Yet Another Second Year Report into Japanese

Hello! There isn’t actually that much second year report but I’m keeping the naming consistent.

About one year after [my first milestone report](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/q5zwfa/yet_another_oneyearintojapanese_report/), here I am again with a new update on my Japanese studies, and how far I’ve gone after about 2 years.

#### My background :

Young adult with a full-time job, I started to invest at least 1 hour a day into Japanese, with the goal to be good enough in 3 years or so at Japanese to move to Japan and work there for a few years.

# TL;DR :
During my first year, I completed Genki I + II, completed 25 levels on Wanikani, and just started reading on Satori Reader. I then chose to move away from textbooks to start immersing more. I have about 420h logged this second year.

To be honest, this second year wasn’t very good. I have stagnated a lot, and it can be solely attributed to a large lack of immersion. I kept it up for few months then hit some roadblocks, and my immersion schedule fell apart. I’m still trying to regroup the motivation to put up together a new routine and stick to it. My daily time have also been steadily decreasing the past few months, and I have been hitting the one hour/day goal much less often. If anything, I am still keeping up diligently with my kanjis and vocab reviews.

My reading is probably something like lower N3. Listening, speaking and writing level are still abymsal.
Some milestones:

– Wanikani lvl 45, just reached a 2-year long perfect streak!

– Completed all N5+N4 lessons on Bunpro. Completed half of N3 ones.

———–

## Early Year : Immersion

I read on Satori Reader and used its built-in SRS to learn new vocab I came across in it. A bit daunting at the beginning because of lot of new common words I haven’t learned at that point, slowly became easier.
I set myself the goal to read one chapter a day, which started to slip more toward 1 chapter every two days to keep a more reasonable pace, until I eventually fell out of Satori Reader as I felt like trying other immersion ressources. I completed the Kiki-Mimi Radio story during my first year, and then completed Hole in The Wall before trying different stories, but I didn’t go much far in any other.

That’s the point where I started to drift away from Satori Reader as I tried other resources.

The thing is, I love Visual Novels, and I have this pipe dream of learning passively the language while just enjoying stories I like. For the same reason I don’t mind too much reading novels either, I also think that with a resource with more prose (compared to mangas or animes that are more dialogs-focused) I’d learn much more on grammar and vocabulary.

So, that’s the point where I’m trying different stuff out.

### JPDB

First, I start using [jpdb.io](https://jpdb.io/) to be able to iron out a bit my vocabulary by learning common words I haven’t seen yet, then find a target novel or visual novel and start learning the vocabulary a bit ahead, as it has vocabulary decks for lot of them.

My quick opinion of jpbd: It’s a great SRS, with a lot of potential, but rough on the edges. It’s unclear how a lot of features work and I had to go to the official discord and ask for explanations a couple of times, and it feels like it’s missing on a bunch of quality of life features. Would still recommend it, unless you already are an Anki power user.

At that point I have now 5 SRS : Wanikani + Kamesame + Bunpro + Satori Reader + JPBD. And I want to get more immersion in? I need to do some cleaning.
So to not go insane on the SRS workload, I drop Satori’s, slow down my lessons on Wanikani, and starts to more heavily suspend leeches and block uncommons words on Kamesame.

### Immersion Attempts

I don’t remember exactly the order, but here’s what I tried.

I tried to read some NHK Easy News articles. A bit difficult, but actually fairly doable. I just never managed to stick to a proper routine with it. I highly recommend the free android app [Easy Japanese](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.eup.jpnews&hl=en&gl=US) from Todai, it agglomerates easy japanese articles from several sources, and has TONS of quality of life features. (Popup dictionary, highlight words by Nx levels…). Very clean and pleasing app.

Then I spend some time installing all the software pipeline to facilitate VN immersion, using the [Moe Way’s guide](https://learnjapanese.moe/vn/). Textractor + Texthooking + Clipboard Insert + Yomichan, ect. ([Yomichan](https://learnjapanese.moe/yomichan/) is a godsend by-the-way, maybe the single most useful tool out there, it’s a popup dictionary for web browsers.)

Tried some time trying to get the setup to work on Ao No Kana before learning it’s famous for being almost impossible to Textract properly. Then I tried out Nekopara, play for an hour or two and get very overwhelmed by the new content and vocabulary, drop off. (However I was very impressed by how clean their engine is, there’s even a one-click feature to instantly change language. So you can read in japanese and immediately peek at an official english translation.). Tried Hanahira only to test out my setup, it really looks too uninteresting.

