Language learning can be motivated by a continued sense of progress and accomplishment, and nothing is better for that than being able to use the new language in ways that weren’t possible previously.
For me the most recent such experience was from playing Genshin Impact in Japanese, with Japanese subtitles.
12 months ago I barely knew how to read Hiragana. But I just watched [this cutscene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6s99U4mfRM) and was really moved by the beautiful story and the writing, including the wonderfully localized poem at the end.
Then I felt emotional again when I realized my Japanese reached a milestone that made enjoying something at this level possible in the first place.
Please feel free to share your own experience.
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I’m learning Japanese too! I’m not that good but I can understand roughly 60% of anime or Japanese games without subs.
The first time I felt a sense of accomplishment with language learning was when I went from failing in German to getting the highest marks in my class.
I also learned hiragana and katakana in a week and ditched the romaji after that, and I have no problem reading with those scripts now. I also threw myself head first into the kanji, and at this point my kanji knowledge is heaps more than everything else.
I’m also proud of myself for being able to do this while balancing school work.
Anyway, that’s just my experience.
Whenever I’m reading something in English, not doing Japanese homework or studying at all, and then I end up on a webpage where something is in Japanese and my eyes immediately read it the same way I would read english, I short circuit like, “wait I’m that good? I didn’t have to sit there and sound it out, it just happened?”
It isn’t consistent, but when it happens I feel really good about myself…and kinda weird, because brains are weird. It’s like, why can’t my brain do that *all* the time yet? It’s almost always newer content this happens with too, it’s almost never old shit I’ve known for years.
* I listened to the Japanese weather bloopers and when they were like “Let’s cut to the weather camera and see how that’s going” I was all like “yeah I understood that”
* I played monster hunter and when my characters were bantering to each other in Japanese I was like yeah I understood that
* I keep this kirby art book by my dinner table in case some hold up for dinner and I can even read most of it w/out the dictionary
I started learning Japanese with lots of passive listening because sitting down and not understanding anything was frustrating. But I stopped because I made the realization that it was just white noise 95% of the time.
So I learned like 3500 vocab in a premade deck on anki, I made like 1000 more of my own cards watching anime and YouTube.
This past week, I started doing near non stop passive listening to anime I have already seen and here I am thinking I’m actually getting pretty good at comprehension. Definitely a big difference than where I was before when I first did passive listening. I feel like I can actually make gains now by just listening throughout the day.
I have recently started trying to take learning it seriously. I just finished a 3 month trip to Japan to try to get an idea of where it would bring me.
I went to Taiwan after when my visa was up. I was really discouraged with myself as I did not spend a lot of time learning anything new rather I was trying to get a feel for living in different areas as I planned to study at a language school in 2024.
I was sitting in my rundown hotel communal area yesterday and two older Japanese men sat down and started talking. After bathing in mandarin for a few days straight it was comforting to understand a human for once.
I had got the courage to ask them if they were Japanese and they invited me to sit with them and we talked for an hour with a mix of my broken Japanese their broken English and Google translate.
The one man was from Kobe and gave me his number and address and asked to let him know if I ever plan to visit so we could meet up.
That experience really gave me some momentum to look forward to returning to Tokyo at the end of the week to keep studying.
Anytime i dont have to look up a kanji or grammar lol im like “i actually get this!!!”
There’s better earlier examples, but recently reading through all 4 volumes of [クラスで2番目に可愛い女の子と友だちになった](https://learnnatively.com/book/c469a95d36/%5D without translation, and all 3 volumes of [君に紡ぐ傍白](https://learnnatively.com/book/c7e61b09e6/) mostly without translation (I checked a few things in Vol 3).
Plenty of other moments where I’ve felt the opposite too though (like how am I still struggling with xyz thing?)
I was scrolling my japanese playlist and I read a title of a song, and I was like “w-wait, I can read the kanji and understand the full title?”. I am still N5, but honestly those small moments keep me going.
you learned Japanese in a year and understand everything said in that cutscene??? Word to word? 😭
I have N1 since 2018 but I’m still 80% lost in poetic Japanese like this lmaaoooo
(though I expected it since I don’t really consume Japanese medias anymore since the first time I seriously learned Japanese)
Reading doujins