Chimmsen's slow and cozy Japanese journey

Japanese
#1

Hi everyone! :smiley:

I’m still new on here (bought lifetime last sale) and haven’t participated that much on here in the forum, but decided a space where I can ramble a bit about my japanese learning is just the right thing for me! :slight_smile:

So why am I even learning Japanese? I don’t intend to live, work or travel to Japan. I just enjoy learning a language and decided on Japanese because I already watch a bunch of anime and read a lot of manga, so I know that I already enjoy the native media and will get lots of immersion.

Since I don’t intend of going to Japan, my only goal is to consume media and mostly manga and anime. I don’t care about the JLPT, since I won’t be travelling or something, but I’ll probably take some mock exams just to get some feedback. I focus on reading and listening, consuming media is my only goal.

I’ve been learning japanese consistently for about a year (but honestly, mostely with Duolingo before switching to bunpro) and would consider myself somewhere around N5, but haven’t done the mock exams yet. I’ll probably do mine at the same time as the official JLPT times, just so I can feel the hype with everybody else here :slight_smile:

So, how does my current schedule look like? Mostly just slowly lowering my review count and reading easy manga. Since I came to bunpro after a year of learning, I just dumped all the N5 vocabulary over the course of a few days into my review cue, set to adept 1. I thought it would maybe take two weeks to get the reviews down to a managble amount, but I was very wrong :sweat_smile:

My current reviews are about 600, which would be fine for one time, but they would come back after a few days and I don’t want that stress. So I’ll just ignore this number for now and just do about 100 reviews a day. Shen I start to get less than 100 reviews for the day, I’ll start adding N4 materials again.

Besides bunpro my main focus currently is reading. In January I read the full series of Chis Sweet Home. It was my first time reading manga in Japanese. And while the first book was rough, it already clicked for me with the second book and I was breezing through them. With a lot of look-ups of course :sweat_smile: I was a bit over-enthusiastic and made a full vocabulary deck of all my look-ups while reading, but I realized that I read way faster than I could learn those vocabs, so I stopped making a deck around book 8.

Currently I’m reading Gal to Dino, I’m already 5 books in. It’s such a cozy and wholesome read, I would recommend it to everybody who likes Iyashikei no matter the level.

So, that’s about me. Feel free to comment and be part of a slow and cozy journey that focuses on reading and enjoying native materials. No set schedules, no goals with a time limit. Just flowing along with reading and slowly working myself through bunpro and my favorite manga.

8 Likes
#2

Ooh, Chi’s sweet home is a great pick.
You’ll probably also like Yotsuba, which is a fav among beginners here.

My fav manga is Blue Exorcist. I also like Somali to Morikamisama and Natsume Yujincho cause I like Fantasy.

If you have too many look ups, put them in a user deck. Then you can learn them at a steady rate (e.g. 5 a day) When you add them in lumps.

5 Likes
#3

Thanks a bunch for your reply! :smiley:

Yotsuba!to is on my (very long) to read list I curate on natively. Currently I only manage to read the very easy manga. Luckily most very easy manga on natively are cute stories oftentimes featuring animals and slice of life things. Which I like very much.

I already read the sample from Yotsuba and it was easy very cute and cozy :slight_smile: I’m still undecided what I want to read next, but it will probably be かわずや|L15, since I already have it and with only 2 books I expect it to be a fast read. I also intend to participate in the Wanikani absolute beginner bookclub starting from march. We will be reading a book with scary stories for first graders, hope they will be not too scary :sweat_smile:

While my review situation is kinda frustrating right now, it’s just what happens, when you dump all the already known N5 vocab in all at once. It’s just a temporary thing during the transition from other learning sites to bunpro. And ultimately reviews have been going down just by doing 100 reviews every day and not adding anything new. I started with over a thousand and now am already down to 500. Sure, I would love to get back to learn new grammar and vocab, but I get tons of exposure to those while reading all the manga, so I don’t worry to much. I bought lifetime membership for the sole reason of taking it as slow as I want, so spending a few weeks just slowly lowering the review count is absolutely fine with me.

2 Likes
#4

I’m so hyped for the upcoming bookclub! :slight_smile: I wrote all the first grade kanji on vocab cards and just casually review them. Sure, I already know most of them, but this is an excellent chance to really cement those.

Also, I guess, with my focus on reading manga, it makes way more sense to learn the kanji in the same order as the students do, since manga will decide which kanji to use and when to use furigana depending on the expected grade of their target readers.

Yesterday I had a huge reading session (yay, finally some calm after a stressfull week) and finished another Gal to Dino manga :slight_smile: Two more to go and so many fun reads in the future. I just got 黒 | L17, and while it doesn’t have furigana, the kanji used were fairly simple and easy to look up with hand writing. Usually I would never read horror, but it looks really cute, so I hope it will be more on the spooky side of things.

