I’ve been studying Japanese for approximately a year as a full time software engineer. ~7 months ago, I moved to Japan as a work transfer. Especially before moving here, I dedicated every bit of free time after my 9-5 to Japanese. On each weekday I’d study 5 hours, weekends 10 hours of anki, grammar, and immersion. Over time I stopped adding new cards and focused on immersion while keeping up with the anki reviews.
However, my immersion comes with a big asterisk. I absolutely hate reading books and articles, even in my native language, I find it so boring and get restless. For articles, if I am interested in the content, the temptation to google translate it to italian or english just to get to the information quickly is too strong. So my immersion has ended up being almost entirely listening and speaking.
**To date:**
– Grammar, atm I stopped halfway through N1 just to absorb everything before it better. But I can output nearly everything covered at N2 and parts of N1.
– 7,841 words in my anki deck
– 56.5 hours of Italki conversational practice. Started at month 4, still continuing it in Japan just to talk about niche topics.
– Several hundred hours of anime (I don’t keep track), some of which I’ve rewatched over and over and can recite entire scenes at this point.
– Yotsubato, One Punch Man
**Speaking**
My speaking gets me through 95% of situations in an average month. We use English at work. But, from ordering food, talking to ryokan staff, conversations about local news, getting my hair cut, everything I can do with no holds barred. Some people do go easy one me because I’m obviously a western face (gestures, mixing English into their sentences etc) but even when they don’t, I don’t have much trouble excluding niche topics.
Being able to speak was a gradual change, and Italki was obviously necessary for it, but I felt like rewatching my favorite shows and getting lines stuck in my head helped so much more. It seared common sentence patterns into my brain. I also practiced Japanese songs for karaoke with my work friends.
My accent is obviously foreign, but my italki teacher said it’s better than most western learners at my stage. I owe that to karaoke and memorizing lines from anime instead of just reading words from a page to myself.
**Reading…**
However, my reading is terrible. As a westerner, like everyone else I used RTK alongside my vocab mining for kanji recognition. Mnemonics are just meant to be a crutch, but I never did the bulk of reading immersion that’d let me take those training wheels off.
As a result, I read too slowly in actual real-life situations to actually be useful. I second-guess myself when I read a word, sometimes even mis-recognize it, or just plain don’t know the kanji yet. This isn’t an issue in my anki deck. Going to sushi place with my friends, I can’t read most of the kanji for the fish variety names, even if I know how to say it. I forget to, or just don’t feel like adding every kanji I don’t recognize to my anki deck right then and there.
I know I just need to read more, but manga I end up subconsciously leaning on furigana and books bore the hell out of me. I tried reading light novels, topics that are my interest, but I hate it more than anki reviews for some reason.
I don’t regret focusing on speaking and listening, as it’s led me to some treasured interactions with actual people. I.e. I had a fun conversation in Numazu with an old man in a ramen shop about the Ohtani interpreter drama, we talked about the Dodgers for half an hour after he learned I went to university in LA.
But realistically, I just need to treat reading like my anki reviews and turn it into a habit regardless of enjoyability. Like brushing your teeth, some things just aren’t fun for some people but it’s unavoidable.
Anyone else just hate reading for some reason? What was your approach?
by SymphonyofSiren