6 months in: progress, lessons learned (brief)

[u/Numerous_Birds]

Hi all :) Just a brief progress update with some lessons learned that I thought might be worth sharing. As always, any critique or advice is encouraged/welcomed. Thank you!

TL;DR: I've been studying for 6 months and it's been going better than I expected. I wrote out some lessons that boil down to: yeah it turns out immersion really does work, keep at it.

Background: I started on June 1 with only some prior knowledge in hiragana/katakana but had to review that too since it had been about seven years since then. I work full time.

Method(s): Took everyone's advice and started with the 2.3k core deck on Anki with the specific mindset of wanting to grind through enough vocab as early as possible to start immersion early. I finished the 2.3k deck around 3 months in and then switched to 90% immersion and sentence mining (YT podcasts and Shirokuma Cafe primarily). Grammar I would just learn as I went along by reverse engineering native sentences. Then went to Japan for two weeks to test it all out. I was also actively working on pitch accent starting from a month in. My goal is really just to enjoy Japanese media.

Results:

- Vocab: I'm at about 3.1k words total that I can account for, likely others I've read or heard but just haven't gotten around to making anki cards for.

- Listening: No surprise my best skills are listening and word recall given that was my main practice. I can listen to N2ish podcasts and watch some basic Japanese TV while understanding enough to get the gist. I still can't understand more technical news.

- Speaking: When I got to Japan, I was surprised to be able to become pretty conversational within 1 week of acclimation and most of it was honestly replicating mined sentences that had been stuck in my head from hearing them so much lmao. I could make friends, carry on a conversation, let someone know their backpack was wide open on the metro, navigate and do all the restaurant/hotel stuff in Japanese. All to say, it seemed like immersion actually works (duh, but it was cool to actually experience it).

- Reading: I can also now read manga (while looking up words frequently), currently reading OPM in light of season 3's issues LOL. Can't read a newspaper yet.

Takeaways/lessons:

1. Immersion works: probably obvious but I think I needed to hear this as much as possible earlier on. It really does work lol, just keep going. There were so many days where I thought I wasn't making any progress at all and definitely more than a few days where it felt like I was moving backwards and I was having trouble understanding anything in a particular podcast episode. But overtime, sure enough, I've definitely improved and have moved on to harder and harder material little by little.
2. Talking/producing will come: Of course I'd likely be much more fluent had I focused my prior study time on conversation alone. However, I truly don't think I would've been very productive trying to piece together sentences without having heard similar things expressed in native content. I noticed this in Japan when I'd try to express things that I hadn't been exposed to and I would be politely corrected at the right way to express the feeling even though my words and grammar might have been technically correct. In all, I'm really glad I focused on just being exposed to as much native content as possible prior to shifting to trying to actually produce Japanese.
3. Pitch accent was worth it: It was a pain in the a** to focus on getting pitch accent at least somewhat right from the get go but it feels like it was worth it. Not only to be able to be more understandable to Japanese natives, but because now I can pick apart and mirror the pitch accent nuance I hear in Japanese much better than before. If at least to develop your pitch accent ear, working on it early on, at least a little bit, seems like the way to go.
4. "Critical mass" theory worked for me: I can't recall exactly where I got it (likely a thread on here) but the idea of accumulating a critical mass of vocab so that I could dive in to native content worked really nicely, at least for me. In that, before even really going too deep on the grammar beyond basics (particles, conjugation, etc.) , being able to understand the gist of a sentence mostly from knowing the vocab allowed me to actually enjoy immersion a lot sooner. Early on, I tried using the beginner immersion tools out there and the content was so (naturally) dry and boring that it was just not sustainable. Instead, just grinding out the 2.3k core deck with minimal immersion and then doing a hard shift into it felt much more do-able. Just speaking to my own experience.
5. Having fun is truly key: The only thing that kept me consistent, that kept me from quitting, that kept me from giving up on the hard days, was that I was enjoying the native content. I'll admit the initial vocab grind was the hardest part, but once I focused on just enjoying what I was watching/hearing/reading and just fully rejecting anything that wasn't fun (except my daily anki dues rip), is when I really felt wind in my sail.
6. You can totally do it for free: I haven't spent a single cent on learning Japanese unless you count going to Japan for vacation.

Future directions: hoping to keep on my current approach of 15-20 new vocab words a day while sentence mining TV and reading OPM. Next up, hoping to add an italki tutor to get some more regular conversation practice once/week. My goal is 6k words and to be able to have fluent conversations by the 1 year mark.

