First Year retrospective

I’ve been lurking on this sub for the past year, but I really don’t like to post due to communication difficulties and anxiety. This post is sure to make me anxious too. But I think it’s good to share one’s own experiences as well as write down for one’s own purposes; “this is how I felt in the year of 2024.” Maybe I’ll look back at this a year later in embarrassment of my thoughts today, like a schadenfreude of your past self. What a clutz that guy was.

I started with \~30 years of exposure to anime, but little knowledge of the language itself. It’s a little difficult to say exactly how much progress I made because I haven’t followed a textbook and I’m not shooting to pass the JLPT so what do I measure? Well, I’m 7,000 cards into Anki (that’s not 7000 words, just cards), can have simple conversations and occasionally convey complicated ideas though it’s much easier in writing than speaking. I write essays and play games in Japanese.

At the bottom I will give details on various categories such as reading/listening/speaking/writing, but first comes my overall story, what worked for me, and what didn’t. I feel that some of what I did that I found really effective for me is maybe because I’m kind of weird, though.

This post is kind of long so if anyone wants to comment, I’d ask they read the STORY section at least and feel free to skip any others.

# STORY

I started learning Japanese in April of last year. It was really hard finding quality information about how to even go about learning Japanese as there are a lot of opinions and they often conflict with each other. The resources I found most helpful at the start were tofugu articles (though I wish I’d known about imabi), curedolly videos, and… ChatGPT (please don’t hate me!). I tried to read manga alongside a translated version and ended up giving up after 65 chapters of “BLAME!” and probably understanding very little, though I probably should’ve found something simpler sooner.

I tried Genki, but couldn’t really stick with it because it didn’t line up at all with the material I was reading; I needed something much more comprehensive and that could be used as a reference rather than a guide. Basically, I was lost for the first two or three months with little more than a J-E dictionary and some knowledge thanks to tofugu.

I tried to make my primary dictionary goo辞書 basically as soon as I was able to start reading definitions with the help of a J-E dictionary. To be honest, often with the help of Google Translate at the start. Google is as unreliable of a translator as people say, but some of the things I learned at that time by reading translated definitions, like the difference between 開ける（あける） and 開く（ひらく） and how they differ from English’s “open,” have stuck with me to this day, even though I can now just read their definitions. And these understandings were practically impossible for me to obtain by relying on the explanations given by J-E dictionaries.

This also ended up being my primary grammar guide as a lot of grammar points don’t seem to be a lot more than words and maybe a particle they combine with, and many of them seem to be covered in monolinguistic dictionaries as definitions. For example, for に越したことはない:

[Bunpro](https://bunpro.jp/ja/grammar_points/%E3%81%AB%E8%B6%8A%E3%81%97%E3%81%9F%E3%81%93%E3%81%A8%E3%81%AF%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84): “There is nothing better than, It is the best, Would be the best”

[Goo](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E8%B6%8A%E3%81%99/#jn-79181): “５ （「…にこしたことはない」のように打消しの表現を伴って）…するのがいちばんよい。「早いに—・したことはない」”

I find goo’s definition here to be roughly as easy to understand and because it’s right next to the definitions, it’s easier for me to understand in Japanese (without translating), and it’s easier for me to get a feel for why the grammatical pattern took on this meaning and why/how it uses に. Plus, I get to learn this usage of こす at the same time as I learned the word itself. This just feels like the faster route to me. Plus, I’m not big on memorizing grammar points in the first place, particularly in cases like this where I hope to internalize this usage by properly conceptualizing こす.

Though the dictionary doesn’t necessarily cover all the points bunpro and other sources do. For example, it [contains an entry on “ずにはいられない”](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E3%81%9A%E3%81%AB%E3%81%AF%E3%81%84%E3%82%89%E3%82%8C%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84/), but not “いられない,” which I find confusing on its own, coming from English.

