[Progress Report] Reflecting on Two Years of Mining: Where I Was, Where I Am, What I Learned, and What’s Next.

September 9 marks two years since I started mining vocab into anki. I want to give a progress report and talk a bit about where I was when I started, where I am after two years, and what I have learned along the way. My hope is that sharing my experience can help anyone else who struggles with areas where I also ran into trouble. This is going to be very long.

***Where I started:***

I started learning Japanese several years ago. Originally I bought Genki and tried studying it on my own. That didn’t work out. Then I enrolled into a language school and moved to Japan to study Japanese. In the beginning it felt like the classes were working, but ultimately that didn’t work out either (I’ll elaborate more on this later) and I quit. I enrolled into a second language school which was focused more on conversation (the original was for JLPT prep and aimed to get you into a Japanese university) and that one wasn’t bad but I didn’t feel like my level was growing so I ultimately dropped it. I spent a few months trying various textbooks and apps on my own, and again none of them stuck. I managed to learn a little bit through the variety of methods that I tried, but it wasn’t anything substantial. I knew some basic grammar, I knew a few hundred kanji, and I knew a few thousand vocab (I can’t give a definite number. It was at least 1k words, but probably closer to 3k).

The level that I reached wasn’t enough for my goals. Most importantly, I live in Japan and that’s nowhere near high enough to live a good life here. I understood that to have a proper life I needed to reach fluency, but no matter what I tried nothing was taking me there.

I was frustrated. I really liked manga and that was one of the things that brought me to Japan, and during my period of frustration (Around Spring 2020) I basically gave up and then just read some manga. And the most interesting thing happened! I noticed that while I was reading, I was able to learn some vocabulary through the context of what was happening in the story. I had never experienced this at the time, but I really enjoyed it so quit all of the apps and textbooks that were failing me and I kept on reading manga. After a few volumes I switched my focus over to reading a visual novel. Originally I had bought this VN when it released in 2018, but I didn’t know about all of the tools for mining back then so I was manually searching words and gave up very quickly because it was so tedious. This time around, I followed a guide online for how to use a pop-up dictionary tool and I began reading like that. This was exciting because it made more of the story comprehensible to me, and I found that I was learning lots of words just by reading. I was making more progress than with the manga which was exciting also.

And then two years ago in September of 2020 (first card mined was on September 9) I followed another guide online to improve my setup. I switched to using Yomichan for looking up words (I was using some other tool for Firefox before that) and I began making flashcards in Anki for all of the unknown vocab. I had previously tried Anki when I was a language school student, but it didn’t work out. But this time was different – I was adding sentences to my cards which really helped with comprehension, and the card creation was mostly automated which made it easy and manageable, so I stuck with it. At the time it felt more like a pipe-dream than an actual goal, but I had hoped that I could reach 10k vocab and 2k kanji within two years. I had read somewhere that someone who passes the N1 knows 10k words and 2k kanji, so that was kind of my dream.

***Where I am now:***

Tomorrow is September 9, the two year anniversary of when I started mining. As of yesterday, I have 9,003 cards mined in Anki which – if you count the 1k+ words that I already knew when I started mining – brings me to my goal of 10k words. As for kanji, I used an Anki extension called Anki Grid which allows me to view how many individual kanji I know, and according to that extension I have reached 2,349 kanji which is well beyond what my goal was.

In terms of where that puts me, my level has certainly increased a lot since I first started. At this point, I consider myself to be on the verge of fluency but not quite there yet. The reason why I say this is based on my experience using Japanese in my daily life. Despite all of the copious amounts of cope that some people like to dish out when discussing the topic of fluency, fluency does in fact have a definition, which is *being able to express oneself easily and articulately.* Obviously this is not something that can be clearly defined, but it is something that you will certainly know whether or not you have achieved. Through my personal life I have come to the conclusion that I can mostly express myself clearly and understanding messages is rarely a problem, but there is still more work to be done.

In my job I am currently in the process of switching to a position where I can use Japanese daily. I had to be tested by some of my Japanese coworkers, and the result that they gave was that they don’t think I will have any problems with communication in my new role. Outside of work, I take kendo classes in Japanese which involves a lot of communication and I haven’t had any problems there either. I also have a wife and kids and these days we speak a mix of English and Japanese and there’s no major issues when communicating with them either. Occasionally there will be something I have to ask about in each of these situations, but at this level I can easily learn new stuff through context or have it explained to me in Japanese. However, there are still times when I am very confused, which is why I say there is still a bit of work until I am properly fluent.