My reviewes are still hovering around 500, which isnt that much. I hope with my steadiness, that by march I can start adding things again :slight_smile: A feature of “just space out my reviews” would be nice. But I guess everyone here got their very unique wishes for the SRS :sweat_smile:

2 Likes
#5

Today I reached a small milestone! I have been reading for 40 days and just hit 3000 pages read! Even though I’m only reading absolute beginner mangas, not much text, many pages even without, I think this is a huge accomplishment :smiley:

I just started reading beginning this year, and when I started out I wouldn’t have thought that it will come this easy and fast for me :slight_smile: While the first book had been difficult it got easy fast. Today I start reading the last book of “Gal to Dino” :slight_smile: I had always no look-ups while finishing the one before. Even if I didn’t know a word, it was mostly obvious from context, sometimes I looked them up to ensure I got it right, but most of the time I just enjoyed the flow of reading :slight_smile:

Hope everybody else has a joyful day, too :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#6

Hmm, I’m wondering about the benefits of watching unsubbed Anime if I don’t understand much :sweat_smile: Of course, I lack a lot of vocab and it usually still takes me. bit of time to parse longer sentences while reading, time I usually dont have when warching an Anime.

On one side, when I watch with english subtitles I oftentimes recognize words I wouldnt have without the hint of the subtitles and I can parse longer sentences, cause I already now what the meaning is (as long as the subtitles match that of course). But yesterday i started rewatching wonderful precure without subtitles and realize I actually understood most of the first episode, which I wouldnt have noticed with subtitles. But the second episode suddenly had a bunch of more complex dialog :sweat_smile: and my understanding went way down.

Watching with subtitles is something that I have done for decades, which I’m very thankful for now, since I think it really jump started my listening comprehension, I already habe a firm grasp how japanese should sound and how sentences flow and I knew a lot of injections and short sentences. Now that I started learning, it makes me really happy to just casually recognize new vocabs and grammar points or even whole sentences and I think it reinforces those points and enhance my listening comprehension in a gentle way. This will stay my default for a long time.

Recently I added watching without subtitles to my routine, just whenever I feel like it. I’m not sold on the benefits for learning yet at my stage, but it’s fun enough for the moment.

Does anybody else have some input? :slight_smile: When is the right time to start watching unsubbed anime?

1 Like
#7

I’d actually recommend watching with japanese subtitles if you can. For me it’s been bridging the gap in listening practice and improving how quickly I can comprehend text. For now I’m using youtube and the auto generated subtitles. It’s not perfect by any means, but not bad if you can find someone to watch who talks a little slower.

3 Likes
#8

I wish I could watch anime with subtitles :sob:

I’m on mobile only and with only access to crunchyroll. I occasionally have access to a pc where I installed some subtitle plug-in, but downloading subtitles (many of the things I wanted to watch didn’t have any) and timing them for crunchyroll (why are they never timed correctly?) was such a hassle that I stopped completely. Retiming subtitles halfway through cause of the break/interlude thingie and then again when a new episode starts really destroy the joy of watching. I’m not very tech-savy and I’m kinda bad at using new tools.

As for youtube, I actually hate that with a passion. I cannot stand to watch people just talk, it drives me insane :sweat_smile: Weird, I know, but that’s how I am. I really only consume anime as the only thing I can watch and listen too (besides music). Can’t stand audiobooks or podcasts either.

Maybe there is a way to just read the subtitles like a book on mobile? I tried to download subtitles, but couldn’t open them :sweat_smile:

Thanks a lot for your input! I had such an uncomfy first experience with subtitles, that I kinda completely forgot that that might be an option :sweat_smile: I’ll try my best to find a suitable solution that’s more fun to use :slight_smile:

1 Like
#9

Sounds like we had a similar journey. I also started with Duo, probably wasted to much time there with the lack of direct teaching and time-consuming, repetitive drills. (When I was still being made to do 「お茶と水」9 months in, it was a clue that it wasn’t a serious course.) Except you found access to manga sooner than I did. I’m about to finish N4 lessons, and I just got into よつばと this week after several failed attempts to start reading. That’s great, and way to go! I’ll definitely be checking out the titles you listed. My goal is to finish N3 lessons this year and double my vocab and kanji, since many people say that at that point, they could understand enough to make immersion enjoyable, which really helps shift the load off from the intense study grind to enjoyable input.

