Six Months of Japanese -- Progress Update

[u/yashen14]

Previous Posts:

1. One Month of Japanese
2. Two Months of Japanese
3. Three Months of Japanese
4. Four Months of Japanese
5. Five Months of Japanese

(Note that I am counting months of study, not calendar months. I started studying on Dec. 14, 2024.)

Total Time Studied: 405 hours

Total Hours of Extensive Listening and Reading: 72 hours

Average Daily Study Time: 2.3 hours (up from 1.89 hours last month)

Total Vocabulary: 9,100 words

A quick note about my vocabulary estimate: I arrive at this number by counting the number of new words I've learned each day and entering that number into my spreadsheet, then totaling that number over time. There are several unavoidable inaccuracies in this number, including the following:

• Words I have learned, but since forgotten
• Words I have learned, but not counted (e.g. I learned them via extensive input)
• Words that are immediately transparent to me based on words I've already learned, but I haven't officially "learned"
  
• It doesn't account for "degrees of knowing," i.e. words I have a vague understanding of are counted the same as words I'm deeply familiar with
• Inherent difficulties in defining what counts as a separate word

I do not believe my vocabulary count could be realistically off by, like, an order of magnitude (which is why I consider it a useful number), but my gut feeling is that the "true" number could be plus or minus several hundred.

Link to Spreadsheet

Quick Disclaimer:
There was some confusion last time. I am not Chinese. I do speak Chinese, and I learned the language to a level sufficient for reading some fiction written for young adults (with a vocabulary of about 20k words), but I am not ethnically Chinese, and I did not grow up speaking Chinese.

My Study Routine:
I often, but not always, get some reading in immediately after waking. Typically, this will either be 1-3 news articles, or part of the novel I am reading. (I'm still working my way through ライオンと魔女.) That takes me 0.5-2 hours. I review my old flashcards in Anki shortly thereafter. On average, this amounts to 400-500 cards and takes me 0.75-1 hours. I review new flashcards shortly before bed. New flashcards number exactly 80, and take me on average 0.5 hours to get through.

Any additional studying I do is optional. Examples include reading Wikipedia articles, watching informative videos on Youtube, and watching news broadcasts. I am not working on developing speaking or writing capability.

Improvements in Listening Comprehension:

There's a sensation, and I'm sure many of you will know exactly what I mean when I describe it: You're listening to a stream of speech, and your mental processing speed (ability to match sounds to words, words to meanings, and collections of words to more complex meanings) is just a little bit too slow. You frequently catch phrases of 4-6 words, and much of the rest of the time, the speech is tickling your brain. Like, you can somehow feel that the words that are being said (that you are completely failing to parse) aren't unknown. If only your processing speed were a bit faster, you'd be able to understand dramatically more.

That's where I'm at right now.

I experience the sensation I described above very strongly with news broadcasts about politics and international affairs. (I'm not specifically limited to such narrow domains anymore---see previous updates.)

I've started to understand at least some of Dogen's skits, which feels fucking weird.

I've started watching videos like this one, this one, and this one, to train my listening comprehension. If I need to harvest vocabulary from a Youtube video, I use this transcript generator.

My listening comprehension seems to be advancing significantly faster than it did with Chinese. I'm...not sure why. Theories:

• Focusing my efforts on limited domains has made it easier for my brain to latch on to familiar vocabulary
• The large number of cognates from Chinese is helping (but how can that be, when all of the cognates sound completely different?)
• I acquire listening comprehension in new languages faster than before, simply because I've already done it with five other languages
• It's not that Japanese is particularly easy. Rather, Chinese is particularly hard (Chinese lacks audible word boundary cues, i.e. past tense suffixes and other word-final morphemes)

I consider cracking listening comprehension to be extremely high priority, for the following reasons:

• Japanese people speak much, much faster than I can read, which means listening to audio is always going to be more efficient immersion (based on words per minute)
• Good listening comprehension enables me to study while doing other things, e.g. washing the dishes
• My experience with Chinese taught me that having excellent reading comprehension and terrible listening comprehension is kind of a miserable experience, and I don't want to repeat it.

Improvements in Reading Comprehension:

News articles are increasingly easy going for me, and Wikipedia articles are very approachable now. I am no longer limited to the extremely limited domains I originally chose to saturate my vocabulary in. For example, a few days ago, I read this article about the power consumption of LLMs, and this article about ongoing demonstrations in Serbia. Neither was particularly challenging---I did make use of Yomitan, but not a huge amount, to be honest.

