Any dangers in speedrunning Japanese? I went too hard during a party and basically woke up with tickets to Japan

[thelizard]

I was in a similar starting point.

Started learning in March, had a trip planned in September. So roughly half year. Except I didn’t have 500 days of duolingo experience. - on the other hand I took preply lessons once a week mainly for conversation practice because I felt like I otherwise have no way to practice output whatsoever.

in September I was able to (from easiest to less easy):

• Ask the Narita low-budget bus counter staff for a ticket to Tokyo
• Navigate Konbinis, Restaurants, Hotel Check ins*
• Various bar smalltalk
• Follow directions when I booked a tour
• ca. 60% of the overtime complaints of a fellow software engineer who was curious about whether we work this much overtime in Europe, too
• ca. 30% of what the Izakaya chef explained about the food
• 2-3 keywords in each sentence when I went out to drink with a friend who moved to Tokyo and his buddies
• ca. 15-20% of what some Okinawan grandpa in a Doutor told me about his life story
• ca. 5-10% of the trauma dump of some random girl in a bar in Shinjuku

Could I have gone faster: in retrospec, yes, but not with more SRS. Instead, the limiting factor was actually interacting with the language outside of SRS. I went to Japan with an on-paper vocabulary of ca. 2000 words, which isn’t much to begin with. But a lot of those words I had never actually heard in a sentence in the wild before. I am able to recall them in SRS, but if I hear them in the wild it’s like … uuuh?

Ever since that trip, my word count hasn’t increased a whole lot. I’m at ca. 2800 words now. My goal is 3000 by February to my next trip. However, I have dedicated substantially more time to immersion since September than I had before, and it feels like my actual comprehension has improved substantially.

I hope this helps.

*sometimes I said 分かりました, but I didn’t 分かりました at all

[eciu]

You made me even more curious about that N4 so i went and took it.
And yes, the gap is huge compared to N5

In vocab I had to kind of guess in 20 or so cases.

In grammar & reading I ran out of time and had took random answer in last 3-4 questions

And funnily enough, I’m putting the least amount of focus on listening (out of these 3) and somehow I have the best result there

I’ll do another N4 mock exam in late January and will see what the difference is.

Even if real NX exam is not my goal, as a self learner it feels kinda important to me, because its pretty much the only thing where i can actually test myself in semi-serious environment.

As for choice of things to watch, I think I’ll stick to picking media I’d like to watch over the fact, that its the “everyday japanese”. But I agree, probably around April or so i’ll try to get some Italkie natives as a test run and ask them how cringe is my langauge.

@thelizard

Honestly, I think that duolingo experience is a bit overrated. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who actually intends to learn a language.

Yes, it’s a good way if you want effortlessly to start your language journey and then jump to something else once you get hooked into it. While I admit it will help you learn the basics without any prior research or preparation, it’s design doesn’t forces your brain to actually learn the language, but to learn the pattern on how correct answer in Duo’s looks like with minimal language skills. But still, 4 minutes a day just to keep streak rolling is a fun activity.

And as for your trip this sounds really good! How often have you ended up using the phone translator app to help you with communication? Or did you managed to do without it?

• ca. 60% of the overtime complaints of a fellow software engineer who was curious about whether we work this much overtime in Europe, too

Oh boy, as a fellow engineer I already feel your smugness there

• ca. 5-10% of the trauma dump of some random girl in a bar in Shinjuku

I guess it works in any language with girls, just nod along

By the way, I feel like it was few times easier to compare map the Japanese grammar structure and logic behind it to some computer language than any of the actual languages I know. Have you noticed anything like that?

[thelizard]

@eciu

I feel like it was few times easier to compare map the Japanese grammar structure and logic behind it to some computer language than any of the actual languages I know. Have you noticed anything like that?

I had the same thought. Japanese grammar often seems to map better to a lot of software development principles than to English. Specifically, the sentence core structure is much closer to object oriented programming than to English.

And I recall when first learning OOP, most books at the time pointed out the same issue that Japanese books do: It’s sort of backwards and you have to think the other way round. Except that OOP books in the late 90s had the arrogance of calling it “counter intuitive to the human mind”. I suppose the authors didn’t speak Japanese.

Of course this model doesn’t hold at all as soon as sentences become mildly more complex.

@eciu

I guess it works in any language with girls, just nod along

Last thing people want in those situations is advice anyway

[eciu]

I remember my first small breakthrough when I randomly decided to try to decompose any sentence onto quasi-logical structure full of brackets, AND’s 'n OR’s.

でも それ は
[ [ピアノを 弾けた] の ]           が        ([僕だけ だ]った) から
  ↑_____________↑                           ↑_________↑
  [ability clause → noun (+の)]            ([limited to me] + past) + because/from
                               ↑                                                             ↑
             actor (が)        IS          description

[but that is] + {[piano (play - can)] as a thing}   is  {[me (limited-to)]} + past + because
The one who could play piano is only me - that's why

It was a really wild ride

[embiken]

Hi eciu. First of all - I think what you are doing is amazing and keep up the great work. It is clear you have lots of passion for Japanese and you genuinely like the language. This is the most important ingredient to learn it.

