reading more as I continue learning Japanese. It’s also just incredibly refreshing reading something without being forced to, with the added benefit that it is in my target language and helps me learn it. Obviously, listening is still incredibly important for learning, but it’s nice to explore a medium that I haven’t before. If you are not currently a big reader or are like me and have just not read for enjoyment, I highly recommend that you give it a shot. Outside of just books and visual novels, it also helps make walls of text on the internet way less intimidating, which is just yet another area to explore the language in. I’m mentioning vocab a lot here, which reminds me that sentence mining was something that I was really excited about in my last update video.
Anki is a side, not the main
Since that video, I’ve added a little over 3,000 words to my sentence mining deck, which is pretty cool. But something I’ve noticed since then is that my attitude towards Anki or just SRS in general has changed quite a bit. Ever since I started, I’d always heard from people better at the language than me that Anki is just a supplement, and that immersing is more important. This was something I would just agree to since I didn’t know any better, but only recently did I actually understand why this was the case. Part of the reason why I think it was difficult for me to grasp that concept when I was first starting out is that learning new vocab in Anki felt like it moved me along faster. And to be honest, in the beginning, it probably did. But as I continued learning more and more vocab, not only did each new word take up a smaller percentage of my total vocab, but the words I was learning were becoming more uncommon. At this point, I would still consider most of the words I mine to be common, but that’s a pretty arbitrary metric.
Regardless, as I’ve spent more time with the language, I’ve come to understand that learning a word in Anki is not actually learning a word. It’s basically becoming aware of one way to use the word in one context, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I would still see the word in a similar or identical context in the future and understand how it works there. Even in contexts where the word is used in a different way, the knowledge I had of the other uses would many times be enough for me to glean the use of the word in the new context. Once I understood that, I understood why immersion is more important than Anki. Anki is not how I learn words, it’s just where I become aware of them. It sounds obvious now, but because of my unfamiliarity with Japanese and language learning in general, I just didn’t actually get it for a while.
My current level and future plans
Overall, I feel pretty satisfied with my current level of Japanese. That doesn’t mean I’m planning on slowing down at all, but rather the opposite. The level I’m at now is a good motivator to continue, because it feels like I’ve gotten to a point where I can look back and notice a significant difference between my comprehension now and then. I can comfortable consume way more content than I could in my previous update video, but I also know that I still have a long way to go. Listening is a particularly weak point of mine, which is something that I want to work on so that I can more comfortably watch native, unscripted content which is what I find to be the purest form of the language, in some way. Output is still something I haven’t really thought about too much either. Like I’ve said in my previous video, speaking was just not something that I initially cared much about, but it still would be nice to be able to speak.
Regardless, I still want to focus more on improving my comprehension for now since a higher comprehension is more applicable to my actual life as someone who doesn’t live in Japan. I know I said earlier I want to improve my listening, but I also am just enjoying reading too much right now to completely shift my focus away from it. I’m probably going to be trying to read some more visual novels as well as getting to some light novels that I’ve been considering reading since before I even started learning Japanese. Thanks for reading!