Albaby's Early Japanese Journey

[Albaby305]

I’ve seen a few threads where people give an ongoing account of their learning progress, so I thought I would give it a try. Especially since in a few months, I’ll face a challenge to my motivation - so maybe this will help keep me going!

I came to self-learning Japanese about eight months ago, when my wife and I started planning a trip to Japan with our two children. I wanted to learn some Japanese so that I wouldn’t be a complete American abroad, with the negative connotations associated with it. I didn’t expect to become as fascinated with the language as I did. Or that it would be as challenging as it was.

Those first few months ended up being more “learning how to learn” than expected, also. Or more, learning what works for me. I don’t use any of the tools I started with today. I began with DuoLingo, which I soon learned was pretty useless. I picked up a Genki I textbook and made actual physical flashcards for a bit - because I am “Unk,” as the teens say. Lots of googling led me to The Moe Way, which brought me to CureDolly and Tae Kim and the fundamental importance of immersion in addition to formal learning. Picked up Anki and tossed my physical flashcards. I used the Renshuu app for quite awhile, as well as RingoTan for kanji practice. I’ve dropped all of those.

Today, on days where I have a full amount of extra time to devote to Japanese, my learning is a mix of the following:

• SRS tools (Bunpro for grammar and vocabulary, Anki deck for Kanji practice)
• Audio immersion (Nihongo con Teppei/Japanese with Shun podcasts, mostly)
• Video immersion (anime, natch! Shirokuma Cafe, Kimi No Todoke, YuruCamp, and Freiren right now)
• Reading immersion and speak-aloud (graded readers, NHK Easy, and some AI generated scripts)

I’ve recently added in Pimsleur language courses at one a day. And I do an hour’s worth of Italki lessons with a Japanese teacher each week (shout out to Rie-Sensei!)

More output than I think many others would do this early in the process. But my goal is to be able to speak at least a little by the time we go to Japan in the summer. It’s been so difficult to get even to the level of “distracted toddler” speaking ability, but that’s part of my goal.

And that’s why I decided to start this thread. When I’m back in the states after our trip, I’d like to keep up my Japanese journey. I’ve invested a lot of time and it’s a very satisfying intellectual hobby. So hopefully, I’ll be able to keep motivated even after this trip is over. Maybe I’ll just need to start planning the return journey…

[Albaby305]

Okay, second entry. Studying continues apace, with a mix of Bunpro, Anki, some immersion, Pimsleur language audio (level 1 for now), and one hour per week of Italki sessions. The Pimsleur was a new addition, and I’m very much enjoying it.

I have been a little remiss in my reading immersion - I think because I don’t have a lot of material that is interesting or fun to read at my current level. I enjoy listening to my basic podcasts (Nihongo con Teppei and Japanese with Shun) because I’m able to catch most of the meaning, but reading is a slog. Tadoku readers at my level are very dull, and trying to read the NHK site or other more advanced text is sooooooooo painful. Not sure which is the better choice.

Finally, I took my first N5 practice test here on Bunpro. Pleased to report it was a passing grade:

…but the listening portion completely destroyed me. There were only about 3-4 questions I really felt comfortable that I know the answer - the rest were a mix of guesses, which I think is reflected in my score. Clearly that’s where I need work. I don’t have any reason to actually take a JLPT exam, but my listening skills aren’t far enough along where I feel like I understand the details of these passages. I can pick out nouns, adjectives, and pick up the stems of the verbs - but without really being able to understand the adverbs and verb tenses in real time, I can only get the general topic of the sentence and not enough nuance to get the meaning. I feel my reading and grammar are there, but listening is way behind.

[Albaby305]

Third entry here - I guess I’ll be doing this kind of weekly, at least for a little while, to keep me on track.

About four months away from our Japan trip, eight months into learning. I’m trying to figure out the right balance for how to spend my limited Japanese time. I’m torn between learning new things and practicing what I know.

Learning new things, because I’m roughly halfway through N4 right now - and I can just feel myself beginning to approach that mid-N3 “sweet spot” where immersion starts to be more intuitively comprehensible. I’m already getting little hits of that now - moments when I’m listening to a podcast where I suddenly realize that I’ve completely understood the last sentence or two without translating in my head. It’s so good! Such a wonderful feeling! My understanding is that really starts to happen more when you’ve gotten your grammar and vocab to about that mid-N3 level. And I want more!