I had a similar experience when I learned Japanese N5. I had to speedrun it in 3 months because I was to stay in Tokyo alone for 2 months during my studies.

That was 10 years ago and I didn’t know about Anki or Bunpro, so my approach was different.

I studied with a Japanese native 2h twice a week, and did around 10h of homework per week as well.

I didn’t start from zero too. As you, I had around 1000h of watched anime time and I knew basic words, sentence structure, and was familiar to how Japaneses sounds. No Duolingo though.

I did it and passed N5 exam with 90% score, and I was able to navigate Tokyo pretty well.

I couldn’t chit chat in bars, but I didn’t have problems with daily life. The highlight moment was when I lost a 5G modem on a train to Kyoto and had to go to lost and found at the station, explain what I lost, and get directions on how to retrieve it. It was soooo satisfying to get the modem back!

With your learning method, you will probably get SRS burnout, but that’s very easy to fix. Just stop adding new words and focus on reviews only for a week until they go down and you feel that you have energy and mental capacity for new vocabulary and grammar.

What many others are saying here and what I will stress as well that doing SRS doesn’t mean you actually learn the language.

In every language learning there are two activities, and different parts of brain are responsible for them. Recognition and recall.

Recognition is an ability to understand the word when you see it or hear it. SRS is great for that.

Recall is an ability to say or write what you want when you need it. SRS won’t help you with that.

Learning a language means you have skills in both recognition and recall. Otherwise you might know the 2k core words but wouldn’t be able to say anything coherent.

And SRS is responsible for recognition only. For recall you need to actively speak the language with others. Formulate your thoughts and decode what others are saying in context. No other way around it.

So bottom line, what you are doing is great and you are fully equipped to get to the conversational level around N3.

Add more speaking practice, ideally with natives, as soon as you can. If you won’t learn to talk you won’t be able to truly using the language.

In software terms it would be like you downloaded the app and have on your disk, but you haven’t installed it yet so your OS can’t use it.

Good luck on you journey! You got it!

[eciu]

Its been a month since my initial post and that means I’m right in the halfway with my grind, ~3 months left. Dropping a small update in case someone is interested.

It turned out a bit long, so be warned.

Closed the “chapter” by trying another N4 test, it’s nice to see some progress there.

Grammar

Since I already got the basics, I don’t emphasize rushing through N3 content that much. Lowering from doing 1X to just 4 new points / day sounds just fine and I expect to cram though N3 grammar points by end of February that way.

Vocab

I’ve finished my basic decks and It feels really good when daily review count for January went from ~180 down to 90 cards.

I’ve also recently found jiten with vocab bank for every episode from a lot of anime, so I’ve come up with this flow:

1. Download 85% of the most common words used in episode
2. suspend all cards with words that I could recall + cards for names and some rare words that i find not worth studying at my level
3. go through the episode deck and “let it sit” for a few days
4. watch the episode and see how it feels.

I’ve already went through vocab for a first episode, and will prob try to watch it sonn-ish.

Reading

I’ve picked up an old novel I tried reading long time ago (where I was trying to brute force with translator and dictionary). The difference is huge. Now I try to only look up the words I couldn’t guess from the context and sometimes I doublecheck more complex sentences on a translator if I get the meaning right. Trying to read 1-2 pages of it daily.

Kanji

Kanji was the star of this month, I wanted to reach 1000 kanjis on Kanji.garden and I’ve ended up seeing ~1050 of them. I think I’m familiar enough with 200-400 of them to be able to use them in the wild, of course.

While learning isolated kanjis might not be optimal way, the way the site works makes it really enjoyable for me and I do not find it tiring or troublesome at all. The exposure to that helps me greatly to differentiate kanjis in actual words on vocab review and of course guess the meaning AND/OR reading of words I have not seen before.

Listening / Immersion

I’m still trying to passively listen to some random japanese podcasts or J-Music whenever I’m not actively studying. Comprehension rate of couse varies on the content I get varies depending if its a “NX graded podcast” or some more natural stuff like street interviews.

I also try to watch 1-2 episodes of anime without any subtitles at all, to simply just go with the flow and accept that I won’t be able to comprehend 100% of the stuff going on there.

I’ve also tried gaming in Japanese. Arknights came out and the controls were pretty intuitive, so besides option setup it was rather smooth. While I could guess what was going on with the story with dialogues, which wasn’t that hard to understand, rest of the stuff had a lot of custom names and tech-related terms, which made no sense tryharding at it. I’ve reverted game lang to English and kept voiceover in Japanese. I simply try not to read subs for dialogues and it seems good enough.

Writing

Every night, I’m having a chat conversation with AI in Japanese where I try to talk about myself, state my reasons, give a short summary of what happened today or replying to questions to keep the conversation going and so on. Also I’m getting a quick check for mistakes and weird wording with suggestion how to make things sound more natural.
Since I’ve already got the base vocab and grammar going, It turns out surprisingly well. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite easy to understand.

