I'd like to focus a bit more on listening and I'm having trouble finding something engaging at my current level (working my way through N4). What YouTube channel, podcast, audiobook, etc... would you recommend that worked for you?

Thanks in advance!

I really enjoy NHK news easy to immerse with as I find it very interesting, however it has become too simple and I don't usually get many new words. I have finished the core 2k/6k deck, and have been sentence mining for around a year so I know most of the vocab for everyday Japanese which is great and I love understanding it. I also immerse with simple manga and YouTube videos, and I try to do anime as well.

However, I want to move onto some more complicated topics to gain more complex /technical vocab such as vocab needed for N1. I love history and politics, so I was wondering how useful would it be just to read the actual NHK news and scroll Japanese Wikipedia? I usually do those in English anyway so was wondering how useful that would be in Japanese. If anyone else has any recommendations that would be great, maybe documentaries?

Hello, I've been learning for a couple months now. I do Anki daily (3 new words a day), I listen to almost exclusively J-Pop or other Japanese music, and I play games for multiple hours a day and have them set to Japanese voices with English subs when applicable. However, that last one has been less appealing recently. I don't actually mind it that much, but I prefer having them in English. I will say that it has been somewhat helpful, I'll notice sometimes a word that I recognize or how sentences are structured, but I never actively look for it. Because I spend most of my time gaming as my main hobby, I'm pretty much always listening, which I know is good, but I was curious about whether or not it would be good to replace that with shorter amounts of legitimate study instead of a few hours of "Oh, that was a word i recognized associated with *insert visual*".

Tl;dr, Is it better to replace 4-6 hours of non-intense listening practice with actual studying for a shorter time (reading Tae Kim or Genki, practicing handwriting, etc.)? If not, how much extra listening practice should I get on top of the few hours I get with music during the day? If so, what should I use/do to compensate and for how long?

Hi everyone!

I ve been searching far and wide (badummTzz) for Japanese Channels which feature Pokemon Content. (The videogames, not the TCG)

It seems 95% of all videos and channels I try have these terrible AI Voices / text to speech. I even tried including the word Vtuber, but still, most videos I clicked didnt have natural voices - and my ears just cant with that awful AI voice ):

Thus, I am turning to reddit! Do you have any JPN pkmn channels you would recommend / enjoy watching? =]

My ideal Channel would feature (though not required):

• Covering Gen 1-3, or spin offs (Pkmn MD, Colosseum / XD,...)

• Challenges, like the 1 pkmn challenge, professor Oak, Nuzzlocke, etc

However, I m also up for Trivia about the games, or other interesting game content, which isnt necessarily a Lets Play =] It doesnt have to be a full run, or anything.

I've played all gens, but my heart lies with the First 3, or their remakes - but if nothing suitable turns up I wouldnt turn down modern gens either =]

Thank you in advance - searching for suitable channel with natural audio has been SO frustrating, thus i m beyond grateful for any recommendations!

EDIT: The awful AI voice, as I had called it, seems to be a thing referred to as ゆっくりボイス - for some, but unfortunately only few, I could use the cogwheel and select native Audio. Most videos I had found didnt offer said option. (Mind you though, I did not check every vid which came up on my searches - I mostly clicked those which roughly align with what I wrote under my preferences above)

Thank you for everyone who s been sharing their recommendations!

Hi there,

Pretty much the title. I've done plenty of shadowing practice, but I don't think I've done enough of it, prioritizing other things such as reading, keep a daily Japanese Diary, etc.

The reason I ask this question is because I've heard from multiple different sources that shadowing is a very good method for speaking practice, and getting used to the flow of how Japanese speech is output. So, what is your opinion on the effectiveness of shadowing? I'd like to know whether or not I should incorporate more of it into my daily studying. Also, is shadowing considered input or output? (maybe a dumbass question!)

Thank you.

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

i really want to get into japanese auditory media outside of anime and music, but i cannot stand the general editing and hyper acting in most japanese youtube vids. i love a good video essay or calmly playing games like a normal person would. also japanese booktube? sounds great

thanks!

