I guess it worked to some extent if you go this fast through topics here!
I guess how many hours you’ve spend learning words, listening, reading?
I’m trying to measure everything)
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I’ve been learning for just about 4 years now. I’ll be honest I haven’t really tracked time at all, for like my first year I was obsessed with “oh if I know all the kanji then I’ll know everything!” as if it was when I was learning mandarin…
After that I tried really hard to do genki but only got a quarter through. After that basically did nothing for two years. So yeah I don’t have a good time guess sorry 
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2009& 2015 studied Genki in class, with CD and paper workbook - 11.2 days (calculated from number of credits)
2021 studied Joyo with kanjiDamage in anki- 13.2 days
2022&2023 reading reviews with Japanese definitions in Jalup app (now gone 
) -19.2 days
2024 bunpro and tried to increase immersion (hence my ‘immersion’ study log thread) unfortionately I don’t know how to find cumulative time in bunpro app and don’t know how much time I spent immersing this year. It feels alot less- maybe 7 days?
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You mean 1 day == 24 hours?
yeah, that’s how anki counts my time in the app.
Hi everyone! I finally got some time and power of will to make an update!
These few weeks were not the best but were not too bad either.
Grammar
Finished n4 10 days ago and right now doing 1 hour/day closing ghosts.
Kanji
Were doing 45 minutes/day and missing some days, haven’t moved forward, maybe 40 kanji or so.
Words
Have been doing 30 minutes/day since the time of the last update. Stats are getting better every day and the average amount of added cards has grown to 15 per hour this week!
I’m adding only cards I am quite familiar with from text, mostly if I can recognize it with furigana on maybe I know one kanji in it, I know that I’ll encounter it, or I can remember the first letter of this word, also it should be in the top 2-3k.
Reading
This was the main part for the last 10 days!
I’ve been doing 2.5-3 hours/day reading https://fanficfanfic.tumblr.com/toc. It was painful at the start and now painful as well, but I’m able to understand most sentences and read with a speed of 15-18 while using furigana (I generate it with lingq.com, which really helps to “print” the reading of the word in mind, or something like that).
Listening
I think I did about 8-10 hours of concentrated listening in this period but I’m not sure, I should definitely track it as well. Shun is very understandable as well as some other YouTubers for beginners. And yet, I don’t think it’s possible to have 80-90% understanding while cooking, most of the time I’m losing the main point very quickly, I guess I need to wait a little bit more.
Summing up
In total during these 21 days I’ve spent 90 hours learning which is pretty much 4.25 hours/day. Not the best results, and I hope fixing them with my scedulre. Also 5 days were just not on point because of me traveling for a bit.
The interesting thing is that I think a lot about methods of studying, more than studying, much more.
There are 3 interesting I’ve been thinking about during the last week.
- App that connects to my Anki deck with words and finds content with the best amount of learning words per pice of content, as well as it track how much times I’ve seen this word and what is my recent retention on it, as finds content based on it as well.
- Learn words where I know at least on kanji reading, so I can learn 会話 then, 会社 then 社員, 店員 etc. (I just asked GPT to give me this, I guess we can automate it to some point, or maybe use some websites), so ye, can be pretty effective and I may start using this method as well.
- Make text model write me content with words I learn. So ye, basically like 1 app but for generated content. It can be beneficial because I can setup a topic and let it choose needed words from my anki deck as well as make text easy.
Tomorrow I meet my mentor and will discuss my plan for next weekend, but probably it’s not changing much.
Thanks for reading
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I’ve done 3 before, it didn’t go well at the time, but thdt was before 4o released (whenever that was) so maybe it’s better now. Just double check that it’s actually generating things that make sense.
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How did it go when you were trying?
I’ve heard that it’s ok at Japanese nowadays, but if I decide to create an app like that (or script) I’ll check it
It seemed to me that it was understanding Japanese as a translation of English, rather than it’s own language. It was especially bad with words that have multiple meanings in Japanese where English only has one.
So an example would be the time it told me a story where a rabbit wanted to fly but it can’t because it’s not a bird, so in the end, a frog flew away with it…
…
Because 飛ぶ…
…
It was a very enlightening mistake for me and it scared me off using AI generated fiction, because I didn’t want to mistakenly learn something bad.
