Hey all, I’ve been studying Japanese for about a year and a half total and I just got home from my third visit to Japan. I was very surprised at how much Japanese I could use so I thought it would be interesting to write up a little report.
**First visit to Japan:**
I first visited Japan in December 2019. It was one of the best experiences of my life and I decided I wanted to learn the language. I studied off and on for the next 3 years, but couldn’t find a study routine that made sense for me (and Japan being closed for 3 years due to Covid was very demotivating). I may have studied for a total of 6 months spread throughout those 3 years, and that studying was mostly just Wanikani.
**My second visit to Japan:**
Japan re-opened last year and I finally went back for a second time in December 2022. My Japanese was obviously extremely limited but I was surprised at how much I knew. I couldn’t have any sort of conversation whatsoever but I generally knew how to ask for very common things. I could recognize maybe 1/3 of the words in any given sentence, and I could tell the general topic of a conversation but couldn’t make out any real information.
However on that second visit my pronunciation was already pretty good (I don’t know why – the only “immersion” I had done at that point was Dogen’s youtube videos lol), to the point that I stopped getting 日本語上手’d and instead people would ask me if I lived in Japan. I took that as a real compliment.
After my second visit to Japan I committed to a serious study routine for 2023 and I put in the time to find one that worked for me. The study routine I settled on was three-pronged:
1. Genki I+II for grammar.
2. The Anki Core 2k deck for vocabulary
3. Wanikani for kanji (and more vocab).
This combination worked really really well for me and I studied pretty intensely, about 2 hours a day (which is intensive for someone with a full-time job, unlike the hikikomori in this sub who talk about studying 8 hours a day). Genki took me 3 months and the Anki deck took me 6. At that point I was up to ~700 kanji in Wanikani. In July 2023 I stopped all three lines of formal study and set a goal to immerse at least an hour a day. It’s been hard to keep that up and I’ve only logged about 35 hours of immersion so far. I really got in the groove last month when I found the show Polar Bear Cafe which is the most comprehensible non-children’s show I’ve found so far, so most of my immersion has been in the past month.
So in summary, total study up to this point has been maybe 6 months of screwing around over a 3-year period, then 6 months of serious active study in 2023, then about 35 hours of immersion and sentence mining. With that foundation of study, I went on my third trip to Japan at the end of October 2023, for three weeks.
**Third trip: October-November 2023.**
On this trip my Japanese was noticeably WAY better than last time but still nowhere near fluent.
**Reading**: I could understand about 1/3 to 1/2 of self-contained instances of Japanese. – a warning sign, a notice, an audio announcement, etc. Note that I don’t mean I understood 1/3 to 1/2 of *words/characters*. There were instances of Japanese that I understood without knowing every word or character, and conversely there were things I didn’t understand even though I knew most of the words within it.
**Speaking**: My speaking ability was very limited but it was enormously better than when I last visited. I’d say I was at an elementary school level of speaking. I could talk about direct facts and occurrences, but generally didn’t know how to express things related to thoughts and feelings and other more complex things. I was able to make a little small talk and have very basic conversations with people, and generally if I asked them to use simple words and speak slowly, we could have a very functional interaction. I was also able to complete almost all “day to day” interactions (conbini, hotel check in, asking for directions, etc) entirely in Japanese.
People again told me that my pronunciation was really good and my Japanese sounded natural. This is definitely from immersion and probably from Dogen’s pitch accent Patreon course (which is awesome). It’s also because I automatically imitate the ways people speak in everyday natural Japanese. My personality is also expressed a bit differently than in English as a result of this.
My speaking ability this time was good enough that it allowed me access to things that a non-japanese speaker wouldn’t have access to. E.g. an onsen in the mountains where the owner spoke absolutely zero English. I was also able to navigate and function in towns that had no English.
I should say again that no aspect of my Japanese is anywhere near “good” yet and I still can’t express or understand things that are more complex than the basics. But it feels good to be conversational at a very, very, very simple level.
There’s also something interesting I’ve noticed. I think native Japanese speakers’ reaction to you speaking Japanese progresses through phases. When I first visited Japan and used my bad tourist Japanese with bad pronunciation, I heard 日本語上手 constantly. The second time I visited, I only heard that once and instead was asked if I live in Japan. This time, I got one of four main reactions:
1. Zero reaction – the person just responded in Japanese and we went from there. Most common overall, especially from elderly people.
2. “Do you live in Japan?” – “No” – “Okay, but did you live here before?”
3. “Why do you know Japanese?” / “Where did you study Japanese?”
4. Shock/surprise that my Japanese sounded so natural. Most common from younger people.
On a bad note, I also made my first major blunder in Japanese. You know how they say “enough to be dangerous?” Well, I’m there. I was eating dinner at an izakaya in Koyasan, talking a bit in Japanese with the owner lady and the other customers. I had heard in my immersion that the lady who owns a restaurant like this is called a ママさん. So when I wanted to ask for more water, I said ママさん、お水ください。 She looked a little surprised but didn’t get angry or correct me or anything. Later I wondered why she looked surprised so I googled ママさん… and it turns out that it’s extremely rude and is basically like referring to her like she’s the mistress of a brothel. I was mortified. It was on my mind for a lot of that evening and the next morning so I decided to write her a note apologizing and that I didn’t know it was rude, and I left it in the izakaya’s mailbox before I left town. I hope she reads it lol.
I think it was a good lesson because I’ve gotten a little casual with my Japanese and I needed the wakeup call. I should have done some research before just blindly experimenting with a word like that. I’ve gotten casual in other ways too – I tend to skip the ます form of verbs a lot and I shorten phrases when it’s convenient/natural, like です to ～す, (e.g. “カードもいい～すか？”). But I think it’s a little early in my Japanese studying journey to be playing fast and loose like that.
Overall this trip was extremely motivating. I really think that anyone who is studying Japanese and has the means to visit Japan should do it. It’ll do wonders for your motivation and studying and will make it feel that much more real.
The trip also showed me where I need to improve next. That’s primarily by studying more vocabulary. I’ve always done well with formal study (textbook, classroom, etc) and it’s the same with Japanese. I’m generally able to recognize, understand, and use words that I’ve studied in Anki even if I haven’t absorbed them much in my immersion yet. On this trip I could use the words I’ve already studied but I don’t think 2000 words is enough to really do much. So I think I’m going to study the next 2000 or 4000 words as well. The other area I need to improve is just to learn more everyday phrases and types of sentences. There are ideas I just don’t know how to express in Japanese.