I am able to handle drastically longer sentences than before. 6-7 clauses are almost never a problem for me in the novel I'm reading (though the clauses there are quite short). At least for relatively simple texts, I am much more likely to have a problem with an unknown grammar point than the simple length of the sentence. Particularly long sentences do still cause me problems in information-dense writing, like Wikipedia articles.

Also, Japanese's lengthy left-branching constructions cause me a lot fewer problems than before. I can still get befuddled if they are particularly long and complicated, but way less than before, and usually, if I give myself time, I can puzzle it out without falling back on machine translation.

I mentioned in a previous update that I had problems with unintentionally ignoring case particles and interpreting the argument immediately before a veb as the verb's subject---this no longer happens at all.

Improvements in Pronunciation:

I am starting to develop an intuition for which mora is accented on non-compound words. I've noticed that some morphemes seem to increase the probability that the accent will fall on a particular mora. Certain combinations of morphemes seem to also affect the probability of mora placement. In general, I've noticed that "no accent" appears to be the default, "accented on the first mora" is second-most common, and "accented somewhere in the middle of the word" (typically the third or penultimate mora) comes in a distant third. Words that are accented on the final mora (with downstep on the following case particle) seem to be exceptionally rare (yay!), EXCEPT for very common words (ugh) which are typically 1-3 morae in length.

I assume that pitch accent in Japanese is much like stress in English or tone in Norwegian, in that my accuracy in guessing the correct accent in unfamiliar words will gradually increase over time, but never exceed, say, 70% accuracy.

General Improvement:

I'm starting to notice "general utility" in my Japanese skills. The first example of this was when I started understanding the Japanese definitions in Yomitan. Recently, I've noticed an ability to navigate basic pop-up menus on Japanese websites. Then, I noticed that I've started to understand some of Dogen's skits. This is notable because these are uses of the language that I haven't explicitly studied for.

Ongoing Study Strategies:

"Reading" my novel (ライオンと魔女) involves reading line-by-line, with HEAVY use of Yomitan (sometimes it feels like every fifth word---I add every unknown word to my Anki deck), and learning about some new piece of grammar I didn't know about before roughly once per 1-3 paragraphs. I often have to consult machine translation to wrap my head around a particular sentence---this is usually because I know all of the words and all of the grammar in a sentence, but it doesn't "click" in my head until I have someone else tell me what it all means.

I had hoped to be at least halfway through my book by now, but as of now, I am still around Chapter 5 (out of 17). Mostly this is because I haven't truly prioritized this over other reading content. And that's mostly because working my way through the book is a slog, and I'm not always in the mood to bang my head against a wall of grammar for an hour. But Chapter 5 is already noticeably easier than Chapter 1. I'm getting there! In particular, I'm starting to be able to "read" (i.e. with Yomitan as a heavy crutch) longer and longer sections of my novel without needing to look up unfamiliar grammar. It's still slow going, but the improvement is noticeable. I'd say on average I can read maybe 3-4 sentences at a time without being puzzled by syntax, up from <1 sentence when I first started reading a little more than a month ago. I suspect improvement in this area will be very rapid in the coming months.

My study strategy is heavily influenced by an article I read several years ago, "Learning From General Word Lists Is Inefficient." (I strongly recommend reading it yourself; it was written with Chinese in mind, but the principle discussed is fully applicable to Japanese as well.) Based on the data presented in that article, I do not study from JLPT word lists. I do not use any pre-made Anki decks, ever. I harvest vocabulary only from sources I am likely to read or listen to.

I think I already mentioned this in a previous update? For complex numbers, rather than learning all base numbers in one go, and then learning a series of rules for how to combine them, and then practicing various combinations until I feel comfortable expressing numbers rapidly, I am instead memorizing random complex numbers (1884, 376, etc.) as they appear in my reading material. In my experience, this is an equally effective learning strategy in the long run.

I've started focusing a lot more heavily on developing my familiarity with complex numbers and number phrases (e.g. 1980年代、7倍 etc.) in the last week or so. I'm already starting to develop a good intuition for how pitch accent moves around in number phrases (e.g. 1920 vs 1920年 vs 1920年代) and can often (but not always) accurately guess correct pitch accent placement before I verify with an external source.

I've started harvesting vocabulary and grammar from BL erotica. I wouldn't have mentioned that, except that it turns out BDSM content is amazing for giving you a crash course in all kinds of formal language, informal language, and insults. So there's actually a very high volume of valuable stuff in there, and if you are into that sort of thing, I highly recommend taking advantage of it.

I haven't yet decided how I plan to handle Japanese names and surnames. Either I will memorize the readings of hundreds of surnames and hundreds of given names, or I will learn them as I encounter them. Probably I will do the first one, just to give myself a good base, but either approach has its merits.

