Just a year ago I’ve known nothing but kana, basic grammar and like 100 words of basic vocabulary. Now I fluently understand written Japanese even within some narrowly specialized topics (the ones I like personally, there’s still a lot to improve). I mainly used anime, visual novels and texts from wikipedia or news that I found interesting.
Edit: By fluency I mean understanding the content I like and consume everyday, I’m still struggling with some parts of the language, I’m not proficient at understanding idioms or really advanced vocabulary
[https://imgur.com/a/g7z6KYH](https://imgur.com/a/g7z6KYH)
The first step was the very basic vocabulary – a pre-made Anki deck with about 1000 words. It was hard but harder was the realization it’s absolutely not enough for understanding everything more than “konnichiwa” type of conversations. Japanese is too reliant on individual meanings of kanji – I knew words like 理解 but had no idea 理 represents the idea of logic and 解 the idea of understanding and was confused whenever I saw them together with other kanjis. Forgetting basic vocabulary after getting further is also not a rare occasion.
*料理? Paid….what?*
After that I’ve discovered mpvacious + yomichan – it granted me the ability to watch videos and save vocabulary from it.
Example of a card I create in 2-3 seconds: [https://imgur.com/a/PdQA37r](https://imgur.com/a/PdQA37r)
Watching something was a real challenge. Sometimes I had to look up each word in a sentence, the enjoyment of watching an episode was greatly reduced by all these times I have to pause and look up something but still I was ok with it as the episodes were awesome by themselves. Choosing an anime that doesn’t have lots of advanced vocabulary but is enjoyable at the same time is not easy.
On average I’ve been mining and learning about 25-100 words per day (but for this post I’ve speedrunned ～400 cards for 3 days, lol, wouldn’t recommend doing it again) and spending about 1,5h on it with the intervals of about 2 sec/a card with huge leaps representing the strong factor of procrastination I’ve been struggling with. The only thing that was pushing me further is the “dependency” on Anki and realizing if I skip a day I’ll have to face Anki for 2+ hours the next day or if I stop it completely I’ll eventually forget everything I was studying and hours of work will just vanish in space. It took me too much time to actually start reviewing daily though.. So my daily stats look like that: [https://imgur.com/a/UMzzQq5](https://imgur.com/a/UMzzQq5)
And what’s awesome about knowing so much vocabulary is the fact that you actually start to have problems with finding unknown and yet useful vocabulary (I don’t bother with terms I personally don’t understand even in my native language or some old Japanese vocabulary I’ll see again only once in a lifetime). I can watch an entire episode and get only 5-10 new cards from it, so getting 100 cards like previously takes really a lot of time. It’s much more than I currently know in English.
Although the main disadvantage is the fact that it’s rather passive than active vocabulary. It might take me a lot of time to remember a word I’ve trained myself to instantly recognize. I’ve never written anything more than responses in a simple chat with random people from Japan, I have almost no experience in writing and speaking.
Also the fact that I still struggle with understanding spoken Japanese bothers me a lot. Kanji matter too much in this language.
*You said kishou? Oh, you mean 気象? But we don’t seem to talk about weather, so 気性? 徽章…? \*looking up\* oh..it was 希少..*
The correct word just doesn’t even float in my mind, so any tips for how to get through this?
Other stats: [https://imgur.com/a/pOmXS0F](https://imgur.com/a/pOmXS0F).
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But generally speaking, it was in awesome journey. Just realizing that you fluently understand the language that was completely alien for you just a year ago is amazing. I don’t regret all hours spent on reviewing during school breaks, it was fun to immerse into another culture. I’ll keep studying and probably pick another language when I’ll feel ready for it
8 comments
> Now I fluently understand written Japanese even within narrowly specialized topics.
I can’t help but feel like this is hyperbole even at 10k cards. I have more than 15k cards mined currently and I feel like I’m still far from this point. Heck, most VNs have more than 20k unique words. I get that 10k cards is a lot, but fluency “even within narrowly specialized topics” just seems like taking it too far.
I think this way can help other people. Well done author for sharing
If you learn 私雨 (the best word) you can be at 10001 cards
I cannot imagine averaging 756 reviews a day. Big ups but holy hell I get fatigued after ~120
I really wish that as a community we had some way to aggregate statistics for time studying vs assessed reading level, separated by study method. Posts like this are fun to read, but I always find it hard to draw strong conclusions from them due to their inherent subjectivity :(.
Fluency isn’t measured in card collection, this isn’t Magic the Gathering. Fluency is gauged in real life in situ.
What’s the last book you read in Japanese?
Language study: you’re doing it wrong.