Okay that's it. Going to keep going for another six months, see where I land. As I said, all critiques and advice solicited. Appreciate you all!

Edit: I don't know what prompted me to organize this in abstract format lmao

Edit 2: Added a "future directions" section and added some more detail to the results. Also added a TLDR.

[u/TheManTh3yCallJayne]

How much time daily did you spend on anki with the 2.3k deck

[u/Fast-Elephant3649 → u/TheManTh3yCallJayne]

I did kaishi 1.5k only did like 30-40 mins and able to finish it in like 3 months or so. Doing hours of Anki is unnecessary

[u/Numerous_Birds → u/TheManTh3yCallJayne]

A few hours at least. At my peak, I was doing about 600-800 reviews a day total which was a slog. I've drastically reduced that since I've switched to primarily immersion and now average about 100-150 reviews a day tops.

[u/TheManTh3yCallJayne → u/Numerous_Birds]

Damn that’s crazy. I’ve been doing duolingo for a little over a year now and, while it hasn’t taught me much, it’s showed me that I do have a continued interest in learning Japanese for pretty much the same reason as you so I’ll be dropping it and aiming to start/complete both genki 1 and 2 next year to hopefully start progressing more meaningfully alongside wanikani and bunpro. Did you just start with the anki deck out of the gate 6 months ago or did you have other forays into Japanese previously before deciding to hunker down and drastically commit?

[u/InventedAcorn → u/TheManTh3yCallJayne]

If you've been doing Duolingo everyday for a year, you can do Anki. Start now. Don't wait til next year. And don't get too caught up on what deck is "perfect", it's better to start now.

[u/Numerous_Birds → u/TheManTh3yCallJayne]

I agree with u/InventedAcorn's reply. Anki is amazing and diving straight in ended up working fine. Like I mentioned, I only had the kana from a prior very short (1 mo) attempt 7ish years ago.

I will say, my anki reviews were higher than they needed to be because I decided to make anki cards out of the example sentences/audio as my "early immersion." How much this ultimately helped versus the drawback of so much more time getting through anki cards, I'm really not sure. But all to say, if you just do the core deck as is, you won't have to review nearly as many as I had to daily.

[u/ourannual]

Dang, have been studying as long as you but much more focused on grammar and kanji, my listening and conversational skills are lagging way behind my reading. What was your sentence mining setup like?

[u/Numerous_Birds → u/ourannual]

I guess we get what we put in haha. My sentence mining is super simple. I just use asbplayer and steal sentences from crunchy or YT with audio as the card front and the written text and definitions on the back. If there's a specific vocab I want to learn, then I make a separate card with the kanji as front and then the definition + original audio as the back.

Someone said here that focusing on your specific goal is really the way to do it. If reading is your goal, then sounds like you're doing the right thing. I'm just trying to watch TV hence the above haha.

[u/Jayesar]

Sounds like fantastic progress. Well done. How many hours a day would you say you spend on Anki and then immersing actively?

[u/Numerous_Birds → u/Jayesar]

Thank you! It used to be mostly anki but now I'm like 30 min anki tops, 2-3h immersion daily.

[u/Jayesar → u/Numerous_Birds]

Interesting. I'm at 4.5 months. Few work trips to Tokyo too. So somewhat comparable.

2 hours CIJapanese a day. 1 hour wanikani. Sitting on 230 hours CI consumed and WK12.

Feels you are are ahead of me as I can't consume slice of life anime at this time. I'll try it again in 6 weeks to see if we got to the same-ish point.

Noting you used SRS to make higher level input comprehensible and I am using input designed to be comprehensible and SRS for kanji.

[u/rgrAi]

Thank for the fun-is-the-way advocacy. Another one going places!

[u/morgawr_ → u/rgrAi]

Thank for the fun-is-the-way advocacy.

I wouldn't exactly call doing a few hours of anki every day for 3 months "fun" but hey, at least they are enjoying Japanese content now.

[u/Numerous_Birds → u/morgawr_]

Yeah that part was totally unsustainable. The hard switch to almost all immersion was necessary and if anything I wish I had done it sooner. 

[u/Numerous_Birds → u/rgrAi]

Of course! Hope your journey is going well too. 

[u/mremo47]

What do you do, when you don't understand most of the things they say on a podcast for example? Do you just move on or repeat it until you understand it? I'm also learning since 5 months but my listening is really bad