I will say, at the time, I did send it to my friends and we had a good laugh about how rabbits can’t fly but frogs can. 笑 it even had a moral at the end which was something about using your friends (the frog) to achieve your dreams (flying) 笑.
Luckily, it was a mistake where even someone in N5 could perfectly understand how it happened, but yeah I just… I dunno. I’ve played around with some of the more modern open source ones and their Japanese is still hot garbage, but I’m willing to grant that GPT 4o or 5 might be better now, I’m just staying away from it for now and learning more vocab so I can read more native content instead.
Apologies for my long-winded response.
Ye, that’s funny)
The first option should be the most optimal, but I guess app like that will take time to make it can be quite consuming while running
I feel like that’s what Lingq is trying to be, but without being able to integrate directly with Anki, it’s really missing out. I do wish I could sync my Lingq words with my anki progress, rather than randomly seeing a word I marked low like three months ago and going ‘oh, yeah, I know that now.’
Lingq is yet another app that used to have an API and does not anymore. Someone reverse engineered it ages ago (so, out of date), but I looked at what he found and it didn’t seem like it would be useful for what I was trying.
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It’s becoming a bit hard to maintain this log but here is the report!
Summary
In short my times for learning looks like this:
Reading - 2h/day
Active listening + mining - 2-2.5h/day
Half active listening + just active listening - 2-3h/day (not tracking)
Words (with new approach) - 2h/day
Kanji
Gave up even on reviews with 1700 kanji, I’m not planning on learning them any further any time in the future. Right now I’m reading only with firigana on and offing it for words I know well. Also recalling kanji for 15 seconds every time is not fun at all. Anyhow words distinction (without furigana) is pretty high right now
Grammar
It started taking less than 10 minutes every day so I gave up on reviews a few days ago, all the grammar I’ve learned and needed is already in my head because of massive exposure.
I may start adding 2ish points I’ve encountered and added as a phrase to Anki during other activities just so the time is ~30m for bunpro.
Reading
I started reading Mushoku Tensei about 10 days ago. It wasn’t pleasant but now it looks like I’ve encountered enough words, so my speed of reading was 17-20 words in the past few days so if I continue it for 2 weeks or so without jumping from this book to something else, the amount of new words will be even pleasant to read. Not taking any words from it right now.
Listening
Great stuff, I started to understand audio content, most of Onomappu I can understand 80-90% of the time, most videos I’m holding the line of what he is talking about (not like I’m barely holding the line, but more like I’m really watching stuff I understand)
When I’m cooking I’m listening to mikurealjapanese (diologs) which are harder but I can catch some topics, like 4-6 minutes not understanding anything, losing all, and then 4-6 minutes understanding the next topic in the same video.
Was able to hold fully watch one 40-minute interview on her channel and didn’t get lost a single time, it was a life description or something, pretty proud of myself.
All of it was acived within last week, my progress is huge with the time I spend, but when it comes to native content it’s hard, I managed to understand one video about shadowing a few days ago but it’s it for now, even close language learning content is still hard. When I stared rewatching Mob Psyco a few days ago I got feeling that I’m not getting anywhere as I couldn’t understand a singe word (at least it seamed that way).
On the other hand watching last 3 episodes of Dandadan in Japanese gave me almost 0 struggles while I was not really concerned about Japanese at that moment at all.
Active listening
I started going through my beloved 葬送のフリーレン and extracting all good phrases (nice frease has new words within top 12k or I just like the words like 清貧, and I can understand it, some phrases I add have 3 or more unknown words, but then they should have very straight forward grammar). Thanks @amberglade for idea of setting this thing. Now I have these beautiful looking cards
Words
I was doing about 20 new words for the first 2 weeks after the last post and stared adding only words with new kanji (assuming I will learn words where I know kanji readings quite quickly thought just reading, I still think it is true), but then it stared taking to much time while I wasn’t seeing those words for days and weeks. I gave up.
Righ now it’s been 7 days since I’m doing just listening practice with phrases I took from Frieren. Right now I think it’s extremely effective.
- I add 80 cards and it takes about 60-80 minutes
- Retention is 90% and I never fail card, can click hard but not fail.
