It has been around 400 days since I got started on the journey to become jozu, I’ve learned a lot of Japanese, and also learned a lot about learning to learn Japanese. Stick around and maybe you’ll misinterpret my advice and come up with something that’s actually useful.

I think the moment I decided to learn Japanese might have been with the release of the Tsukihime remake, I remember telling myself that I could probably learn Japanese earlier than there would be a decent translation of it, and from there I downloaded Duolingo because “how else does one start learning a language”. I was doing the kana reps and going down the curriculum trusting that somehow I was getting psyop’d into understanding anything of what I was doing, unfortunately for me, this did not happen. About two weeks into doing Duolingo for maybe an hour a day or so, I stumbled into a Livakivi video talking about his experience learning Japanese. I had now learned that there was a second way to learning a language apart from classes and textbooks (sorry Duo, I don’t think your gameified spambot counts as learning a language), it turns out that consuming and engaging with the language you are trying to learn is a useful way of learning. Who could have known.

From there I got acquainted with things like Anki, and the input hypothesis and all the memes going around language learning. I got myself the core2k/6k deck and started chopping away at it, once again trusting that answering the ‘good’ key on Anki would somehow make me jozu. I also started reading the imabi guide as well as Tae Kim’s guide and over the course of 2 more weeks or so, finally figured out that I had learned absolutely nothing the two prior weeks (this would become a pattern).

There’s a lot of shilling for getting as much vocabulary into your head during the early phase of learning as you are humanly able to, and while I did not follow the autistic advice of trying to keep up hundreds of new cards per day, eventually understood that doing any critical thinking on your learning becomes impossible when you’re microwaving your attention with flashcards for long periods of time with horrible retention. The underlying logic to the Anki frontloading argument comes from assuming that you need to know the words in order to understand the sentences in your immersion, but while that might be true when it comes to IRL conversation, we have tools that let us look for a word’s definition without even having to think about whatever we are looking up. This means that by frontloading vocabulary, we are expending the most effort on the easiest problem we can solve, which is, in my opinion, a waste of time. Common words are by definition common, you’ll see them a lot and eventually get used to them.

I don’t know exactly how we can maximize the early gains from language learning, and to be honest, anyone who is looking to use the language for a prolonged amount of time isn’t all that interested in the answer either. But the zoomer within tells us that unless we have the best method we won’t make it. I suggest that instead of abusing SRS in the early stages, you instead spend that time in a grammar guide and figuring out what you’re going to read/watch well before you’re ready.

I started reading Dracu-Riot when I was about 100 words or so into Anki. To the surprise of no-one, I did not understand much, and I was feeling overwhelmed with every line of dialogue. I asked myself, what would be the most effective way for me to understand whatever I’m reading. I could wait until I finished the core2k/6k deck, and then come back, but I checked the stats and there’s way more words in here that those in the deck, and there’s no guarantee that all I learn in Anki will translate into me recognizing them in the visual novel, I had probably searched for the definition of 彼 at least 30 times by then, and I had already seen that card in Anki for multiple days, so I had strong reason to doubt that would do any good. I came to the conclusion that there would be no better word list than the actual text, no easier way to understand the sentences than by having read them before, gaining a little bit of understanding with each new sentence that I read.

There’s also the factor of fatigue when reading in a new language. Even if you know every word and every grammar rule that the sentence uses, If you’re a beginner, you will attempt to read the sentence in every possible interpretation you can figure out since you have little or no confidence that what you’re reading is the correct way of interpreting the information. This takes a toll on you very quickly and as a beginner you would do well to take breaks often. A lot of improving your reading comes down to minimizing the time you take on common structures, there will be times where you have to look up every noun in a sentence and check your grammar reference back and forth, but very few texts require this from beginning to end. Struggling on these sections is fine and happens very commonly when you start taking in information from a field you’re not familiar with even in your native language.

None of this means that I was successful in reading the visual novel, I read the thing for 2 or 3 hours every day for a week before dropping it. Partly because it was hard, but even more so because in all that time, my interest for it had not grown at all (mostly because I could not understand it, I know). I moved on to a different one, and stumbled into Cure Dolly’s Japanese guide. If there’s anything valuable to learn from this post, it’s that you should watch Cure Dolly’s Japanese guide. This completely changed the way I was thinking about Japanese once again, there was no need for weird Asian mysticism and suspension of disbelief to understand concepts and structures, this is a language used by real people to convey reality, it needs to make sense and be understandable, even if the only logic to it is that it’s what people are used to.

Just knowing these things makes very little difference to your understanding of the language, but it does help in giving you the confidence that every new sentence you are able to read not only solidifies your knowledge, but also allows for easier acquisition of similar sentences. The goal is not to be proficient at the language, but to consume, engage and enjoy the content that happens to be in it. You’ve made it when you stop noticing the language and can focus on the idea, and luckily, consuming content you are interested in lowers the required Japanese ability for it to be enjoyed.

I by no means claim to have mastered Japanese nor do I have a fancy paper to convince you to buy a course. But I am still getting better and since the start of 2023, began engaging with the content I want to watch and read without being governed by it being a way to “study” or that was catered to my level. There are so many things I cannot understand still, and if I care about it, I will work to piece it together.

Stats

Anki

• Young cards: 1216
• Mature cards: 5655
• Known morphs: 6347
• Known variations: 7301
• Total retention (past year): 80.2%
• Total retention (past month): 86.1%

Tools I’ve used

• Anki
• Duolingo (for the kana)
• Yomichan
• Textractor

Resources I recommend

• learnjapanese.moe
• Cure Dolly’s Japanese course

Random Knowledge bits

• Doing more than an hour of Anki a day is dumb and bad and if you have that kind of time for flashcards, you should be using it for something else like reading.
• Try to do Anki in the mornings or in a consistent schedule, and avoid doing it when you’re extremely tired/drunk/high.
• Understand that being new to a language means your level of literacy will have to be built from nothing, don’t expect to understand nuance/jokes/sarcasm/irony unless its extremely obvious.
• Talking to yourself is a nice way to practice structuring ideas in the target language, I used to think about my day, what I did and what I would be doing the next day. It feels very awkward at first, and you might have the instinct to force new vocab into it but remember that the goal here is to speed up your ability to structure your thoughts into the language.
• Unless you’re a complete beginner and just getting into it, never spend more time learning to learn Japanese than learning Japanese.
• Don’t take advice from people who give unhinged advice/methods, I don’t doubt that it worked for them, but they probably have such high levels of neurodivergence that anything would have worked.
• Anki and SRS tools are extremely helpful to establish a routine to your learning, but do not delude yourself into thinking that they’ll get you to fluency by themselves.
• Build habits not skills, if you want to be someone who watches or reads stuff every day, just do it, nothing is stopping you except your idea that you’ll fail to understand it. And let’s be honest, its extremely common for people to misunderstand texts or ideas even in our native language, get this idea of correct out of your head and just read, odds are that whatever story you’re making up in your head is more interesting that whatever shitty anime you’re into.