My study plan for easily learning a new language through thousands of hours of study/please offer advice and help me because I was born stupid.

Howdy, I am trying to get more serious about learning Japanese and to accomplish that I have started documenting my progress. From what I have seen on this sub there have been many successful students that have recorded their efforts and inspired me to do the same. I plan to do this each month.

My hope for sharing this post is to open myself up to critics and further develop my learning plans. I am not an educator but maybe other new students could see the path I took and save themselves some time in researching study methods.

Little bit about me: I am 29 year old American with 3 kids and a wife. As for hobbies I play video games and host a podcast (about video games). For my job I am Cyber AD in the Air Force. In the last few weeks I was selected for a short notice deployment to an overseas location for min 6 months. I have been slowly learning Japanese over the last 3 months but, I am limited by balancing my job duties, family, and other hobbies. With this deployment completely separating me from my family and most likely limiting my podcasting capabilities, I want to use this time to develop a skill that I enjoy. My deployment location has an ok internet connection so, I will not lack for study materials.

**Goals**

I do not have a set goal of when I “have made it”. I see learning a language as a continuous effort. I do plan to develop the some of the most common skills listed on this reddit. I want to be able to play video games, read novels/manga, and watch anime in raw Japanese with good enough comprehension.

**Intentions**

I have been a lurker on this reddit for months now and I have noticed a few trends. One that really interested me is when people bring up the US Foreign Service Institute and their categorization of Japanese as a Level 5 language that would require 88 weeks or 2200 class hours to reach a Professional Working Proficiency in the language on average. I believe that I can perform better with an arbitrary target so 2200 hours seems easy enough. Now I plan to meet the target without killing myself. Quick maths, I would need to study 6 classroom hours each day for a full year to hit that number. Impossible with my current lifestyle. I have no intention of taking any JLPT tests and the military has no bonuses for knowing Japanese so I have to timeframe required. I will then aim for 2 years to hit the targeted 2200 hours. 3 hours a day for a year will get me right up to the halfway mark of 1095 (I’ll pick up the other 5 hours somewhere).

**Methods**

I am enlisted with 4 dependents. Money is always a limiting factor. Any study tools or resources I utilized will most likely be free or very cheaply sourced. I will not be attending any classes or tutors at this point. For tracking my studies I will be relying on the free service of Toggl, a simple logger that will keep me on target each week. With my upcoming deployment my shop has not been giving me taskers so the majority of my day is sitting a desk computer on standby every day. This is prime study time.

**Month Log\* As I started on the 17th this will not encapsulate the full month only 14 Days**

**Studying 22/28hrs Avg 1:32 of study time per day**

**Anki 5:52**

Anki is the popular solution for Japanese and I use it every single day. I try to do at least 10 new cards a day but push myself to do more if I think I can handle it. I do on average 150 reviews a day. The thing that might get me on this is that I actually am currently using a lot of decks at the same time. I have read on this sub that running multiple decks at the same time is not very beneficial. It leads to a lot of wasted time when duplicate cards occur and slows down progression through all the decks. I understand this seems wasteful but I believe the decks are different enough that there is not too much cross over with some exceptions. Quick decklist: Human Japanese, Core 2000 Listening, Jlab, JP Study Buddy, Katakana Reading Practice, WaniKani Ultimate and my own personal mining deck.

**JPDB 1:44**

My learning progress

Learning You know

Words (direct) 59244 36 186 (0%)

Kanji (direct) 3007 37 174 (5%)

Words (indirect) 210 0 7 (3%)

Kanji (indirect) 218 6 34 (15%)

JPDB is probably my most underused tool. I need to use it more but it is my lowest priority SRS so I often don’t get to my reviews completely cleared each day. I acutally owe a lot of my kanji to this service. The service is supposed to account for this if I come back after a longer than intended period and get a question right. This could be quite useful if I was recently re-tested on the same term in anki or renshuu. As for decks I just study whatever anime or webnovel I am currently interested in.

**Kanji Garden 00:56**

I love this app. Sadly I am on the free version so I only get 10 reviews a day and learn about .8 kanji a day. So slow it will take me 10 years to learn anything. I will keep this app and probably not track my time on it anymore. It will be just a slow keepsake that I check back on after a while. If I pay for any app this would be the one.

**Renshuu 08:07:52**

Vocab 1466

Kanji 118

Grammar 40

Renshuu is a fantastic resource but I often fail to finish all my reviews in a day. I also struggle with learning kanji from it but with the help of other resources my study has become more productive.