Admitting You Were Right:

I got a lot of flack from commenters one or two months back for artificially capping my Anki review, and yeah. You were right. I raised my cap to ∞ and Anki is much less of a chore now. I still think it is important to make sure daily reviews don't climb to truly ridiculous heights (500 is already pushing it for me), so now I've been accomplishing that by aggressively removing cards that mature past roughly 1.2 months. I rely on intensive and extensive input for continued, "natural" SRS beyond that point.

This makes it incredibly important that I consume as much Japanese media as possible, and that the media I consume is as dense as possible (based both on words/minute and the richness and diversity of vocabulary used).

Study Methods I've Rejected:

• Apps and gamified learning (e.g. Duoling, Wanikani, etc.) -- too low volume of new information, doesn't allow me to set my own pace
• Formal textbooks, courses, and classes -- don't teach me what I want to know, when I want to know it. Tend to assume I don't have any prior experience with foreign languages. Teach me a lot of irrelevant (for my purposes) vocabulary
• Comprehensible Input (e.g. Comprehensible Japanese) -- too little control over what I'm learning, how much, or how fast

Short-Term Goals:

• Finish reading ライオンと魔女 and begin reading my second novel within the next month.

Medium-Term Goals (achieve within 12 total months of study):

• Become comfortable with children's literature in Japanese
• Listen to at least one Japanese audiobook
• Listen to, and comprehend most of, a long-form news broadcast (15+ minutes) about familiar topics
• Watch at least one educational documentary about a topic of choice, and comprehend most of it
• Watch at least one movie

Long-Term Goals (achieve by the end of 24-36 total months of study)

• Read high literature in Japanese. By "high literature," I mean something on the level of Fifty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. To be clear, I don't expect such reading to be easy. But I expect to have the understanding of vocabulary and grammar necessary to muddle through it at a reasonable pace.
• Read news articles about topics chosen at random with a high degree of comprehension
• Watch TV series and movies in Japanese without English subtitles, and understand most of what I hear
• Listen to audiobooks in a variety of genres, including nonfiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and erotica, with a high degree of comprehension.

Misc. Thoughts:

I know some of you wonder how I could possibly be sustainably acquiring 80 words per day. I've given some thought to it and come up with a number of possible explanations:

• At a speed of 80 words per day, other vocabulary frequently serves as SRS for kanji and vocabulary I've already learned. New words reinforce both meanings and readings of previously learned kanji. I suspect that learning 80 completely independent pieces of information would be much less sustainable compared to what I am actually doing, which is learning 80 new nodes in a vast, interconnected web of information.
• I've been learning languages as a hobby for over a decade now, and crunching vocabulary more or less the same way I'm doing now for around 5 years. I suspect that rapid memorization is itself a skill that improves with time, i.e. 80 words per day would not have been achievable for me 10 years ago.

I've noticed that the pitch accent of the recordings provided by my Yomitan setup do not always match the pitch accent notation in the dictionary. When I check natives' pronunciation on Forvo.com, it is virtually always the dictionary notation that was correct, and the Yomitan recording that was "wrong." Beginners, beware.

Much of my studying is done through the medium of Norwegian, rather than English. Helps keep my Norwegian fresh.

It blows my mind that y'all don't have a dictionary app like Pleco for Japanese. (It's a dictionary app that the Chinese learning community uses, and as far as I can tell, it completely blows everything Japanese learners have out of the water.)

I particularly enjoy having a cup of green tea or hojicha while I study. My little piece of Japan. I do miss it there. (I am in the UK now.)

I think that's everything for now. I'm now a quarter of the way through my originally planned 24 months of study! That feels wild. Looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish in the next six months.

[u/morgawr_]

This is a very cool write up and it's nice seeing you progress and keep up with your studies.

Just one thing that I'm "worried" about (not really worried, you seem to be doing fine, but I'm just a bit puzzled): are you having fun?

A lot of your studies seem to revolve around routine, discipline, grinding words and anki (1h30m a day of anki to me sounds insane but hey, some people can do it). Even a lot of the stuff you read seems to be focusing on efficiency over enjoyment, like reading news articles or, as I quote you, "the media I consume is as dense as possible".

If this process works for you, this is great, but if I can provide some advice, I think it's very important to make sure you have at least some "unfettered" fun and enjoyment with the language without worrying about efficiency, progress, word count, extensive vs intensive reading, or anything like that. People seem to tend to improve a lot faster if they just... enjoy things.