But I also want to practice what I already know, because - again - we’ll be in Japan in four months, and I’d like to be sharper in my recognition and output of the things I already have. For example, I already have the vocab/grammar to ask someone for directions to the train platform or how long the tour is going to last - at least, in theory. But I can’t really have that conversation yet. I can’t do the output, and I couldn’t understand someone giving me answers in native-speed Japanese.

To that end, I’m shading away from my SRS time (Bunpro and Anki) and my pure reading immersion, and trying to shift more towards listening/speaking. I’ll still do some reading, but reading aloud to at least work that into practicing speech. I haven’t quite had the time to fit in a virtual meetup, but that’s definitely on the agenda for the next few weeks.

[Albaby305]

Not going to lie - had a bit of a challenging period here. For the first time in my Japanese learning process, I ran into a real lack of motivation for a bit. I really didn’t feel like doing my daily learning or immersion.

Not sure what caused it. Might be the “plateau” phenomenon I’ve read about. I’m now a little more than halfway through N4, so each batch of things I learn is no longer a huge step forward. Also, I had two small dispiriting live conversations - a session with my Italki tutor where I really struggled, and then meeting a friend of a friend who was Japanese and (encouragingly) asked me to say something to her in Japanese, whereupon I completely blanked. Both made me feel a bit bad about where I was.

I’ve recovered my equilibrium. I’m still getting momentary hits where I can listen to a stretch of podcast, or read a few lines in my AI-generated readers, where I’m actually understanding the language for a bit without translating internally. I’ve just been clinging to that.

Other than that, I’ve had to bear down and blow through the SRS reviews that build up if you slack off. That was a bit of a slog. Now I’m caught up.

Three months until my Japan trip. Getting very excited. If anyone has suggestions for a website/reddit community that’s good for vetting travel plans, I’d appreciate a reference - first trip for everyone in the family so we’re mostly hitting highlights, so we don’t need to dig too deep, but I do want to make sure we don’t overlook any “don’t-miss” options.

[Albaby305]

Another journal entry. This time, “Life finds a way…to interfere with Japanese learning.” Just been very busy, so mostly doing just what I’ve set as the minimum for learning - my Bunpro/Kanji reviews, iTalki sessions, and listening to podcasts in the car. I’ve really skimped out on my other immersion - very little reading or other input.

Plus side - all the wonderful feedback elements of Bunpro keep me coming back to make sure I always do that. Downside - when time gets tight, my learning gets SRS heavy. Because the microtask and little seratonin rewards make SRS feel more “making progress” than trying to read NHK Easy or something else - and because i dread clearing an SRS review backlog - I always make time for Bunpro and Anki, and not other things.

On the plus side, I have been feeling more confident with my very basic reading from AI. I asked AI to put together a handful of short stories with only N5 grammar and vocab. I’m getting to the point where I can read them through, in a single sitting, without having to look things up and (most importantly) without missing the nuance/tenses that come from the string of hiragana after the verb.

Why do that? I know I’m retreading ground I already covered, but I think I really need practice and experience with Japanese sentences in a way I’m not getting from SRS. I don’t have any prior experience with SOV languages generally, so that’s a very basic muscle I need to learn - and reading basic sentences where I already know all the elements gets me to more instinctively use/recognize the particles.

On vacation next week, so plenty of time to read and watch and listen - so hopefully more non-SRS stuff then. Also hope to plow through the rest of Pimsleur. And maybe finalize our Japan trip activities!

[Albaby305]

Hoo boy. Two months later…

Life continued to find a way to interfere with Japanese learning. Big time. I had a pretty decent run of always finding at least a half hour a day to do something, but then the last push of touring colleges with my daughter set me back. I kept up my biweekly iTalki sessions with my tutor, but didn’t really have much time for anything else. Nothing quite like having two thousand SRS reviews build up on Bunpro and Anki to really make you feel blue! Anyway, once the dust cleared and I regained some normalcy, I’ve cleared most of that backlog - at least on Bunpro. My Anki kanji learning I just reset, once I found myself literally unable to remember any of the kanji just trying to run through 1K reviews.

And that was the big lesson from this big gap - I forgot a lot of Japanese very quickly. I was shocked at how much that I kind of thought I knew with SRS practice just disappeared once I was away for a few weeks or so. It has really recalibrated my expectation of how durable my learning is, familiarity vs. actual understanding. It was pretty disappointing. But also I have renewed my determination to keep going!!!

