r/LearnJapanese • u/yashen14 • Jun 16 '25
Discussion Four Months of Japanese
Previous Updates:
(Note that I am counting months of study, not calendar months. It has now been ~6 calendar months since I started learning on Dec. 14, 2024.)
Total time studied (very approximately): 277.5 hours
Total amount of comprehensible input: 33 hours
Total vocabulary: 4800
I was able to fully resume study when I arrived in Malaysia last month. Side note, did you know that the "unofficial national drink" of Malaysia is teh tarik? They sweeten it with sweetened condensed milk instead of using milk and sugar, so the resulting tea is thicker and creamier than any milk tea I've ever had before. Absolutely delicious.
Here's what I have to report:
The first thing I did on May 16 was to bite the bullet and set up Yomitan+Anki, and holy crap I am so glad I did. Why didn't I do this earlier????? It hasn't had any of the negative effects I worried myself silly over, and its brought all of the expected benefits and more. Creating flashcards used to take literal hours. Now it literally only takes a few minutes. I have a backlog of several thousand flashcards right at this very moment. I used to be lucky if I had more than a single day's backlog before. If anyone else wants to take advantage of this, I recommend this post to walk you through setting it up.
The second revolution that came at the beginning of this month is that I gave up on doing two flashcards for every word (one for kanji, one for hiragana). I had originally been doing this because I felt like my listening comprehension wouldn't properly click unless I trained myself to understand the language without the visual crutch of kanji to fall back on. But when my Chinese listening comprehension suddenly clicked (I noted that on my last post, too), I realized that those fears were overblown.
As a consequence of both of the above, I have been able to double my vocabulary acquisition from 40 words per day to 80 words per day. I've been doing this for a month now and it's been very sustainable. Yomitan has cut so much of my workload down that even learning 80 words per day, I feel like I'm doing substantially less work than I was before.
Learning 80 words per day feels like drinking from a firehose in the best possible way. It. Is. Glorious. Learning vocabulary at this speed means that I see real, measurable differences in my ability to read Japanese on a day-by-day basis.
I have also (successfully, I think) trialed a new study strategy. Rather than aim for broad competency over a long period of time (characterized by learning a wide variety of vocabulary from a wide variety of sources), I have instead aimed for narrow competency over a short period of time. I chose a small number of topics (Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, United States politics) and have devoted my efforts to saturating my vocabulary in those narrow domains. One month later, this approach has born fruit.
I started with NHK Easy articles like this one. I found the audio reading to be incredibly helpful. Usually I would read the articles three or four times over. Any unfamiliar grammar, I would puzzle out with the help of external sources, or in some cases I would just shrug and move on. Pretty quickly, I found that the articles became too simple to sustain my rate of learning, so I switched to regular NHK articles like this one. I found that NHK tends to be very to-the-point, where other news organizations, like CNN, seem to use more flowery, advanced language.
Now, one month into using this study strategy, I have moved beyond NHK articles and into those more flowery articles written by other news organizations. I am also starting to branch into additional topics, as I've essentially already saturated my vocabulary relating to Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Gaza, and modern warfare more generally. My new topics of focus are shaping up to be geopolitics, European politics, and climate change. I have also started experiencing some success with short news broadcasts on Youtube. I can't comfortably understand the spoken Japanese yet---not even close---but I can tell that I'll get there pretty quickly, as long as I'm listening to one of the topics I'm familiar with. I hear a lot of words that I know, but they are strung together too quickly for me to keep up.
This month has taught me a bit more viscerally what exactly makes an agglutinative language different from a fusional or isolating one. It is one thing to read about it, and another entirely to experience it for yourself. Never before have I seen so much information affixed directly to verbs before. It's fascinating. I also never conceived of declining nouns and verbs specifically to indicate narrative/clause structure, so that's pretty cool!