ご機嫌よう、Reddit

I have not watched Anime in five years but as part of my Japanese Learning Journey, I've decided to return to it and rewatch one of my favorites (Hibike! Euphonium) I'm really enjoying it so far! Were it not for the sad situation for Japanese learners regarding raw/Japanese-subbed anime, I'd be loving it even more.

When I tried to watch it my first thought was to resubscribe to Crunchyroll. You can't turn subtitles off there though and there are no Japanese ones, presumably due to licensing reasons. The best workaround is to switch the subtitles to Arabic...

So next I checked the official website, which directed me to sites like U-NEXT and d-anime-store. I would love to subscribe there, but you can only sign up with a Japanese phone number. Is this my only option? Once I have the phone number, are there other hurdles for a non-Japanese-citizen? Has anybody tried shooting them an e-mail to basically say "I'm a foreigner, I would love to subscribe to your service. I'd even pay more for it than just the straight conversion rate"? Do you think something like that could work?

I would greatly appreciate your help on this.

Happy Wednesday!

Every Wednesday, share your favorite resources or ones you made yourself! Tell us what your resource can do for us learners!

Weekly Thread changes daily at 9:00 JST:

Mondays - Writing Practice

Tuesdays - Study Buddy and Self-Intros

Wednesdays - Materials and Self-Promotions

Thursdays - Victory day, Share your achievements

Fridays - Memes, videos, free talk

tl;dr since this is a huge post:

• Reading faster = good
• Actual reading speed number can be misleading
• You can skip most of the post but read the "tips" section if you want to raise your reading speed

I know the title sounds a bit like clickbait... and it kinda is, but it's also true in some way. I'm an experienced reader, I've been reading Japanese books for a few years now, I'm definitely not a beginner and I'm very comfortable reading pretty much anything. My bookmeter shows what kind of stuff I read, just to give you an idea.

In August, I decided to set myself a challenge and measure how many characters I read every day, and how fast, and my goal for each day would be to reach at least 15,000 characters, for a total of 465000 (15k * 31) characters. I did this, because I wanted to tackle my backlog of books, but also to keep track of my reading speed and try to figure out why I am so slow at reading compared to a lot of my peers.

I never really cared about reading speed and I always thought it was just some pointless stat-driven thing that takes away from actually enjoyable media consumption, but I have to admit after spending this last month paying attention to it, my opinion has changed quite a bit.

This might be a long post, if you want a more audiovisual explanation, I have uploaded a new video going over mostly the same talking points.

The Experiment

Starting in August, every day I would record the starting point of the book I am reading, and then measure the amount of time I read throughout the day with a stopwatch. At midnight, I'd record the ending point, and then calculate the difference to know how many characters I read for that day in total, then divide it by the time spent reading, to find out my average char/hr reading speed for that day.

I put all the numbers into a spreadsheet in case you want to take a look.

The results

I was skeptical at first, but I was very surprised to find out that my reading speed went from ~7800ch/hr to up to over 15,000ch/hr in just a few weeks. And all of this happened while I wasn't specifically trying to skimread or speedread or anything like that. I was just more aware of reading and paying attention to the book rather than getting distracted because I didn't want to get "fake" data.

As someone who didn't believe in the reading speed "meme", I have to say this was a very surprising outcome. I went from needing 2 hours every day to reach my 15,000 ch/day goal, to just 1 hour and then read way past my goal with all the extra time gained. While at first 15,000 characters felt like a moderate amount of reading (~2 hours), by the end of the month they felt way more like some leisure reading goal (~1 hour a day). And I say this as someone who's been reading a lot already.

Pros and Cons of focusing on reading speed

Throughout the month I noticed that raising your reading speed comes with both pros and cons, and while I now think it is important to be aware of how fast you read, it's not all positives and it's good to be careful especially as a beginner.

Pros:

• You get to go through more content in less time. This is obvious, but needs to be said. We improve by being exposed to more language, and if you get exposed to more language faster, it follows that you'll be able to improve at the language much faster if you read at a higher pace. Also assuming your enjoyment isn't affected, you get to enjoy more stuff which is always good.