- It’s comprehension speed training
- Training in understanding what they are saying by separating sounds (there are so many times when I “know” words but can’t get them, as well as speed from previous point)
- New grammar point tracking
- Instant actual usage training
Doing this I actually understood that just by practicing my basics I will be able to understand a lot, a lot more even without new words.
With that new words are sticking well, and what more important I learn how to say them (many times it’s hard to even read them, so listening a dozen times and repeating helps)
After seeing the word I added for a few times I remember it, but words I haven’t encounter for a long time aren’t taking much time to review because if I hear it I can probably guess the mining from my card unlike when it’s single word card.
Kanji is not a problem, I even remember words because I work with subtitles and if the word repetes a few times it’s writing just sticks to the point where this word is not new. And if not, I always read with furigana.
So I love this method and will continue adding 80 cards/day while it’s getting easier with each day.
Speaking
I took 2 italki meanings and was surprised how well I speak, I lack vocab, but almost all the constructions I wanted to say were in my head 驚いた. Not very fast, brain is not working well like I’m sick or something but I’m definitely not dying in Japan. Understanding what the opponent is saying is harsh.
I think it’s important to speak, my brain started thinking in Japanese and is looking for construction and words a few times (like a shower), I even can think in Japanese, just it’s not very convenient because I stop quite a lot without knowing words, I would right them on the paper, but there is no paper in a shower. Some king of reinforcement.
As well as I started noticing constructions and words I wanted to use, not many but a few every day since then.
There were a few days with bad time performance, but it’s due to the start of the long-lasting programming pet project, will to learn is quite stable.
Ok, that’s it, took me 1 hour to write, but I’m glad I did it, sorry for the mistakes in the second half and have a good learning!
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8 hours?
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More like 6 - for days where I can not learn 6 hours for some reason so on avg it’s 5 or something + 2-3 hours of listening while cooking, cleaning, and already starting procrastinating with it (it was the main point, I become fluent in English by procrastinating for like 2 years from b1) (I mean now it’s been 2 years, but I had no trouble even one year ago, so last year or even one and a half it’s barley any new words)
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Wow, 6 hours still a lot of time, I don’t usually pass 4 hours (I guess). Good luck!
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Another member of club “Onnomappu is surprisingly easy to understand”. I don’t really listen to stuff made for learners (unless it’s videos about distinctions or nuance) as much anymore, but I remember it being crazy how understandable he was.
I recently checked what percentage of the Mob Psycho anime I understand and it was too low to bother watching. I’m going to start doing the prepare>experience strategy by pre-learning words from Persona 4G and then playing that section. I know a little under 70% of unique words so I can focus on the ones with higher frequency before, then learn those words as they come up as I’m playing.
I haven’t been doing that with the games I’m playing now (Pokémon, 妖怪ウォッチ, シャドバス) but that’s because I started those at over 80% total words known, so it wasn’t as big a problem.
But, my 4 hours a day are mostly spent doing reviews. I don’t even track my gaming time because it’s not even every day, lol.
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Since you’re into 葬送のフリーレン (so am I, big fan) you might want to visit this site. The formating of the pages also makes it a great mining resource, just make sure that the “off”-box option isn’t marked.
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Thanks!
But I think I’ll just buy all the frieren in paper, I don’t like this format to much because how it’s quality eats furigana which I like so much (
Do you mean words review for 4 hours day?
Yeah between 4 srs systems (including bunpro, obviously.) I have found a way to decrease the inefficient flash cards but unfortunately I guess it’s going to take months (it’s been 1.5 months since I implemented this plan and yet I still had 250 flashcards today, without adding a single new word to that service 😮💨) before I can fully transition to the more efficient method. 
I also decreased bunpro to 1 new vocab a day, since reaching N2, but it doesn’t seem the reviews have decreased at all. Bunpro takes the least time over the course of the day, though, so it’s not a huge contributer.
So it goes when you’re bad at memorizing. If I could learn just through passive listening like you can, this would be a lot more fun. But it’s still worth it learning Japanese anyway 
last week I typed the longest message I’ve ever sent to one of my friends without needing a single dictionary lookup. 