I don’t know if other people struggle with this, but at times I find it hard to “untranslate” explanations of grammar and terms given into English to make them applicable to Japanese. It can be hard to fully understand an explanation given in Japanese, but it can also be hard to apply explanations given in English. “Stop thinking in English” is advice I often hear, but advice for learners is almost always given in English (even for those coming from other languages) so I struggled for a long time to not conceptualize Japanese as “untranslated English.” For example, to take bunpro’s advice on によって meaning “depending on,” if I read “AによってB”, I’d have to translate both A and B, then stick “depending on” in the middle, remember to flip the order, and only then come out with something sensible (assuming “depending on” was the best translation). It became much easier when I started being able to read the description of unknown Japanese concepts in terms of known concepts and could think about them more abstractly. Then when I’m still struggling, apply in-English advice backwards to work towards understanding the more literal meanings of things.

One last thing about monolinguistic dictionaries: J-E dictionaries at times can contain pseudo-translational-equivalents (the meaning is not the same, though the translation is correct) and I thought monolinguistic dictionaries would give me the more literal meanings of words, but this is not always true. Particularly in the case of idiomatic expressions, it seems. For example, どころか is defined by goo as “ある事柄を挙げ、それを否定することによって、あとの内容を強調する” ([https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E3%81%A9%E3%81%93%E3%82%8D%E3%81%8B/#jn-158626](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E3%81%A9%E3%81%93%E3%82%8D%E3%81%8B/#jn-158626)) and understanding this definition is no substitute for thinking about usage examples and what どころ and か imply in this phrase and its possible etymology.

Moving on…

I got a penpal on mylanguageexchange.com probably much sooner than is advisable because I would spend hours writing only a single paragraph in Japanese, checking my grammar with ChatGPT, sending it off, and it still being not perfect despite the robot’s help. At the start it took me around half an hour to construct reasonable sentences and was probably not worth the effort. However, by the six or seven month mark I felt I was able to construct reasonable sentences, reasonably quickly and without ChatGPT’s help. Since then, I’ve done writing practice in various places.

I find that writing practice reinforces my reading comprehension and it gives me room to test my understanding of what I read by trying to use similar phrases in new contexts and see if it works based on the feedback I receive. The learning curve is incredibly steep, but this means there is lots of room for error which makes for fast improvement. Succeeding and writing a perfect essay means not learning anything new–I already knew how to express every thought. Making mistakes gives opportunity for growth. I make many mistakes, which might be good for growth, but it doesn’t feel very good.

I tried playing some games in Japanese and it was just barely doable. By the time the Live a Live remake came around, it was playable, but I was a bit lost at times. My penpal recommended me Raging Loop and while sections of it are very challenging, it’s a pretty interesting story, funny, well written, and I keep coming back to it. Though right now I’m playing Persona 3 Reload and its grammar and vocabulary is much simpler; still above my level, but approachable. There are many 日常言葉 which were lacking from my vocabulary.

# Relearning

Something I found frustrating around 4-5 months in was that particles are fundamental to understanding Japanese, but the explanations I received of them felt either insufficient or confusing. Out of frustration, I spent two weeks going through all the definitions of the 格助詞 and writing translations of them into a doc, frequently relying on Google Translate when a line was too complicated for me, and marking it to be retranslated by hand later on. While this wasn’t perfect, it did give me a reference that I kept referring to time and time again over other sources, and this is when I really felt I was starting to vaguely understand Japanese. It was easier to see how things fit together because I had an outline of the whole picture whereas before I only had a small corner colored in.

I feel that language learning resources are demanded to make things easily understandable by their readership. However, learning is not happening when one gains new information, it happens when this information causes thoughts which reveal the implications of that information and new ideas form. So I try to avoid explanations that I can understand easily as I feel I cannot learn anything that way.

I don’t see this site talked about at all, so I want to give special mention to [www.kokugobunpou.com](http://www.kokugobunpou.com/). I essentially decided to rebuild my understanding of Japanese from scratch a second time by reading this site and this was enormously helpful to me. It gives useful descriptions of the basic Japanese grammar in Japanese and that really helps cut through a lot of things that I think can get very confusing when using English grammatical terms to describe Japanese grammar and semantics. I would recommend if one only read one article from this site, it should be the second article, “文節の働き(1)主語・述語”, as what it covers is something that I think is fundamental to Japanese grammar. There are also detailed articles on all verb conjugations, parts of speech, etc..