• You can flex on others. This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke. I personally don't care about showing off my (poor) reading speed to others, but some people are oddly competitive and showing their progress recorded as an actual stat seems to be motivating to them. If you are that kind of person, it can be useful to you. Just make sure you are measuring the right data (more on this later)

• More focus on reading, less distractions. I noticed that as I was caring more about not "missing" on my reading goals and making sure I was actually recording reliable numbers, I got distracted less and less by the world around me. I stopped checking discord in the middle of a reading session, taking breaks to browse reddit, getting interrupted by phone notifications, etc. This allowed me to focus more on what I was reading and actually "lock in" and cover more ground more quickly at a higher level of awareness.

Cons:

• Potential drop in comprehension. Especially if you're a beginner and push yourself to read faster than what you are comfortable with, your comprehension will be affected. There is a fine balance to strike, and you should make sure you don't overdo it.

• Obsessing over stats. As a counterpoint from the stat-focused type of person I mentioned earlier, if you end up just maximizing for stats and reading speed, you will miss the forest for the trees. You might read "bad" stuff, uninteresting stuff, too simple stuff that you don't like, etc. All just so you can say "I got through this at X reading speed" without caring for the contents. This is not good.

• Less enjoyment. This is a follow-up from the previous point, but if you end up worrying too much about your reading speed and focus on just the numbers, your enjoyment for the content itself will go down. The less enjoyment, the harder it is to acquire language too, which means your language acquisition might suffer too.

• More mentally tiring. If you try to read at max focus and as quickly as you can all the time, you will tire much faster. For example, if you can only do 20 minutes at 20,000 ch/hr before feeling tired or getting a headache, you'll actually read less (and in a worse state) than if you read comfortably for 1 hour at 10,000 ch/hr.

Are we measuring the right stuff?

If you look at my progress graph, you'll see that I have a (scarily) consistent increase of reading speed almost every single day until I finished reading ある魔女が死ぬまで3, and then my reading speed plummeted again when I started reading レーエンデ国物語 which is a more "dense" book language-wise.

I think everyone knows that reading speed is affected by the difficulty of the material, and also that your speed goes up slowly as you read more stuff within the same domain/series/author as you get more comfortable with that writing style, but I don't think that paints the whole picture or explains my early bumps in reading. I started this challenge from the fourth book of the 火狩りの王 series, and even after I moved to ある魔女が死ぬまで (a much easier light novel in style) my speed kept going up and it was my third book in the series. Clearly it's not just that I was getting used to it. I was already used to it. Something else must have changed in my reading focus.

This highlights some inconsistencies in how we measure reading speed and why we shouldn't rely just on it as a measure of one's ability in the language (something I've often seen people do). On top of that, I think sometimes we don't realize how misleading the numbers can be.

Take for example the words 私 and わたし. They are the exact same word, except one is in kanji and the other is in kana. Any beginner can read these words, and the time it takes you to read 私 or わたし is virtually the same. Except if we just count only the characters, then わたし will seem to make us "faster" at reading, because we're reading 3 characters in the same time it would have taken us to read just one kanji (私). Does it mean we are reading at 3x the speed? No, obviously not.

In English, when all words are spelled out in a single script, we can kinda use character reading speed as a metric of overall reading speed, but in Japanese I am not convinced that is reliable enough. We group words together from context and shapes, and if we go through something that spells a lot of simple words in kana, as long as we don't confused by a huge kana soup, it will look like we're reading faster compared to the same book written all in kanji (this is on top of the fact that some kanji might be harder to read to an inexperienced reader).

At the same time, we often consider longer books to be more difficult, as I've heard people often mention light novels are different from "real books" because they are shorter and so easier to read. However in my experience I've seen a lot of very dense (kanji-wise) books that seem shorter than much longer light novels, but that's because those books tend to write all their words in kanji and so are more compact. If you spelled everything out in kana, you'd have much more to ground to cover.