1 Like
#10

I actually thought duo was really useful for the beginning as it really drills hiragana and katakana. But they overhauled the full course recently and it got a lot better. I still use it every day, one lesson to keep my streak. I don’t like how they focus on word fields for each unit, cause all those similar themed words always trip me up. But it’s actually kind of nice to get an intuitive feel for the grammar (since they don’t explain a thing). By now it’s just a fun habit and I do quests with my family and friends, I don’t expect to learn anything serious from duo anymore. But I made it three sections in, so far.

I’m glad you started reading yotsuba recently :slight_smile: It’s a nice book, but I only have read half of it so far :sweat_smile: started it a bit to early and lost motivation. That’s why I looked into easier manga this year. But still, the first book was hard, it always is. But with you finishing N4 currently, you already have a huge vocab base and a nice grammar base. The only thing to learn for you right now is how to put it together. I bet you will be reading fluently in no time :slight_smile:

If you want a reading buddy, we can read the first book of Yotsuba together :slight_smile:

#11

Is it like 750k words of reading?

1 Like
#12

I think I saw @CursedKitsune’s (?) thread not long ago and they mentioned they used JPDB for vocabulary. When I checked it out, I saw that they have decks for anime ordered by average difficulty.

I don’t know how easily you could check the % of vocabulary known by exporting/importing from other SRS systems, but I imagine starting from whatever catches your interest from the lower difficulties and working your way up would be a nice way to get started watching with Japanese subtitles.

2 Likes
#13

Hahaha, probably not. Those are totally beginner manga, lots of panels without text, sometimes even whole pages without. I would guess it’s maybe about 20-30 words on average per page, which would make it around 90.000 words, i guess?

I don’t have any automated form of word counting, but natively counted the pages for me, while logging my books. Otherwise I wouldn’t even have known the pages. I’m not a great logger, but I enjoy updating which book I’m reading on natively :slight_smile: I mostly use it for making to read lists, though :rofl:

I highly recommend natively, if you are into manga/anime immersion. They have tons of bookclubs, too, of you are into those things :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#14

Thanks for the advice! I will look into it. Getting a percentage of known words surely will take me a long way :slight_smile: Currently I just use natively, the level system they use had been a good fit so far, but listening is obviously still way harder than reading for me.

2 Likes
#15

'Just writing to say that I love this idea of taking time to learn Japanese :slight_smile: it’s good to know that we don’t have to rush :slight_smile:
And I enjoy seeing the different threads going in different directions, I laughed a bit when seeing the last two updated threads :slight_smile:

Screenshot_20250218-175208~2
Screenshot_20250218-175208~21080×665 76.4 KB

2 Likes
#16

I’ll be honest, I intentionally named my log like that. While I totally respect the speedrun/binge people (sometimes I’m like that, too), I wanted to make the statement, that there are people out there taking it slow :slight_smile: Just to encourage others to take it slow, too :slight_smile:

But I think I might be a bad example for actually taking it slow, as I binged a lot of manga and anime recently :rofl: But I don’t have any ambitious goals. I don’t care if I’m still N5 in 3 years as long as I can still enjoy native materials :slight_smile:

1 Like
#17

Ye, even if a person learns learn 1 word a day and 1 grammar point a week + repeating it, it should be enough to get to the n1 level in 30 years which is not bad considering it’s only 8 anki cards a week

#18

haha, 30 years sound really achievable. I think I was about 30 when english finally started to feel natural to me and I could read and watch whatever without any problems. But the only english learning I got after school was browsing forums, reading books and watching movies, never actually sat down and learned any english after school. That’s why my pronounciation is really, really bad.

For japanese I would like a slightly faster schedule, I’m getting old after all :sweat_smile: 10 years for being able to comfily consume all the native material would be nice. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#19

Thanks for giving us updates on what you are reading/planning to! We are at a similar level, but I haven’t been engaging with native materials enough, so I will probably follow in your footsteps :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
#20

I read Chis sweet home first. It got a bookclub on wanikani, so most of question you might have, will mostly likely already be answered. For most text, someone from the community already tried to translate it and the discussions about more difficult grammar is really helpful. But it got a lot of baby talk, which makes it kinda impossible to look up anything chi says until you understand how her speech pattern works.

I recommend Gal to Dino more, even if it doesn’t have a book club yet. The difficulty is about the same level as chi, but without the babytalk of Chi. I think it got some gal slang/very casual speech, but I had no trouble with that. Also the story is way more wholsome :slight_smile:

Yotsuba is also a beginner manga that’s often recommended and also come with an in depth wanikani bookclub. In my opinion it’s a bit harder than Chi Or Gal to Dino. For yotsuba there is also a vocabulary deck here on bunpro. I never had success with those decks, though. I like to read way faster than I could ever learn the vocab :sweat_smile:

You can read a few trial pages on bookwalker to see what you like more :slight_smile:

Good luck on your reading journey. :slight_smile:

1 Like