***What materials did I use for immersion:***

Visual novels, anime, manga, dramas, movies, variety shows, music, radio shows and podcasts, talking with people, video games, browsing the web… Basically I took everything I normally do and switched some of it to Japanese.

***What I learned:***

1) Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: The JLPT. At the beginning of my journey I viewed the JLPT as the roadmap for learning Japanese, and that having passed it was super important and would open many doors for me. What I have learned after all of this is that **the JLPT is *mostly* useless.** Some of you are going to disagree with that, but let’s face reality: unless you are trying to enroll into a university or get a job meant specifically for foreigners within a small subset of the work field, **there is absolutely no reason to take the JLPT other than for online dick-measuring contests.** I didn’t need it to get a position using Japanese at work and when I interviewed at other companies (I’m content in my job, but I do interviews on occasion) none of them ever asked about it. I didn’t need the JLPT to get citizenship either. Most people in Japan don’t even know what the JLPT is or what the levels mean. I do intend on taking the test eventually, but since the only thing I need it for is the aforementioned online dick-measuring contests, I’m going to wait until I hit 20k words and 3k+ kanji, because I want to pass with a perfect score. However I do think I would be able to pass the test now because [when I took the online practice quiz I got a good result.](https://imgur.com/a/7WDNRlx) There are also tests from previous years floating around on some Chinese websites, and I did problems on some of those for fun and it wasn’t hard. So anyway in my experience, you don’t need to worry about the JLPT at all unless you’re trying to go to Keio or work at Mercari or something.

2) **Textbooks are terrible.** All of them. I regret wasting so much money on them. A few months ago I went digging though my cabinets to gather up all of my old textbooks and threw them away. I spent some time flipping through, and in retrospect it’s funny how a lot of these textbooks are full of mistakes. If I were to start over having known what I know now, I would have learned vocab by going through a list of words, and I would have learned grammar using [日本語NET](https://nihongokyoshi-net.com/). I also would have avoided online grammar guides like Tae Kim, Mainichi, and that other big one that I forgot the name of.

3) **Studying kanji in isolation is one of the worst ways you can waste your time.** Heisig, Kodansha Kanji Learners Course, Kanji in Context, those drill books that they make for kids, the old Nihongo no Mori videos, Wanikani, and that one website that uses sex jokes to teach kanji are all terrible. Don’t waste your time or money, just learn words and you will magically acquire kanji as an extension of that.

4) **It’s never too early to output.** Something I was shocked to find was people who say that you shouldn’t output until you’re already a high level. That’s bananas! Remember how I said I initially thought my classes were good? Well in retrospect I don’t think I was actually learning from the classes. I’m almost positive that all of my progress early on came from talking with my (at the time) Japanese girlfriend, because after we broke up was when the classes stopped being affective. I thought the problem was my teachers, but in retrospect I now realize I was wrong. The classes sucked from the beginning, but talking with a native speaker daily and constantly learning new words and grammar from her is actually what got me to the level where I could begin mining vocab (We also messaged when we were apart, so I got kanji practice from her too lol).

You should absolutely focus on making friends in Japanese. Presently, my wife, my kids, and the people in my kendo club are one of my most valuable resources as a Japanese learner.

5) **If you live in Japan, avoid Gaijin.** This one probably sounds discriminatory, but if you’re surrounding yourself with people who speak foreign languages then there is no reason to study Japanese and there’s a high chance you’re going to put it off, and it also means that you won’t integrate or assimilate because you’re actively segregating yourself (Look into acculturation for more info on this).

If you live in Japan, there’s going to be foreigners (here and abroad) who try to discourage you from assimilation or integration, and they will say things like “You will never be Japanese.” Let me just say from experience – **as a Japanese person** – that they couldn’t be more wrong. This last point is a bit funny, but I also want to add that if you get to a pretty good level of Japanese and you have a Japanese name (via naturalization), people are going to start asking you if you’re hafu or similar questions. I will share a funny anecdote about this: In my kendo club, I was in the locker room changing into my kendogi before practice and I was chatting with two of the teachers who were also in there changing. We were discussing the upcoming summer break and I made mention that my parents were coming to visit me from America. One of the teachers asked me if my dads work transferred him to America. I explained that my parents are just normal Americans, they looked confused so I told them that I naturalized and that’s why I have a Japanese name. The two teachers said that they thought I was hafu and their faces looked as if their whole worldview had had been flipped on its head. I find this especially hilarious because I’m white and I don’t look Japanese at all, and yet somehow in their heads it made more sense for me to be mixed race than it did for me to be a naturalized citizen. It’s funny, and it really challenges that tired old statement that you will hear from gaijin.