I’m also slowly filling up my section of “Sentences that might come in handy”, but I find it more fun to talk with chatbot

Speaking

I’ve tried some shadowing, but for me it’s the most tiresome not-fun part of my learning grind. Sadly, I still can’t produce japanese in my head quickly enough to be able to freely speak, but if I take a longer while to prepare a sentence or two, it kinda works.
From time to time I still practice by example sentences an read out the chat messages I’m writting. Even if speaking is my ultimate goal, I was more focused towards other parts of the Japanese, since its the foundation to be able to speak correctly.

Fun stuff

There is a Japanese school nearby that was recommended for me. Since they start a new group 2 times per year and I was kinda late on on fall group, I decided to attend a example lesson 2 weeks ago.

Of course it was about absolute basics, but after lesson I explained that I’ve started learning by myself 2 months ago and that they offer a test to measure my current level and also invited me to attend the group that started last fall.

On that lesson it was the first time I saw a textbook, been asked to do some exercise and actually speak for the first time to someone else (Was harder than expected). I tried really hard to hide “my power level” to not discourage others, and I think I did pretty good there. Ended up giving up some easy to learn things that were outside of the scope of the lesson though

As for the exam, they measured my level to be somewhere around unit 30 for 皆の日本語 book, but as I’ve expected, my way of studying is not compatible with classroom experience. Neverthless It was a very fun one though.

Plan for February

• Finish N3 grammar (~4 grammar points/day)
• more native content without subtitles (I won’t have them in actual conversation)
• keep up with novel reading
• shift focus for this month on writting / constructing sentences
• more speaking practice
• Get 2 - 3 calls with Italkie to see how my speaking and pronunciation is (still pretty confident in Polish baseline )

3 months left, I’m curious how that gradual shift towards speaking will turn out.

[eciu]

Okay, another month passed in my grind.

As expected, amount of time i could dedicate to learning Japanese has been drastically cut, and will be reduced even more in the final 3 months of the grind.

As per usual, i tried BunPro JLPT mock tests, this time N3. The results are better than expected.

Expect grammar…

The reason is that due to lack of time i had to split the test and do each section on diferent day. On Grammar day i was so tired that i legit fell asleep for 15 minutes or so. Had to speedrun the rest of the test to make it in time
Next try in 1 month, so It will get better for sure!

As for other stuff, I’ll drop a brief summary.

Grammar

According to the initial plan, i slowly managed to finish the N3 content and i do not plan to go any further for now. Amount of daily cards greatly decreases when you do not add new ones, so the timing is perfect for me now

Vocab

I’m still downloading around 85% of vocab from anime episode, slowly go through them, and then watch the episode. Sometimes it feels like im reading english subtitles, so its really encouraging thing! Also, Its really fun when you add vocab from next episode nad ~70% of it is instantly cut out, because of duplicates. In the result I add around 60-90 words per new episode, and the number decreases every day. Goal is to reach a point, when there will be no new vocab in the episode

Reading / Writting

Sadly, due to lack of time I didn’t do any novel reading or writting and it will be hard to get back to it.

Kanji

I’ve reached my initial goal last month, now its just iterating over SRS, with small additions when i feel like. From the experience, Im not sure if going with Kanji Garden was the right call, because I’ve been left with bunch of kanji’s where i roughly recognize meaning and their readings. Sometimes i can “guess” out the reading and meaning of longer words because i know the possible reading of each kancji, but I wonder if going with stuff like Learning the Kanji Book would net me better results. Adding a lot of content with furigana would be required to learn the readings though.

Listening / Immersion

Im still going on with passive listening. As form anime/media watching i started to watch some of them without subs at all, trying to keep up with the plot. I’m accepting that I won’t be able to follow all the plot details, but I’m able to get the rought idea what are they talking about.

Speaking

Still didn’t tried shadowing, but went on italkie instead and booked 3 30min sessions with 1 week interval with different teachers.

In session 1 i was nearly late due to work and didn’t had time to prepare anything, so the grammar was rather bad and I’ve made some mistakes, but I’ve been understood, so that’s what matters the most for me. I was able to tell something about myself, my trip to japan and even ask some questions about Japanese culture or movie/drama reccomendations.

Session 2 was rough. I booked it very late and I was way more tired than i expected. I’ts been hard to produce any meaningful sentence. My dear Tutor there had poor audio and his voice was so quiet that i had to rely on guessing what did he said. Overall, it felt like talking to myself. nothing worth paying for.

This left me a bit frustrated, so i booked Session 3 in some more regular hours and it helped alot.
My perfomance was slightly better than Session 1, so it was quite confortable. We were able to talk about some basic things like weather, my vacations, differences between Japan and my place and so on. Really had fun there.

This month was huge for me. Knowing that I can understand roughly someone when he speaks to me in simple japanese and being able to respond in a way, that I’m understood is a big step. The caveat is that I was leading the conversation, so I’ve been moving through the topics, that I was mentally prepared to speak about. The real test begins when “unexpected topics” come out.

Thats my goal for following months!

…Or maybe i should start thinking about what places do I want to see on my actual trip, I still don’t have any plan aside from VERY rough draft