One advantage to monolinguistic sources for me is they tend to not use a ton of linguistic theoretical language that isn’t directly applicable and specific to Japanese. Even a lot of basic terms in English like “subject” and “predicate” I feel can get messy when discussing Japanese grammar which differentiates between 主語、主部、主体、述語、述部, and so forth. So even if a site does speak with the necessary level of precision in English, that forces me to maintain dual terminology in my mind which is just much harder. Even if they’re in Japanese, I tend to wonder about sites that use terms like ます形 when 連用形 seems like the much more logical term to use.

# LANGUAGE EXCHANGE

On the way to learning Japanese, I have taken a liking to helping Japanese people learn English. It’s kind of revealed how little I actually understand about English, but what I do understand I feel I am good at explaining. And seeing where Japanese people struggle with English tells me a lot about how Japanese works. What I understand of Japanese helps me diagnose misunderstandings of grammar and terminology which then transfers to helping me rid myself of those misunderstandings when I attempt to produce Japanese or am trying to comprehend someone else’s words.

[https://langcorrect.com/](https://langcorrect.com/) is where I’m practicing writing and giving writing advice these days.

[イングリッシュ・ドクターの西澤ロイ](https://www.youtube.com/@englishdoctor_roy) has become one of my favorite youtube channels which I frequently recommend to Japanese people learning English. Frankly, I too learn more about English by watching it and occasionally discuss English with learners in the commends. Though one think really cool about イングリッシュ・ドクターの西澤ロイ is that, unlike most similar channels, they respond to every comment they receive and are always helpful, within reason.

I really want to find more ways to conduct language exchange, but I haven’t really found anything else that works for me and I’m not really a social butterfly to begin with.

# ANKI

Somehow I finally managed to get through one of the core 2k decks. I had issues with the deck in terms of questionable example sentences and non-literal translations, but the fact that they’d already gone through the effort of including images, sound, and sentences made it a good launching pad for me.

For my own deck creation, I had numerous attempts that I considered failures until I finally figured out how to accomplish all of my goals: Monolinguistic definitions, furigana where needed, reverse cards, and efficiency. I eventually learned that I could highlight parts of a word’s definition that most clarified the meaning of a word and greatly reduce the amount of time spent reading my cards.

While I don’t know if studying reverse cards has helped get words into my active vocabulary faster or make my usage of these words more accurate (though I would like to think it has), I do feel anecdotally that it improved my retention rate. I have often seen it advised that people not worry too much about English translation -> Japanese word cards since it might be difficult or impossible to guess, but using monolinguistic translations and highlighting the parts of the definitions that differentiate words from each other I feel made this feasible.

Occasionally, I have to add information to cards, though. For example, what’s the difference between 痕跡 and 形跡? I found chigai.site/9065/ and added its information to the definitions of both which allows me to differentiate between which word I’m trying to guess based on the definition.

Goo also has a thesaurus, [https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/thsrs/](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/thsrs/), which can be used to [compare words like 表示 or 指示](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/thsrs/9637/meaning/m1u/) and even discover new words like 例示.

[\(using highlighting to reduce the amount I have to read to guess the word\)](https://preview.redd.it/wb52qcntzsoc1.png?width=1103&format=png&auto=webp&s=16e96c61f8cfc2fd1dd0bce6f4bc377ab06b56cd)

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[\(The full card contains extra information like pitch accents, supplemental explanations, and additional example sentences.\)](https://preview.redd.it/t2xrcr3wzsoc1.png?width=1039&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd3b30b528695044e1c37dd873dbf13c75205c5c)

Stats: Not quite as good as I’d like, but I’m learning 10 cards a day and it seems maintainable.