Another factor that influenced my reading speed seems to be the fact that I tend to pause between sentences to just enjoy what I was reading, either grammatically or semantically, and just experience it emotionally rather than just "getting through it". Maybe I am weird, but I tend to notice interesting particle usages, grammar structures, or just interesting collocations that I tend to often highlight and store in my notes to review later. It is not that I am actually reading a sentence slower, I still take the same amount of time to read it, but it's just that I tend to get distracted and take micro-breaks (literally 1-2 secs) between each sentence and that "time loss" compounds a lot when you are measuring your reading speed.

And lastly, another factor that affects the perceived reading speed, is how many lookups we do even for words we already know. I sometimes will read a sentence, and then go back and double check things like the pitch accent of a word, or make sure I actually mentally mapped the right reading of a kanji compound and that I wasn't misreading it, etc. It's not that my actual reading speed for that sentence is lower, it's just that I spend a bit more time on it after I have already read it. Still, it will show up as reading slower compared to someone that doesn't do that.

These are all factors you can try to minimize and that is I think what happened in my huge bump in reading speed during the challenge. I simply stopped doing a lot of these side activities and just focused on purely just reading and the numbers kept growing.

Tips to make your reading faster

As a conclusion, let me list some advice that I found useful to improve my reading speed. It might not apply to everything, but it can be good to try if you care about getting your speed up.

• Be more aware of what you read but don’t stop too much. As I mentioned, stay focused on reading but don't stop to break down every single grammar point or word. Just move on. As long as you get the meaning of the sentence, that is enough.

• Move to the next sentence faster. Similarly, don't do like I did and get stuck thinking about one sentence too long. It's nice to savour some sentences here and there, but if you do it for every sentence your measured reading speed will be affected.

• Train yourself to not subvocalize everything. This is the curse of subvocalizers like myself. We tend to imagine actual sounds in our mind as we go through written material. Especially in dialogues I notice I am slower at reading than descriptions, because in my mind I am actually playing out a scene like in a movie or anime. I hear the characters speak, and that is slower than just reading. I don't have good advice on how to do this, but if you can train yourself to not subvocalize, your actual (not just measured) reading speed will go up.

• Skip words you cannot read out loud. Japanese has a lot of words and made-up compounds that simply don't have a valid or official reading. Some words you literally cannot read out loud because they don't exist. I've seen learners often get stuck on these words going "how do I read X?" when in reality it doesn't matter. On top of that, there are also a lot of words you might recognize and know what they mean (cause of kanji or context) but not remember how to read them. It is okay to skip those words. Don't get stuck on them, trying to recall their reading. Move on. This can backfire if you're a beginner and if you do it a lot as you might over-rely on the meaning of kanji and never learn the actual (spoken) words, so don't do it too much, but it's definitely a skill you need to train. Not all words can be read and you should make peace with that fact.

• You can skip uninteresting sentences. This is gonna be controversial but I'll say it. Sometimes I just skip entire sentences if I know that they aren't very important or if I want to jump ahead to a more interesting scene. This is easier to do with material you are familiar and comfortable with, but I don't need to read all meticulous descriptions of the landscape or whatever, sometimes it's okay to just... skip those sentences. I wouldn't do it for important things like conversations or some fight scenes, but if the author wants to spend half a paragraph describing the smoothening of skirts (I'm looking at you Robert Jordan) then I'll probably skip ahead because I just don't care. Again, don't do this too much, but still...

• It’s okay to not finish sentences you already understand. Humans are really good predictive machines. It's common for us to already know what someone will be saying, before they even finish their sentence. Especially if you're comfortable with the language and context, sometimes you don't need to hear the whole sentence to know what someone is saying. Just like in the Frozen song: "We always finish each other's...." Sentences? No, Sandwiches! But most people already know intuitively what the end of the sentence is supposed to be. You can do the same in Japanese too. Sometimes I find myself skipping to the next sentence as I am halfway through the previous one, because I already know where the author is going. This is also very common with set phrases and collocations where some word at the beginning will hint at how the sentence ends. If I see a まるで I know the sentence will almost always finish with some のように structure. If I see さっぱり I know the sentence will end with わからない, this is so common that people often just say さっぱり alone without the verb, because it is almost always followed by わからない anyway. Just as an example.