**Wanikani 03:18:36**

Apprentice 65

Guru 67

Master 77

Enlightened 0

Burned 0

Wanikani really works for me. It has helped me so much on my journey. My only complaints are how long it takes to complete anything and how exactly right you must be. My spelling has never been great and WK makes that very clear when I still mess up spelling otona as otana 5 reviews in a row. Maybe I will learn someday. I am approaching the end of the free period and I would buy the lifetime(since my spelling is so bad it will take me my lifetime to complete) but the pricing seems insane! 400$ for well written flash cards?! Fantastic product for the record.

**Everything else**

I have been using for the last 3 months a smattering of many sources and apps. As I developed my learning plan many of these sources I found were either redundant or not helping any of my study goals. These apps aren’t bad but just not as helpful as I want. Apps I have given up on: Drops(more game than learning), Duolingo(same as Drops), Kanji Book(no srs or target reviews, just random flashcards).

**New Sources**

I have started working though Genki 1 while watching Tokini Andy’s YT and find it very helpful. I have also been watching Cure Dolly, and while the videos are odd in design the information and explanations have helped me a lot.

**Reading: 43 mins compete out of my 2 hour goal**

I have been doing a mix of reading web novels and Satori Reader. I definitely prefer Web novels and I even finished my first one “あなたと離れられるなら死すら厭わない” It took me 2 months going line by line/ word by word with Jisho just to finish it. I did not reach my reading goals this month, I will need to try harder.

**Watching 2:44:24/2hrs**

I easily met this goal. I have two different practices for watching. Passive mode and Study Mode. Passive is just watching with J sub titles. I did this for about 6 episodes of Irozuku Sekai no Ashita kara and am really enjoying it. I will understand at least one word a sentence and can keep up with the story through the images. This is like a practice in vocab recognition as I get very excited when I understand a word or phrase. For study mode I have completed about half an episode of Arcane going line by line/word by word and making anki cards as I go. This is very time consuming but the show is very enjoyable and direct with the language, so it is not difficult.

**Listening 2:11:15/2hrs**

I met my goal here easily and could have done more but at my current skill I can only catch a few words before I am lost in the sauce and wait for another familiar term to pop up. I mainly listen to Japanese with Shun, and Teppi Beginner.

**Gaming** **1:27:18/6hrs**

I did not come close to my goal on this one. I thought it would be easy to sit down and play some games as input. It turns out with a 10 month old running around it is hard to manage enough game time to meet my goal. Most of the time I spent was in Pokemon Scarlet and I made it work quite well with gametotext program and Yomichan to generate cards.

**Discussion**

I failed to meet much of my expected goals before the end of the month. At this point I don’t think I should change my goals. Instead I will try harder to meet them. I would benefit from doing at least a little each day instead of trying to binge at any point. I see now I also spend a majority of my time on SRS and still fail to complete all my reviews. The only answer I see is to keep on trucking until is “ok” each card till it is 4 years into the future. I want to spend more time on grammar too. When I was reading I struggled with a very dramatic part where a man handed a sword to a woman, she then stabbed herself. I had to spend close to 15 mins trying to understand the grammar to see who was stabbed. Did he stab her when it was handed/ did she stab him/ did she stab herself? It was very hard. More study will make it easier in the future.

If you have made it this far in my rambling, I want to thank you. Please freely critic or suggest changes to me. I am not in a race or hurry, but I do want to make progress and build a strong foundation.

**Concessions**

I am aware of the pitfalls of over-planning/ over-engineering but I hope to flex my targets as needed.

I know learning in any field is not a numbers game, ex “I studied for 2200 hours so I should be fluent”. Everyone’s mileage may vary.

Posts That Inspired me:

That one guy who learned from sexy games, I don’t remember his name but may his legend live on.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ndw70e/2200\_hours\_of\_japanese\_in\_1\_year/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ndw70e/2200_hours_of_japanese_in_1_year/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/l51r3d/my\_500\_day\_journey\_to\_a\_160180\_n1\_score\_w\_tips/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/l51r3d/my_500_day_journey_to_a_160180_n1_score_w_tips/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/12zto10/my\_plan\_to\_learn\_japanese\_from\_n4\_to\_n1\_in\_100/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/12zto10/my_plan_to_learn_japanese_from_n4_to_n1_in_100/)