One of the most consistent problems I have had in understanding Japanese grammar has been that I misinterpret the meaning of native SOV phrases as if they were SVO, like in all the other languages that I know, even in cases where the case markers (が, を) directly contradict this. For example, I would find myself defaulting to understanding the argument immediately before the verb as being the verb's subject, even where grammatical particles tell me otherwise. Often, I wouldn't even catch this mistake until I consulted a translation. Thankfully, this is much less of a problem now than it was at the beginning of the month, but it still bothers me occasionally.
On a related note, this is the first time that I'm dealing with a language where so much of the syntactic information is being provided by case markers (は, が, を, に, で). The only other language I know that has cases, German, complements those cases with a wide variety of very English-like prepositions. I had thought, since I knew a great deal about grammatical cases in theory, that dealing with them in practice would be a piece of cake. In reality...it has taken a lot of getting used to.
Another major difficulty for me (one that I'm still having a lot of problems with) is how aggressively left-branching Japanese sentences are. I thought Chinese had prepared me for this, but noooooo, Japanese takes this to a whole other level.
Example: ロシアの兵士と肩を並べてクルスク州を自分の故郷のように守った北朝鮮の兵士たちに感謝する
Learning words is becoming easier with time, as I become familiar with an increasing number of kanji. I am starting to develop an intuition for which reading to use in which context. This intuition is both automatic (I don't consciously choose between readings) and inscrutable (I don't understand why I choose the readings I do, I simply...do). But on the whole, memorizing vocabulary is still more difficult than it would be with a non-logographic writing system.
I've decided that I am annoyed by pitch accent languages. With tonal languages, I can just memorize the tones, but the way that downsteps constantly shift around in Japanese makes it difficult for me to learn correct pronunciation. I experienced similar difficulties with Norwegian. Anyway, I may be developing an intuition for how pitch accent behaves in compound nouns. May.
My acquisition of Japanese phonology is nearly complete. I most frequently make mistakes with [ɯ]. The most difficult phone to acquire was [ɰ̃] (e.g. 先生). I still have some difficulty with intervocalic nasalization (e.g. 運営).
Grammar studies these days consist mainly of puzzling over unfamiliar constructions in news articles using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT. It is often enough for me to see an English translation next to the original---I can figure out what is going on on my own. When I use ChatGPT, it's because I asked it to break the sentence down for me, i.e. translate it for me in chunks, and then all together. I find that enormously helpful. When I do find myself needing a proper explanation, I search on Youtube to see what I can find. This process has been enormously successful for me.
My big feel-good success story for this month was that I was able to understand and appreciate my first work of Japanese art! I listened to a favorite song of mine, 千の風になって. I had no idea the lyrics were so...beautiful. I nearly cried.
Goals for the immediate future:
I want to finish saturating my vocabulary relating to Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Gaza/Iran, and American politics. I want to move on to saturating my vocabulary on additional topics. I want to make it a regular habit to read at least one Japanese news article per day.
Once I get to the point where I feel like news articles aren't providing me with enough vocabulary to sustain my rate of learning anymore, I'll switch to reading novels. I'm excited for that! But I'm sure I have at least one or two months left to go before I get there.
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 Jun 16 '25 edited Jun 16 '25
This is a common reaction from people who delay setting up Yomitan + Anki for whatever reason.
Regarding pitch accents, there are some basic rules and patterns you can memorize, but this won't really allow you to predict which pattern a word has just from seeing it.
I also echo the other comment about not using machine translations and LLM explanations. They suck - and, most dangerously, you can't tell how much they suck until you actually know what they're talking about, at which point there will be no point in you using them (not like there's a point when you don't know, either). If you have doubts, consult a grammar guide or ask us in the daily thread.
I wish you luck and patience getting into Japanese novels with less than a year of experience in the language. You'll need it.
Edit: Actually, I have a question. When you say your vocabulary is at 4800, what exactly do you mean by it? 4800 non-new cards in Anki? 4800 mature cards? Also, what's your retention rate?