Failure Story or how in a year I failed to learn any useful Japanese (and not for lack of effort).

I started my journey with learning Japanese almost exactly a year ago. In that year I clocked somewhere between 700 and 1000 hours. (I lack an exact estimate, I feel 2h a day is underestimated, while 3 would be somewhat overestimated). Yes, I did study over 2h each and every day. Despite all that, I failed to learn anything useful. This post's intention is to try to make an honest assessment on what went wrong, and maybe help someone allocate their time better. There are so many success stories here, how will you react to a failure one?

Why do I say a harsh thing about not learning anything? In order to get more immersion I bought a game: Ni no Kuni. I always played a lot of video games, and this one seemed like a perfect match for me: not too big age category, Japan made, furigana, much content voiced over. Should feel great to finally play some video games in Japanese! I came with a mindset “it's ok not to get everything, aim is to push though!” And the first hour was exactly like that: I understood enough to follow action, while not catching everything. But later several hours were the opposite: Honestly speaking I can't get anything. Seriously, the entire game could be in Chinese and I wouldn’t notice. White noise. 

Like they are speaking entirely different language, that shares only a tiny portion of grammar and vocabulary with what I’ve been learning for the past year. Same is true when reading manga: rather than reading, I spend more time looking up stuff, only to fail, look at the English translation and realize “I wouldn't guess that in 100 years”. Or failing to get any word except vegetable names from a youtube cooking video. Or failing to catch any dialogue from unsubtitled anime.

I am not pushing myself into understanding everything, but it would be nice catch anything besides “ありがとうございます” and ”おはよう”.

I would Divide my learning journey into 3 parts:

1. Total beginner.

I started with 0 knowledge of Japanese or how to learn it. My first tool was a company-paid Rosetta Stone course. Despite all the hate here, I think it was a nice tool for this phase of learning. Totally basic stuff like counting to 10 or names of colors is taught via a fun and immersive way. Speech recognition is not perfect, but it forces you to speak, which is important. Life lessons are nice.

But Rosetta Stone is surely not enough – I learned Kana (thanks to Tofugu mnemonics it went super fast). I read about grammar encountered in Rosetta on Tofugu's website. I also started WaniKani pretty soon. 

Life seemed easy, with great perspective to start learning this beautiful language.

1. Pre-intermediate.

I tried several things in this phase:

• I continued with Rosetta Stone lessons, till the end of the course. This was probably the biggest misallocation of time. Learning is slow, too much repetition, and while “no explanation” works on simple stuff, it does not for harder stuff. On the other hand, progress is progress.
• Continued on Wanikani to learn Kanji.
• I hated how Anki works, so I built my own app for vocabulary in Python. It worked more like WaniKani (you have to type both reading and meaning) because for me typing really improved retention over just thinking like in Anki.
• supernative.tv – I wanted to improve my hearing, but I was very frustrated with lack of any understanding. I was steadily gaining ranking, while not feeling any improvement in understanding. Eventually I realized I am just getting better and guessing how supernative works, and ditched the tool.
• Tadoku graded reading – It was weird, since the books simultaneously felt too easy (when I understood them) and too hard (when I didn’t). I wasn’t hooked, and didn't spend much time here. This was probably one of my mistakes. 
• Native content – manga, video games, anime with Japanese subtitles – failed massively.
• Bunpro – later at this phase I learned about Bunpro. I really liked the tool to solidify my grammar.

Life seemed easy, with great perspective to finally start learning this beautiful language.

1. Intermediate plateau:

I was around level 30 on Wanikani (87% of Kanji from Twitter!) and I solidified my N5/N4 grammar. I said “this is the time: I know enough basic Japanese, time for good stuff!” and for months I failed to make any progress. 

The only success was that I learned how to read NHK News Easy. They seemed intimidating at first, but I made a resolution to read every single piece of news every day. Took some work initially, but now I have reached the point where I can read them without furigana or word lookups. Problem is: as the name suggests, those are “easy”, and while being a reading practice, they are still closer to textbook Japanese, than actual Japanese.

I also made use of jpdb.io. I just put entire NHK News Easy articles into the automatic flashcards creator, to practice all vocabulary encountered. It was nice and progress was swift.

I “read” several manga titles. I spent more time on lookups than reading、 while still failing to understand much.  ハピネス, ルリドラゴン, ふらいんぐうぃっち. They were supposed to be easy, but they seem to be written in a different language than I’ve been learning. I don’t feel any progress having read them.

I again tried all the other immersive stuff, and the results I described in the beginning. 

Being dissatisfied with my skills, I retreated to “easy” stuff: I am level 50 at Wanikani, finishing N3 on Bunpro, over 3000 flashcards on jpdb. 

What was my mistake? Probably overdoing it on simple learning activities. I should ditch (or suspend) Wanikani on level 30, and learn only those Kanji, which I actually encounter. I should not waste time on grammar beyond N4. All this stuff will be useful eventually, but right now it is postponing what is really needed. I should make flashcards only from actually encountered words. And I should power through reading: manga might be hard, but I must eventually get it.

Feels bad to waste 6 months of learning.