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https://preview.redd.it/your3kcyzsoc1.png?width=934&format=png&auto=webp&s=e00365cd4da6cc82e60ba5614e98fdf034fd6d47

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https://preview.redd.it/cq33zdjzzsoc1.png?width=926&format=png&auto=webp&s=f65e2cc0679e7887f5cf8c32193645474d1a606f

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https://preview.redd.it/3dkpf0920toc1.png?width=874&format=png&auto=webp&s=82b71e05887e7463dbfa70a61bfe0aa81c8d3616

# LISTENING

I’ve been watching Mario Maker streamers almost since I started learning Japanese and while in the beginning I had to really focus on what they were saying to make any sense at all about what they were talking about, at this point I am at least able to understand a portion of what they’re saying without really trying. In any event, the videos would be fun to watch even if they were in Latin.

However, my vocabulary is still far too lacking and even if I can piece together what they’re saying, for sentences that aren’t incredibly simple it might take me too long to comprehend. I can’t really watch a lot of anime because the process is just too slow if I’m going to end up pausing every three seconds to look up words anyway.

Visual novel-style games with voiced lines seem like the much better option since I can close my eyes and listen for listening practice, then bolster my understanding by reading what I just listened to. Then, I can close my eyes again and have the audio replay, but this time try to catch every verbal sound and follow the dialogue with my mind.

At least for me, it mostly seems to come down to reading. I can read, learn, and memorize words and phrases and then hear and understand them much better than the other way around.

# READING

I need to do a lot more of this. I think I’m nearing the end of the visual novel Raging Loop and really enjoying it, but right now I’m wanting to play Persona 3 Reload. I’m really starting to realize how the Persona games are seemingly 90% reading, and especially at the slow pace I need to go at, constantly looking up words and creating cards in anki, it’s very, very slow.

I tend to be able to at least basically understand what people are saying, but I feel like I’m relying on context a lot. Perhaps the gap between understanding things linguistically on a surface level vs deeply is years worth of difference. And of course, I don’t think a native-level understanding is obtainable, but perhaps it can be emulated.

# SPEAKING

Speaking combines my lack of listening comprehension with my lack of vocabulary, or at least lack of easily-usable vocabulary so I think it’s my worst area and I find it hard to get practice. Once or twice a month I can afford to do an Italki session. In my last italki session, my teacher was apparently impressed by my use of てっきり～思いました and 余裕がない according to the feedback they left me. Having used てっきり reminds me that for a very long time I was constructing sentences in Japanese word by word, but I’m starting to be able to at least occasionally think on the sentence level which is making my production much faster and allows me to use words like this which only fit within a sentence-level structure. I think it’s due to having practiced writing so much.

Still, because I’m without a textbook, it often feels like there are basic things I’m supposed to have internalized that just aren’t, like when I mistakenly said 知っていないです instead of 知りません. And even simple questions like どこに住んでいますか？ can unearth areas of neglect, like what’s the word for “State”? (州)

# WRITING

すごく恥ずかしいんですけど、見せたほうが早いですね。

書く練習はたくさんありますけど、「何もわからない」という気もします。文章の意味を理解してもらいそうなことがありますけど、自然な表現とかができないかもしれません。でも、向上が見えないことは向上がないわけではなく、いつの間にか向上しました。

ところで、今、langcorrect.comに通っていることで、英語が話せるようになりたい人の投稿を添削したり、私の投稿を添削してもらいたりしています。添削する時には、英語の投稿に添う日本語版を読むことで、使えそうな言葉やフレーズを見つけることが多くて、翻訳や読解の練習にもなります。

添削して、いろんなことを教えてくれていたことにありがたいんですけど、参考にするべきアドバイスから外れて同じ間違いを繰り返してしまう可能が心配です。

書いたり話したりする練習は、聞いたり読んだりしたことの解釈した意味は正しいかどうかを試してみることとして、日本語への理解が深める効果があることだと思います。

これまでは、読み手に文章の意味が理解してもらう以上は望んでいなかったが、これからはもっと自然な表現をすることを狙っています。

by SplinterOfChaos