Probably a lot of people like to post status updates at new year’s, but I guess I’ll throw another one into the mix in case anyone finds it interesting.
I first started studying Japanese four years ago on the way back from my first Christmas vacation with family in Wisconsin, so perhaps it is fitting that I just went to Wisconsin for Christmas for the first time in four years. As far as Japanese goes, I’m at the point where not that much exciting happens, just gradual progress only perceptible on long timescales.
The big news this year is that I visited Japan for the first time in October, and then took the JLPT for the first time (N2) in December. Since taking the JLPT, I’ve temporarily scaled down my Japanese study activities in order to devote more time to some non-Japanese things I’ve long wanted to do, but I do intend to stick with it for at least two more years.
I still dream of becoming conversational in Japanese and going back to Japan and speaking Japanese everywhere, but who knows if or when that will happen. It would also be nice to conquer the N1 at some point, but I’ve heard that it’s not realistic to do that in only a year (and I don’t even know if I actually passed the N2 yet, for that matter), so I have that mentally penciled in for 2025 and there’s little pressure at the moment.
# Kanji
While this is obviously a spectrum, not a binary, I think it is safe to say that I have reached the point where **kanji are no longer a major impediment**. While it does obviously depend a lot on the author and content, encountering new unknown kanji is pretty rare nowadays. It’s now like “here’s three new kanji I ran into this week” rather than something that happens in every paragraph like for lower level learners.
Also, I recently completed level 60 on Wanikani again, so that’s nice. I rushed through Wanikani (almost) as fast as possible in my first year, doing as much as three hours a day of reviews at the peak, and then realized that I hadn’t absorbed a lot of it, so I reset and have been slowly working my way through WK again ever since and I finally completed my climb back up last month. And of course, WK has also added new content over the last couple years
This of course doesn’t mean that I perfectly know every kanji on WK (or the various common non-WK kanji I’ve run into), but I can mostly recognize them. When I say that kanji are no longer a major impediment to reading, what I mean is that unfamiliar kanji are rare and it’s mostly just unknown words that I see.
Also, I can read computer and book fonts pretty easily, but I still really struggle with even the most basic writing when it is written using the weird bold or hand-writing like fonts often seen on signs. Perhaps this is due to never bothering to learn how to handwrite kanji or study stroke orders, and learning them purely by pattern recognition, but I still don’t think studying stroke orders is actually worth it for Japanese learners.
# Reading
As with 2022, I continued to practice and get better at reading in 2023. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of “extensive reading”, where I just try to read things as quickly as I can without worrying about understanding and rarely bother to look up unknown words, so I’ve been churning through web novels much faster than before. I’m currently two thirds of the way through [one story](https://ncode.syosetu.com/n0150fr/) that’s several times longer than any of the web novels I’ve read before. It still takes me 15-25 minutes to read each chapter (or “read”, depending on how distracted I am), but I’m making my way through it.
I’ve also set a goal of reading the first six\* Harry Potter books in Japanese in 2024. I’m already about 40% through the first (and shortest) book, but it is very slow going. I’ve been averaging 4-5 minutes per page (and those are half as long as pages in the English addition), meaning it will take forever to read unless I somehow get much faster over time, which is what I’m hoping for. But maybe that won’t happen, or maybe I’ll be too busy with other stuff. The hardest part is even making the time to read in the first place, especially with everything else demanding my time and attention.
\* I plan to skip Deathly Hallows because I didn’t like it as a kid and only read it once, whereas I reread the other books many times and thus have a better idea of what happens in them already.
# Listening
My listening ability doubtless continues to improve, but as usual, it’s impossible to notice since progress is slow and there are no real metrics to judge by. You can’t even say “I understand X now” because understanding is a degree, not a binary. So I guess the best I can do is give specific examples of things I understood or missed to illustrate my current status.
I recently watched Elemental in Japanese, knowing almost nothing about the movie or its plot beforehand. As usual, I was able to understand a lot, but there’s also a lot I missed, and a lot that relied on guessing based on context and visuals and so on. For example, I was mostly able to follow the plot, but I did not understand at all what was going on during the scene where Ember first meets Wade or why she chased after him (I did understand some lines, like when Ember told him that her father made the pipes by hand). Likewise, during the family dinner, I understood the bit where they compliment her on her accent, but missed a lot of other stuff, and didn’t understand what they said during the crying game at all (except for Wade’s confession of course).
I continue to listen to Japanese podcasts in the background (such as 4989 American Life) and can generally understand them easily when I bother to pay attention, but I’ve listened to them many, many times over the years, so that’s not representative of general listening ability.
# Speaking
As in past years, speaking remains my biggest weakness. Part of this is due to me self-studying Japanese online and never having a need to actually use it, but it also seems almost inherently intractable.
I can of course say some simple phrases and sentences, but I still can’t really converse in Japanese, and I can’t figure out how to change that. I finally visited Japan for the first time in October, but even in Japan, it is more convenient to use English than Japanese. For routine stuff, you can get by with pointing, and for complex stuff, everyone uses translation apps anyway.
For example, on my second day, I accidentally left my sunglasses at DiverCity, and the information desk staff filed a lost property report for me and told me they’d call the hotel if they found my glasses. That night, I tried to ask the hotel desk staff in Japanese if there had been any calls for me, but I couldn’t seem to get through to them and it was frustrating and it occurred to me that it would have been a lot easier to just use the Google Translate app, so I did that from then on and had no problems.
I’ve also been going to a weekly online Japanese practice chat with other learners for over a year, but that has the same problems. Whenever I go, I always stay silent or end up speaking English. Even if I couldn’t remember how to say something in Japanese, it would take me a long time to think of how to say it and I still wouldn’t be confident. If I need to explain something and just want to talk effortlessly and naturally, English is the only way to do it. Does anyone know a good way to get better at speaking?