TLDR at bottom
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Started studying JP in 2018. Was a student back then so I had a lot of freetime. Initially started learning Japanese so I could read sequels/raws of series that I enjoyed. I did not want to read translations because I did feel there would be so much lost context.
Used various study methods when I was a beginner, but after initial hump the general study stack was:
– Anki Kanji deck (prebuilt deck, customized it after)
– Anki core30k deck (ridiculous deck, but I cleaned and customized it to fit my needs well)
– various Anki grammar decks into one (Genki 1 and 2, Tobira intermidiate, Shin Kanzen Master N1/N2)
– any native material that interested me at the time (listening and/or reading)
Eventually, I was able to read novels at a decent enough pace (reading speed and frequency of lookups – which reading electronically helps greatly due to availability of dictionary). This is when my motivation for learning Japanese fell off. I reached my goal!
My listening ability was not the best during this time but I honestly don’t remember lol
Over 2 years I reached 2000 kanji and 7500 words and was aiming for N1, but burned myself out due to stacking my japanese studies with heavy school load. Plus, N1 didn’t mean much to me if I reached my real goal of being able to read. After that, Anki was on pause from late 2019 all the way to mid 2023.
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During that time though, I would occasionally spend my time before bed reading light novels, or listen to seiyuu radio. End of 2022 I finished 14 books in total (1 physical, mostly kindle on phone, and few on booklive/honto).
During this 4 year period I basically did not touch Anki at all. Last year I decided to get back into actively studying japanese. I first started with my dreaded massive Anki backlog. Since I work full time now, it’s been a on and off thing to get through that nightmare. I used a bunch of small filtered decks to slowly go through it (grouped by 100-200 cards each).
I suspended EVERY card forgot during this and ended up keeping 1400 kanji and 5000 words. Great for a large gap in study! Casual reading definitely played big part in this.
To further try and prove to myself I am serious about improving in Japanese again. I signed up for the 2023 December N2. I took N2 (only lightly prepped for it) last December to benchmark myself before resuming active study.
By the time I took N2, I rereached 2000 kanji and 6000 words. And in total I have read 28 books (14 in the past year). Double of the amount of jp books read in the past 4 years!
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I barely passed with 106/180. Surprisingly my listening score was significantly higher than my grammar/reading scores… But a win is a win.
Now my new goal is to just read (and listen) much more now. I aim to reach 8k vocab into my deck this year. After so long I still believe in SRS because otherwise I would not be exposed to some words on a regular basis otherwise.
Speaking/conversation has never been a priority for me. But occasionally I would practice if I was planning a trip to Japan. Maybe it will become a priority in the future who knows.
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Some thoughts
– knowing more Kanji makes everything easier
– interesting material makes it easy to practice
– N2 listening was way easier than what I like to listen to, but still difficult to keep track of many things
– N2 reading very different than what I would read on a usual basis, but the interest was just not there. Used part of Shin Kanzen Master reading for this
– Don’t want to go for N1 anytime soon (life priorities…), but maybe getting better at grammar would help me in the long run.
Just felt like posting this. Maybe someone has insight on setting new language goals.
TLDR: reached goal to be literate, paused study but casually consumed native materials, came back with motivation to learn more
by hoshino-satoru