Intro / Background
Let’s start this by saying that I have no experience whatsoever when it comes to learning languages. I’m in the extremely privileged position of speaking three languages, but they came for free. I never made an active effort on my own to learn one.
My first language is Italian. I have a German grandma who was adamant I learn German from a young age. Which I’m thankful for, because it opened a lot of doors that would’ve otherwise remained closed, such as living in a German speaking city. Then, there’s English, which I learned in school. And didn’t care about it a whole lot. 10 year old me wasn’t sure whether I’m going to need English in my life or not. Lol. Pretty naive, right?
My impulse decision of learning Japanese came up in late February. I had just returned from Taiwan, which included a 3-day Japan trip because why not? Flights were cheap. I knew I would be spending more time in Japan later this year. So I thought that after all these years and countless visits, maybe it’s time to finally make an effort and learn the language. I’m going to Japan again in September.
My overly ambitious goal, because I had no clue how hard it is to learn a language, was fluency by September. 
Spoiler, of course I failed this.
Reason for this thread
Because there’s so many contradicting opinions on how to learn Japanese online, I felt like it’s only natural to add my own.
Jokes aside, I hope someday, someone who faced my same initial problems as I did will read this, and will feel encouraged to deviate from the general “optimized” path to experiment and find out what works best for them, regardless of what people online say. Because I made the mistake of trying to stick to the general recommendations, even if - for whatever reason - they didn’t work for me. And since I stopped, I have been enjoying my Japanese learning journey a lot more. On top of that, it even started speeding up.
Stats
After 5 months, I have learned the following:
- ca. 1100 vocab words
- All of N5 grammar points
- About half N4 grammar points
Comprehension levels:
- I can largely follow “easy language” Youtube content aimed at learners about every-day life situations
- I can read NHK Easy News with some Yomitan lookups
- I understand next to nothing when it comes to regular content aimed at native speakers
Initial Approach
The biggest challenge begins when you Google “how to learn Japanese”. The vast amount of resources, apps, communities, strongly opinionated YouTubers and approaches really made the choice hard.
After roughly two days of “How do I start”-research, I decided to:
- Download and install Anki
- Use the Kaishi 1.5k Deck
- Watch CureDolly Videos on Youtube for basic Grammar
- Read up Tae Kim for more grammar
- Take Preply lessons for output, conversation and feedback
and look into immersion later, once I reach a threshold where watching something in Japanese isn’t purely background noise.
Current Approach
- Completely dropped Anki altogether
- Only using Bunpro for both Grammar and Vocab
- Following the Tae Kim Deck on some days, the JLPT Decks on others. Depending on daily mental capacity.
- Watching Japanese street interviews on Youtube
- Subscribed to a handful of “easy language” Youtubers who make videos about their daily lives
- I’m still using Preply for conversation practice, and it’s slowly starting to actually make sense to do so.
- WaniKani (since 3 weeks or so)
Anki and Kaishi
Disclaimer: I had no prior SRS experience.
I have used Anki with the Kaishi 1.5k Deck for 6 weeks to learn vocab in isolation. After those 6 weeks, I had 240 cards in my SRS queue, but only a 60% retention. It goes as far as learning a card and just forgetting it every-day again in a painful loop.
I can’t tell you why. I have asked what I was doing wrong in the Anki Discord, where lots of helpful people tried to figure it out with me. I engaged with the cards, took my time to “learn” them, and forgot them again.
To this day, I have no idea why Anki went this bad for me. Pretty much everything else I’ve tried went much better than this.
This is not a general recommendation not to use Anki. I couldn’t figure my issue out. But I should have dropped it much earlier, because it obviously didn’t work. It gave me a lot of frustration and almost made me want to quit. But more to that later.
Cure Dolly
Her starter videos are amazing and they definitely helped me understand how the basic sentence structure and particles work. I think the initial Cure Dolly videos are an amazing kickstart into understanding sentence structure and getting the basic gist of how “Japanese works” on a very superficial level. It’s definitely a good investment for a few hours of time to watch those videos a couple of times.
Tae Kim
Despite Tae Kim contradicting Cure Dolly in some places and feeling like Cure Dolly’s explanations are more solid, the practicality of Tae Kim’s explanations helped me a lot in order to understand how to use certain Grammar Points. Until now, Tae Kim is still my preferred source of explanation, if said grammar point is covered in his book.