6) **Language learning discords are just a distraction and nothing more.** I said what I said.

7) **Language learning YouTubers are also just another distraction.** You’re better off just watching Japanese YouTubers. Personally I really like 猫又おかゆ, よゐこチャンネル, and 剣道まっしぐら！

8) **Just learn how to use Anki properly. Stop fighting it. Other SRS apps are inferior.**

9) The number of characters read is more important than the number of “words.”

10) **Learning Japanese is a race against time.** On the occasions that I do interact with other learners, I sometimes see people posting about how many words they’re learning per week and it’s fun to do the math and see how long it would take them to reach my current level. I’m not even exaggerating, sometimes the result is 40 years. It’s important to go at a pace that is realistic for you, but it’s also important to move at a pace by which you can make actual progress.

11) There’s nothing wrong with learning Japanese from anime.

12) **Don’t use pre-made Anki decks.** The only deck worth bothering with is one that you made yourself through mining. Most of the available pre-made decks have mistakes anyway. **This includes paid decks.** If you paid money for an Anki deck you’re a sucker.

13) **You’re probably not too busy to study, even if you think you are.** I should probably have put this higher on this list because it’s a big one. Let me very clear: When it comes to free time for studying Japanese, I have very little. I work full time, I have a wife, I have two kids, and I do kendo. If we were to make a ranking of everyone on this subreddit by available free time, I would be near the bottom of that ranking, and yet even I can reach this level in 2 years. If you think you’re too busy to study, the reality is most likely that you’re not managing your time effectively. Some days I don’t have time to read, some days I don’t speak to anyone in Japanese or watch TV. Some days I can only read for an hour (Very often). You need to find how to manage yourself properly.

14) This is somewhat an extension of the last point, but **learning Japanese is purely a matter of time investment.** The more you read/speak/listen, the better you get. Nothing else matters in terms of advancement.

15) **Japanese is learned when you’re interacting with it such as when you read, talk with sometime, or watch TV.** Talking ABOUT the language (discord), reading ABOUT the language (textbooks), or listening to someone talk ABOUT the language (YouTube, Matt vs Japan and others) is not learning.

16) Aside from media for native speakers, the only thing that was worth paying for was Anki on iOS.

17) In retrospect, I should have gotten an Android phone instead of an iPhone. on Android you can mine words into anki through Yomichan. On iOS you can’t. This is a major advantage. I got an iPhone before I started mining because I didn’t know and Japan is iPhone country. I ended up buying an Android e-reader a few months ago and that has been wonderful for mining, but using my phone would be convenient. (**Any iOS developers here? Send me a message, there’s so much I could talk with you about for making a good app to mine with on iOS.**)

18) Don’t waste your time on stuff like graded readers. Find something you’re really really interested in and dive straight into that. You will learn so much faster than if you had begun with something easy and boring like “The dog is red. The dog jumped” and moved up from there.

19) this is one of the most important points on this list. Read the Anki manual, and also learn about ease. If Anki is a chore then there is a high chance that you are in “ease hell.” I spent a long time in ease hell and thankfully I had a friend who was able to explain about ease and help me fix my deck. Don’t fall into the trap, read the Anki manual now.

***What’s next?***

I suppose my next goal might be 20k words in 2 more years, but that’s too obvious. At a certain point I will reach a level where mining slows down and I become more content, and currently it’s impossible for me to say when that will be, so it’s pointless to make another goal based on the number of known words.

My next goal is to cut out English from my life as much as possible. This has been my goal for a while now, but I am beginning to see it as a reality. Maybe I can eventually reach a place where I only use Japanese.

If you made it this far, congratulations. If anyone has questions I can try to answer in the comments. The main point of this post is just to say that I’m incredibly busy and I still managed to reach this goal, you can too if you discipline yourself. As for the 19 things I learned, I hope that can help people save some time (or braincells). Thanks for reading and have a great day.