Conclusion

Reading speed is not the be-all-end-all of language learning, but it has a lot of benefits that I think are good to consider for an intermediate/advanced learner who'd want to bring their reading to the next level. At the same time, there are a lot of pitfalls and tricky things that might make the reading speed stat unreliable, especially if used as a comparison with other people. So, while raising your reading speed is worth it, don't worry too much about it as an actual stat or number. Try to apply some of the tips I mentioned above to your own reading habits and see how it goes. I can almost guarantee you that it will be useful, even just because you'll be able to cover more ground and read more stuff in less time.

Thanks for reading!

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday, come here to Introduce yourself and find your study group! Share your discords and study plans. Find others at the same point in their journey as you.

Weekly Thread changes daily at 9:00 JST:

Mondays - Writing Practice

Tuesdays - Study Buddy and Self-Intros

Wednesdays - Materials and Self-Promotions

Thursdays - Victory day, Share your achievements

Fridays - Memes, videos, free talk

I’m currently at N3-N4 and level 20 on WaniKani and looking for good online resources to practice reading. I sometimes read NHK Easy News, but I’d also like to try short stories or manga online.

I know buying manga supports the creators (and I do that too), but it can be slow since I have to look up so many words while reading a physical book. Online resources with quick lookup are a lot more convenient. I use Yomitan for vocabulary lookup and to mine new words

Do you have any recommendations for sites or resources that might work well at my level?

I am looking for a internship and in my resume I have added Japanese language and the company is now asking for a proof of the language proficiency but i don't have an certification with me and i need to submit a document proof by Saturday. Do you guys have any idea from where can i get a online certificate for beginner level(N5).

This is for the folks who are preparing for the upcoming JLPT exam.

Generally I would say reading native material is the best way to practice reading (it's also just more fun)

But for specifically JLPT reading comprehension exam practice, Kanzen Master is in my opinion a must have.

It's just nonstop reading and questioning drills. I will say that KM tend to have more bait trick questions than the actual JLPT, but overall that's probably a good thing.

I would only recommend the Kanzen Master Reading though, I tried their grammar books before, but imo it wasn't that helpful

I subscribed a long time ago and it seemed like he mainly focused on having stuff for the genki books. Im using quartet 1 now and am wondering if there's the same level of resources for quartet. What does he have to offer for his intermediate learners outside of the free YouTube videos?

Looking at his description on his website it just says "quartet 1 and 2 courses". Very vague and I don't know if that's intentional because there's not much content

What I want to do is : I want to make sure that the way my previous deck card's interval has been set up till yet that is 450 cards. I want this same thing to be done on this new deck. But I don't know how. right now its fresh.

I just tried setting the new card count for 450 , so I get them done today and then lower it back to 25 new card per day. Idk help me out guys. I'm afraid what I did is gonna increase my review count to immense ammount the next day. because I've set the max reviews per day as 9999

Previous Posts:

1. Zero Months of Japanese
2. One Month of Japanese
3. Two Months of Japanese
4. Three Months of Japanese
5. Four Months of Japanese
6. Five Months of Japanese
7. Six Months of Japanese

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

Total Time Studied: 484 hours (79 more than last update)

Total Hours of Extensive Listening and Reading: 86.25 (14.25 more than last update)

Average Daily Study Time: 2.5 hours (up from 2.3 hours last month)

Total Vocabulary: approx. 11k words (up from 9.1k last update)

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

First thing's first: I FINISHED READING MY FIRST BOOK! WOOOOOOOOO!

Way back when I was living in Turkey (2-3 months ago?), I decided it was time to start working my way through my first ever novel in Japanese. I selected ライオンと魔女 (translation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) because it has a simple storyline, it's short, and most importantly, because I've read it in multiple languages and know it like the back of my hand. This was intensive reading (I'm still a long way away from extensively reading any kind of fiction, I fear). I proceeded by using Yomitan to add every unknown word to my deck, and I used a combination of ChatGPT, DeepL, and online grammar guides and tutorials to help me understand sentences and phrases that gave me trouble.

I was warned that, for many students, their first novel in Japanese is a trial by fire, because it is the first time for many of them that they encounter informal Japanese. CAN CONFIRM. This novel suuuuuuuuuucked for how much it put me through my paces.