My next try was to read the novel Kiki’s Delivery Service. I really want to be able to use a popup dictionary on my reading, and eventually found a good combination with an epub format + [Calibre](https://calibre-ebook.com/) (free reader with a popup dictionary feature). I actually managed to keep some kind of routine on this one, and read the first chapter in about two+ weeks? It was hard, and it’s when beginning the second chapter I realized how I was doing too much intensive reading, and hardly enjoying my time there. Dropped it.

I did few other immersion attempts that never really took off, like tried some graded readers.

And then that was the point where my immersion routine fell apart. It was a huge blow to my motivation, and I never properly went back to Satori Reader. Keep doing my vocab reviews, but my immersion time was getting few and far in-between and irregular. I also started dropping jpdb.
I also kind of half-dropped from Bunpro, as I realized that without good immersion, I couldn’t internalize the grammar well and it would be counter-productive to keep trying to learn more as I couldn’t cement the ones I already learnt. I keep doing the reviews, but stopped taking lessons.

### Side rant : Getting a legal copy of an epub is borderline impossible.

I really want to read novels in an epub format to be able to hook a pop-up dictionary on a desktop reader, but to legally buy one is next to impossible. All stores are either using a different proprietary format or forcing a shitty web reader, the remaining stores have unclear explanations on the format they are selling and still requires to go through so many hoops to do any purchase (Japanese adress and the likes) for it to be worth it. I spent hours searching, and when I finally give up to turn myself to piracy, it literally takes 5 minutes to find exactly what I want. Geez. I cannot condone anyone also making that choice given how hard it is to buy what you want, but if you do please at least buy a legal copy from anywhere so at least the money goes to the authors and publishers, even if you are not going to use their copy.

### Why I failed (so far)

Japanese is damn hard. I got a bit of too wishful, and thought that after forcing myself through Genki I + II and a bit of immersion, I’d finally reach the point where I could be good enough to passively learn by simply consuming interesting content. I remember how good it felt when reaching that point with English. Truth is you are not out of the woods yet at early N3, and even then it requires tons of immersion on less interesting content to get used to the language.

There’s also the issue of Intensive Reading vs Extensive Reading. (trying to understand everything you read VS just skipping stuff you don’t get and keep reading), I realized that most of my immersion was intensive and that’s why it was exhausting. I haven’t yet properly included Extensive Reading content in my routine, but I’m trying to get it to work.

There’s also the reason that I didn’t really stick with any immersion schedule. I’m probably sure that if I kept reading on Satori Reader for a year at the same pace than before, instead of trying out every other resources, I’d be in a much better place right now.

### Hopeful outlook

I have been giving a more serious again try to immersion very recently, and am trying to take the difficulty a notch-down with manga, as they have much more context to rely on.

I kinda put manga off until then because I *really* want to be able to use a pop-up dictionary in anything I read, until I learned this week of some great OCR tools for mangas.

– [manga_ocr](https://github.com/kha-white/manga-ocr), that allows you to screenshot your speech bubble and then automatically pipelines its way into clipboards and other tools to paste the text in your browser and let you Yomichan it.

– [mokuro](https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro), based on manga_ocr and takes it a step further, where it scans a folder full of manga images, and build an html file so you can open it in your browser, read it like a manga, and display clickable text whenever you hover a bubble (and let you Yomichan it again.)

I have picked up Yotsuba&, and will try to keep up a routine with it.

I have also been trying to train Listening a little harder the past few days with those exercise on [Wasabi](https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-lessons/fairy-tales-and-short-stories-with-easy-japanese/), I’ll see if it bears fruits. I find this website amazing and love the content and the clean presentation, but sadly it looks like it has been inactive for the past two years.

Some opportunity to practice my speaking with natives has also shown up, with some kind of mini group-study that might become a regular thing. Did it once and realized how much I struggled, but a little less than I thought and it’s also motivating in some ways.

### Goal for next year

Sadly enough, given that I have stagnated a lot, almost the same than last year’s.

– Get good enough at reading to consume content that interests me.
– Stick with an immersion routine.
– Practicing my listening and speaking. With Japan’s borders opening up, a trip there is starting to shape up for next summer, so I want to be able to have basic conversations by then. I am planning to get a tutor at some point, but I would like to even a bit my reading skills and basic listening so I don’t have to take the walk of shame and do Genki again.

Thank you for taking the time to read this! I remember recent posts complaining that most reports here are success stories about speedrunning the language with insane grind, at least here’s a different perspective with my very struggling second year.