I understand that Tae Kim is not a linguist and that his explanations are theoretically lacking. I feel like at my stage this isn’t particularly relevant. Especially in combination with Bunpro, which I use to re-inforce and apply Tae Kim’s explanations.
Preply
Probably the worst bang for the buck of everything I’ve used so far. Very helpful nontheless. If you can afford a tutor, I strongly recommend going for it.
The feedback I get on my attempts to try to make sentences helps a lot. It also helps to have someone who actually talks to me in Japanese, and listens to my answer in Japanese. We have played through various every-day situations that I might encounter in Japan and it helped me a lot. Of course real-life won’t be this scripted, but it feels like a very good starting point, to have gone through certain situations already with a competent person. Someonw who can explain how I can convey what I’m trying to express in a better way, or what I did wrong, or why talking about a walk in the park (さんぽ) can potentially become very awkward when you misread さ for ち.
Bunpro
Bunpro has been the single biggest acceleration in learning Japanese. The variety of sentences, the explanations, the various ways to apply a grammar point. Heck I don’t need to sell Bunpro. Everyone here is already using it anyway. I wish I started earlier.
Bunpro helped me drop Anki. I don’t know what retention precisely I have. Reason is, I started using Bunpro before the vocab retention stats existed. Those are now skewed because for the largest time, instead of “learning” vocab, I’ve just added it to reviews and failed it until it sticked. But nowadays I’m completing most vocab reviews with 80-90% accuracy, therefore it’s working substantially better than Anki did for me. Again, I can’t tell you why. But I’m happy it does. On Bunpro, I’ve been able to add slightly more than 10 words a day on average. And they’re sticking pretty well.
WaniKani
I wish I started using WaniKani earlier. It gives vocab a structure. It helps me understand compounds. Since I’ve started using WaniKani, I occasionally catch myself hearing compound words in content and figuring out what they might mean without having heard the word before. And I’m just on Level 4. It’s paying off pretty quickly already. I should have done WaniKani from the start.
WaniKani also taught me the general importance of creating mnemonics when it comes to new words. It makes it easier to recall a term in the early SRS stages before it becomes more natural.
Immersion
I should be doing more immersion, really. I’m not doing enough.
People out there are not going to speak clean textbook Japanese. Every single immersion session so far has given me at least some new “aha” moment on how to express something, how to put a specific type of thought into words. I should definitely do more immersion, but I can’t push myself to do more than I’m doing now. At least I have reached the point where I watch something every day, even if it’s just 15 minutes. I hope that with increasing comprehension, I will be able to motivate myself more.
Currently most of my “immersion” comes from:
- Youtube
- Twitter / X
- NHK Easy News
Going forward: short term
I have 5 more weeks until I’m in Japan for 3 weeks. I will probably stop adding core-deck type of vocab and isntead focus on domain-vocab that I will definitely encounter: Restaurant, Hotel, Bar, etc type of vocab.
I will substantially slow down the grammar points to adjust the SRS load to a level that a short review in the morning and a short review before bed will be bearable during holiday.
The same goes for WaniKani. My goal is to complete level 5 by mid-August, then I will probably stop adding things until after my holiday.
Going forward: long term
I don’t know. But I’m having a lot of fun. I feel like my current SRS committment is unsustainable for my lifestyle and I won’t be able to do this forever. I will probably have to adjust at some point, slow down further and find a balance where I can make time for more immersion. In the end, I started off with a completely inadequate mindset of wanting to speedrun Japanese. Which obviously didn’t work. I’m not disappointed, I simply had no clue what I was signing up for.
While I will definitely keep using Bunpro and Wanikani for a very long time, I feel like I should do my best to eventually shift the weight towards immersion more.
Conclusion
I’m happy to have started. Learning Japanese has turned into a nice hobby. I realize that my opinions here aren’t worth much, but I hope they help people who are currently struggling with the platforms they chose to start with, to drop them and experiment different approaches. Only because everyone uses A, it doesn’t mean that so should you.
If you’re frustrated with a tool, drop it sooner. Experiment early. Rigid plans often don’t survive first contact.