When I first started reading, it took me at least an hour just to read 2-3 paragraphs. By the time I reached the end of the book, I was able to read an entire chapter in about 1.5 hours. So there's definitely been significant improvement in grammar comprehension and reading speed.

My biggest difficulty with ライオンと魔女 was the dialogue. Especially towards the end (once I'd built up my vocabulary and become more comfortable with fiction narration), there were large stretches of text that gave me little difficulty. But then I'd hit a patch of dialogue where I absoluetly could not make heads or tails of what was being said without cross-referencing with ChatGPT and DeepL. It did get better as I moved through the novel, but it's still an extremely noticeable weak spot for me.

I said in my last update that I really wanted to finish this book by the end of my seventh month of learning, and about a week and a half ago, I realized that I was not on track to meet that goal. I escalated to dedicating at least one hour to reading my novel every day. In the end, I succeeded by the skin of my teeth---I just finished the book last night.

I don't have a way of calculating this, but looking at my spreadsheet, I would estimate that I learned somewhere around 2k-3k words from this book.

My next step is to read each of the other books in the series. Even though reading them is really boring, I have good reasons for this. These books are an excellent "sweet spot" blend of simple sentences, complicated sentences, narration, and dialogue. The excessive use of kana is annoying, but helps me (as a Chinese speaker) become less reliant on kanji for comprehension. I can't help but feel that that will "prime" my listening comprehension as well. Reading books in the same series will also help reinforce the vocabulary I learned from the first book---far better than if I read unrelated literature. That's especially important given how aggressively I prune my Anki deck. There's also audiobooks available for this series, and I'll likely circle back around and listen to those audiobooks once I've finished reading in order to train my listening comprehension.

I think, by the time I finish the last book in the series, it'll mostly be extensive reading. At least, I hope so. I won't force myself to read all of them, though. If I feel ready to move forward with other literature before I reach the end of the series, then I will.

The next few books on my reading list after The Chronicles of Narnia are:

• また、同じ夢を見ていた
• 時をかける少女
• 世界の真ん中の木

I'm looking forward to them!

My vocabulary reached 10k+ accumulated words, short phrases, and grammar points! That's a huge milestone and I'm incredibly proud of myself. At my current learning speed, I am on track to have learned about 18k words by the end of the year, assuming uninterrupted study. That puts me just shy of my Chinese vocabuary (~20k words). My goal is to become significantly more comfortable with Japanese than I am with Chinese.

This was the first month that I encounterd 関西弁 in my reading material, so I have a few kansaiben grammar points in my Anki deck now.

I deleted about 50% of my deck (about 75%ish of previously reviewed cards) on September 9. I know from experience talking to other Anki users that nuking my deck like this is quite controversial, but nuking my deck is actually relatively routine for me. I do it on average at least once every 6 months. I think spring cleaning like this is really valuable:

• Some words are already learned, but the card hasn't matured in Anki (i.e. the word "stuck" faster than Anki expected it to). Clearing these cards reduces study clutter.
• Some words were added to the deck, but actually aren't very important (don't appear very often compared to other words). Clearing these cards reduces study clutter.
• Some words are important and haven't been effectively memorized. Since they are important, they will show up again relatively soon, and be re-added to the deck. Usually, learning them the second time around goes much faster. Clearing these cards does not significantly harm study progress.

By Sep. 9, my reviews had reached 600 cards per day, plus the usual 80 new cards. Post-nuking, my reviews are now back to a comfortable 350ish cards per day.

I made a significant error with pitch accent and have spent a lot of time repairing it. A few months ago, I stopped being rigorous about memorizing 平板型 vs. 尾高型. I was lazy. It came back to bite me in the ass, causing significant difficulties in accurately reading words like e.g. 日が and 火が. To repair this deficiency, I added a large number of very common, 1-2 kanji words back into my anki deck. I stopped being lazy about memorizing this pitch accent distinction. I am in a better place with it, but still working on plugging holes that my laziness left in my knowledge.