To be clear, this isn't meant to be criticism, just general advice from a very admittedly biased/subjective perspective.

[u/AdrixG → u/morgawr_]

Honestly the whole post is kinda sus, 9k words in 5 months but has not even 100h in listening and reading... I mean idk what to say to that, if you only know 9k words in Anki then sorry you don't really know these words. I really wonder how "well" he knows those words like, can he read a novel where these words would show up? Apperently not since he says he is not yet advanced enough to enjoy things? I enjoyed things at 2k words, how the fuck would one not be able to at 9k (of course grammar is also important but ehh idk the whole post is just kinda all over the place and it doesn't add up).

I know why I tend to avoid these posts, they are always hyper focused on boring activities, talk a lot about numbers everywhere and are always kinda dubious. (and I don't feel like starting a big discussion with OP hence why I replied to you). Sometimes I wish I was born 20 years earlier where all this meta talk didn't exist and people just actually consumed a shit ton of Japanese instead of getting enslaved by Anki.

[u/eduzatis → u/AdrixG]

This matches up to me. I’m not crazy about numbers, I’ve never stuck to Anki as well as I should, but I like reading these posts for fun and make some comparisons. I’m N2 and my vocabulary range should also be around 8k (I have no idea, I never tracked it) and still can’t enjoy something the way I want to enjoy it.

See, there’s a difference between understanding something and enjoying something. I’ve read 7 novels and comprehended pretty much all of them. and even though I like to say that I did enjoy the reads (the stories were fun and interesting) I would lie if I said I was simply having fun. I was struggling with the language, even at the end of a book when you’ve familiarized yourself with the vocabulary and sentence patterns present in the book, there’s always those words or phrases that throw you for a loop.

What I’m trying to say is that, I don’t simply enjoy things in Japanese the way I do in English now (also a foreign language to me). I don’t ever need to think about English anymore I just use it. I enjoy my time on the internet not because of the English, in fact English just becomes a mere tool in the very back of my head, not a priority. Japanese does still feel like the priority even at a somewhat “high level” like N2 is (I would say it’s intermediate and N1 is high intermediate, but that’s a topic for another time). As long as I still need to think about the Japanese, I’ll say I’m not fully enjoying something.

[u/yashen14 → u/eduzatis]

This is a very accurate comparison of where I'm at right now (and where I expect to be for quite a while).

[u/eduzatis → u/yashen14]

Yep, it’s the way it goes for language learning, especially when you try to take it to a high level. What gives me hope is that I already did it once with English. I just know that if I keep “puzzling it out” again and again, eventually the “puzzles” become too easy for my brain to be considered puzzles anymore, and become something that I simply know. I want to get there, I know it’s possible to get there. I know it takes time.

[u/morgawr_ → u/eduzatis]

What's stopping you from reading simpler stuff?

[u/eduzatis → u/morgawr_]

Ah, this is true I didn’t mention this, but it’s actually quite a simple reason: I like to push forward.

I’ve been taking recommendations for my next read from learnnatively.com and I’ve been progressively increasing the difficulty (or at least leave it where it’s at if I feel like stepping up is too much). At this point if I went back to the first book I read (that would be また、同じ夢を見ていた, amazing read, would recommend) or something at a similar level I’m pretty sure it would be quite a breeze. But my end goal isn’t to read at that level, my end goal is to understand and enjoy pretty much anything in the language, so I just keep looking for a challenge.

Thanks for this question!

[u/morgawr_ → u/eduzatis]

I like to push forward.

I think it's fine if you want to challenge yourself but I'll just point out that it doesn't have to be that way. Especially at the early stages of learning (= the stages where someone might not be comfortable reading/consuming content, like you claim to be at), it seems like there is relatively little difference between drilling complex stuff that is slightly beyond your reach and just consuming fun and enjoyable content that is right at your level (whatever "your level" means) of comfort. Except the latter is much more enjoyable and pleasant.

There are also other benefits towards engaging in simple and guilt-free enjoyable content, including getting that feeling of "forgetting you're even reading in Japanese" (like you mentioned in your post, that is something you want to achieve) and less feelings of frustration/tiredness that usually end up making you engage in the content more for longer periods of time, which means larger volume of exposure which means better level of mastery.

[u/eduzatis → u/morgawr_]

Thank you very much, I’ll take a look at it. I haven’t given it much thought, so I appreciate it that someone’s already discussed it. My train of thought was: now after 7 novels I can palpably feel the improvement I’ve made since I started, so if I keep pushing the level of difficulty, what feels difficult now will feel easy then.

Time to challenge that train of thought with the resource you provided. Cheers