That said, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I will be unable to converse with people, even at a low level, on my Tokyo trip in June. I just haven’t been able to develop the ear for it. My Italki tutor has been very encouraging and we’ve had some nice exchanges, but when she gave me her “level up” test that she uses for her more “student” students (imagine a really simple n5 JLPT reading script), I failed entirely. I still cannot understandeven simple Japanese spoken at a normal pace well enough to pick up detailed meaning. It’s frustrating, but I suppose it’s a good wake-up call. I’m okay with written Japanese (at my very simple level) and picking up the 6 out of 10 words in a sentence to get a sense of what someone might be saying, but not enough to comprehend.

Anyway, it’s good and fun to be back in the swing of things, though not at the level I had wanted to be by T minus 30 days. Still - going to be a great trip anyway!

[Rithrin]

Well, just wanted to say, good work! Even backsliding a bit with the kanji deck and in some other areas, it can be hard to keep trying after a big setback.

Yeah, the forgetting can be shocking and demotivating. I’m probably not terribly further than you overall (much less immersion, output), but I have probably 4 to 5k vocab down through various sources. I can get 80% correct from a 100+ item review, and still have trouble remembering
教室 vs 授業. My friend texted me something with 親切 in it and my brain just couldn’t understand it.

But overall it’s thinking about the long term. Over time with the repeated exposure, it will stick. Flashcards also teach you things in isolation, so it can be hard to really integrate. Again, I think that just comes with time. People often point out, it takes children almost a decade to learn this all from the start. Sure, as adults we can utilize study methods to improve upon that, but we still need time!

[kiyome]

Excellent work sticking with it despite setbacks. I know I’ve had a lot of those too. Since you have about a month left before your trip, it’s pretty much the perfect time to focus more on travel phrases and situations that you are actually going to run into. It takes way too long to build up enough Japanese to have any real conversation or to deal with normal travel situations by trying to learn the whole language. So what I always suggest for people actually traveling to Japan is to look up the conversations to expect when you go.

There’s some obvious ones like customs (thankfully, they generally speak English and you can bypass a lot by having it done beforehand), but you’ll at least want to know if they are pointing for you to go somewhere. Major cities do have most signs also in romanji/english, but it helps a lot to look up your travel routes before going. Thankfully, Google maps works really well over there in my experience. Looking up how to use the ticket machines is worthwhile.

Restaurant and store interactions are the most common actual conversations you will have and they will generally be speaking in Keigo unless you request otherwise. There are actually a lot of restaurants, especially smaller places that don’t have English. Studying the foods and additional questions related to ordering them can help, but there’s also google lens (the camera part of translation app). There are people that worry about looking too much like a foreigner doing that, but let’s be honest, people are on their phones all the time anyway and figuring things out faster is way more valuable than looking more native.

But there’s a lot of set phrases that you can prepare for. If you have a reservation you can make it a lot easier by printing it and handing that to them after saying “予約があります。” That can be really helpful to them regardless, especially in loud areas like the airport (especially helpful when picking up whatever you are using to give your phone internet and can’t look anything up yet). I personally mapped out the airport to make sure I knew how to get everything I needed from the airport before going. Some other situations are conbini, hotel check in and out, attraction ticketing like temples, theme parks, ect, and asking for directions.

I’d still do reviews, but switching to studying the actual situations you’ll truly encounter limits the amount you’re learning to a manageable amount so you’ll actually be able to use the language properly when you get there. You can do that on your phone too in the morning or right before an encounter as well. I did that to make sure I could request for them to hold our bags at the hotel and to request a certain type of book at a bookstore.

Sorry that that was a lot of text, but if you want to actually navigate conversations in Japanese, I strongly suggest focusing on those situations you’re pretty much guaranteed to be in. While traveling most people don’t have regular conversations with the locals pretty much at all even if they speak the same language anyway, so knowing how to talk to customer service people will be the most important things to study. All the Japanese you’ve learned so far is still useful, you’ll actually know what you’re saying and be much more competent saying and listening to it because of everything you’ve done so far. You can also simplify sentences that are suggested to you in searches when you are looking up how to say something, so you can rattle it off easier. Anyways, good luck on your trip and your language journey.

[Albaby305]

Thanks Rithrin and Kiyome for the words of encouragement - and the suggestion to pivot to “travel” interactions. I will definitely do the latter, and ask my Italki tutor to incorporate a bit more of that into our lessons. I still want to maintain my general language learning, since I now know firsthand how much loss comes when I break my schedule. But again, I appreciate the support - and I am determined to keep plowing ahead!

[Noxsora]

My recommendation is to practice Katakana.

60% of the time you can communicate in English if you get the hang of how to change it into Katakana

Don’t know how to say “when is the next bus?”
バス スケジュール
For got 座って
Try シートダウン
Kanji helps with reading.