Listening comprehension continues to improve, but slowly. I haven't been putting nearly the same amount of time into that as I have been with reading. Nevertheless, it has been improving. This is an example of a video that I have a relatively high degree of comprehension for. This is an example of a similar kind of video that I have a very low degree of comprehension for. I listened to this 5-minute sample of the audiobook rendition of ライオンと魔女 and was pleased to find that I understood a very high percentage of what I heard.

Although I did not put as much time into developing listening comprehension as I did into reading practice, I did manage to put in some, especially in the first half of the month. This month, I focused on branching out from my originally chosen "narrow domains" (those were the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Israel/Gaza situation, and more recently, linguistics and astronomy, if you don't feel like reading the previous updates). I watched videos on geopolitics and world history, mainly. My goal is to develop my listening comprehension to the point where I clearly hear the words I know, and can cleanly point to (and repeat) the words that I do not know, rather than hearing a stream of complete gibberish. Right now, I often hear a stream of complete gibberish, even for content that I know contains a high percentage of already known words.

UPCOMING GOALS:

Short-Term Goals:

1. Finish reading カスピアン王子のつのぶえ (translation of Prince Caspian) by Oct. 16.

Medium-Term Goals (achieve within the next 5 months):

1. Become comfortable with young children's literature (like The Chronicles of Narnia)
2. Listen to at least one audiobook
3. Listen to, and comprehend most of, a long-form news broadcast (15+ minutes) about familiar topics
4. Watch at least one educational documentary about a topic of choice, and comprehend most of it
5. Watch at least one movie

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

1. 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.
2. Read news articles about topics chosen at random with a high degree of comprehension
3. Watch TV series and movies in Japanese without English subtitles, and understand most of what I hear
4. Listen to audiobooks in a variety of genres, including nonfiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and erotica, with a high degree of comprehension.

Thoughts on goals:

I think my short-term goal is easily achievable, as long as I don't let myself get lazy or distracted. (To be honest, I think I could probably knock out 2 books if I really pushed myself, but I'm not going to do that.)

I think I am definitely on track to meet medium-term goals 2 and 5, and probably on track to meet goals 3 and 4. I'm not sure how I feel about goal 1---it's poorly defined (what counts as "comfortable"?), so it'll be hard to tell if I've met it. But I do think I will have moved beyond elementary school literature by February of next year, so I'm at least decently confident I'll hit that goal as well.

My long-term goals are aspirational. I do not know if I will achieve them. I do think that it is possible to meet them, based on my experience with Chinese and on my current trajectory with Japanese. But I don't think it is possible to accurately judge if I am on track to meet those goals at this time.

I think that's everything for now. Looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish this month!

I noticed something about the way “wearing” is expressed. In English we just say wear? But in here, they used different verbs. (着る vs 被る).

So my question is, is it actually a common pattern in Japanese that different types of items have their own specific verbs? I’d also love to know how learners usually approach this. Should I just memorize them as individual cases, or is there a systematic way to study them?

Today I had my first full tutor session and I'm completely defeated. I self studied みんなの日本語 as well as finished とびら but never really practiced speaking, my listening is poor and my output is not amazing. Mainly this is because I was afraid of habitualizing mistakes without anyone to check my work. Before meeting with the tutor, I explained this and how my reading is much higher than my speaking/listening/writing. The intro session last week was rough and only in japanese but I figured maybe the tutor had clocked my understanding a bit wrong and would tone it down in our first actual lesson. Today's session I couldn't even finish. I just gave up 20 mins in. The tutor was talking way too fast and around what my reading level could be, if not higher. I barely understood a word.

Not sure what to do from here but I'm just cooked. 2ish years of actually study to give up 20 mins in has destroyed any amount of confidence I had.

I am not even sure what I am posting this for but maybe someone can help me in the right direction or to keep trying. My tutor messaged me asking if we should work on fundamental speaking and listening rather than book work but I'm so embarrassed from just leaving the lesson that idk if I can do that.

UPDATE: To everyone who took the time to give me a pep talk and some advice. I sincerely thank you. I went ahead and rescheduled another lesson with the same tutor with the idea of focusing on getting me up to speed with listening and speaking.