Update: 200 hours of Hellotalk in a month.

I’ve done around 200 hours of Hellotalk in just under a month. I can say that I’m finally burnt out and it’s time for a break. In total I have done around 400 hours of speaking and have definitely noticed a drastic improvement in speaking.

What surprised me is that my reading speed has almost doubled even though I’ve barely done any reading outside of doing 朗読 with my Japanese teacher. After speaking so much, the text I’m sounding out in my head seems to have a much better flow, also with the correct pitch in my head. Reading feels so much nicer as my subvocalisation is more correct. The old sound I used to make in my head will probably feel disgusting to me now.

Of course after speaking so much my listening has also improved a lot. What’s also interesting is that I can listen to learners and instantly hear the pitch mistakes they make, and also vaguely grasp why it sounds unnatural. This of course only applies to words that I know well, there are still some words where I don’t know the pitch of; I’m planning to fix that by reading a lot of novels.

I feel at this point, I can benefit from doing tons of input before outputting again. I’m occassionally going to chat with some friends on Hellotalk, outside of that I’m mainly going to focus on more input at this point.