I’m still not quite getting it -_-
I explained the card making app first, then realised you meant tbe timing app, and explained that after. They were in the same post.
You’re actually the first person to say that to me! usually people just say “oh well keep it up” which is kind of depressing haha, but I know they mean well.
You are welcome.
Hmm maybe I’m misremembering the last part, but I thought you’d successfully gotten the words back up after the initial set back, after you stopped learning kanji? Maybe there was another post after that, that I missed.
How many words do you think you know / learn in a day these days, then?
I’m currently at 15 a day but going to try to up to 20 since my retention is over 90%, but I’m worried about time, obviously.
I also regularly take jlpt listening tests (I mean, I regularly take all the tests, but) for training listening to sentences, it is getting better but is definitely my worse category atm. I like them, though, because there is often a twist. Whenever I get the answer right to one that has a twist on the first try with no replaying audio, I feel really proud of myself.
Sorry, I meant because you stopped doing kanji, grammar, and I think vocab reviews. You seem to dislike doing reviews.
I stopped learning kanji about a week ago because I got tired and demotivated.
There was a point in time when I had nice results with anki by adding words I am familiar with, but then I switched to another tactic where I add words only with new kanji readings and I got stuck again.
Righ now as I said I’m adding 80 cards/day but front a page is an audio sentence + screenshot so I can guess the meaning of the target word every time if I here it correctly (so the task is to here the unknown word in a sentence, understand sentence, and say the word’s base form outlod) I don’t know how much words/day I learn but it totally depends on how much times a day I can see that word in new sentence. Like if I can see it 3-4 times in the same day and 1-2 the next day it’s probably will be highly recognizable in context.
I looked on it more from perspective like: I have database of words I’m familiar with reference sentences, every time I see the same word in a new sentence I make myself more familiar with it so many cards have some sort of 5%, 10%, 20%, 50% learned-rate, and it grown every time I see the word. It’s like the tactic where I know the words I need to pay attention to. After a few encounters 2-4 after adding I can recognize them, usually.
Also I think it’s perfect material for making general cards to learn in the future.
After I have 2000-3000 I think ill take 200 words from first 1000 and go though them to see how much I know, then I’ll multiply it by 5 and will know the approximate number of words I’m learning
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Got it!
Not particularly, I just don’t feel that it’s the necessary thing at the moment, I need to work on basics I think
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It’s been 10 days since the last update so here is a new one:
Time
Avg study time for the last 10 days is 4.4h/day
Something like 15h of listening
And I’ve read half a volume of Frieren without tracking time (I wonder how many words it is? 5k mb?)
Reading
I’ve almost done no reading, just couldn’t concentrate at all.
But I’ve been recovering and doing 1 hour for the last 3 days.
- As I said half of the first Frieren volume in paper (I haven’t do a single lookup so far)
Listening/mining
I’ve finished Frieren and now I have 1150 i+1 listening cards, it was about 2.3 hours on average
Anki
It’s the section for the words, but now it’s not only words but listening comprehension, reading, grammar, and making old words stick in stone.
So I added 650 cards in 10 days. 150 short but I guess it’s ok.
Listening
I’ve watched the first season of Mob Pshico with relative comfort, not like I was understanding a lot, I don’t know how much i was understanding, sometime laughing from jokes and fully getting the line because I’ve watched it 2 times before that.
Also listening to “Yuyu no nihongo podcast” and other podcasts, it’s already quite comfortable to do!
Also I want to ask help for with content, I need some good quality travel channels and programming channels (like Fireship or something about finding a job as a dev), thanks!
Grammar
Started adding grammar 3 days ago and added about 15 new point from premade bookmarks.
Plan
Form now on doing:
- 2h anime sentence mining
- 2h anki
- 1h Bunpro (as much as I can)
- 1h reading (msuhoku tensei)
- No tracking YouTube, anime, and manga included
Hope I’ll be able to do at least 5 dedicated hours/day this week.
I also plan on making a new update post the next Saturday to make myself a little bit more accountable
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To sum up:
Bunpro:
n5 - complete
n4 - complete
n3 - 17/219
Words:
I had 1000 cards in 3 different decks that I gave up, and now I have 1150 other type sentence listening cards.
Reading
More than 100k words of reading on LingQ (250k characters on avg)
Time
I’ve been tracking time since I’ve learned hiragana katakana and radicals, from 01.08.2024 and it’s been 548 dedicated hours of study.
Also, I think 150 hours of untracked 70-100%-attention listening is good enough of an assumption.
So in total, 700 hours
But I don’t really care about 150 listening hours for now and usually saying plain study time
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In my limited experience as well N3 is where the grammar starts to get very specific. I’m about halfway through it myself, and it’s a lot more ways of using words in some grammatical way then inflection rules.
So, seems like you’re doing good. If you’re able to read and listen then that matters way more than anything the tools tell you. If you can speak with another person, you’re there. Everything else is meta.
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I wanted to make a post but idk.
Not everything is going smoothly.
Now my active learning time is 5 hours and I think it’s time I can squeeze out of myself every day so I’ll have minimal losses while having time for manga, youtube, chatting, anime etc.
For now, it’s:
- 2h - reading (mushoku tensei with furigana on, it’s fairly enjoyable now)
- 1h anime mining
- 1h Anki listening practice with mined cards
- 1h bunpro
- a few hours of free immersion
Maybe I’ll add 8-12 cards a day from what I’m reading and messages in English/Japanese card type, I want to know how well it will work.
I got a Japanese human to chat with, it was painfully slow in the beginning but after writing ~ about 70 messages it started feeling natural and looks like time spent was divided buy 3.
I bought 1-6 volumes of Frieren, I can read it with really little problems as I did it with subs and made over 1k cards.
I also got 2 easy books one of which is little prince:
I’m looking for a nice setup with iPad or iPhone to make easy word lookups by writing kanji. Maybe you know good apps or convenient websites?
I think ill be reading them in my free time and making 5-10 pepper cards a day with necessary for me words.
My progress is not as big as I wanted, I still can hardly understand any youtube, but there are some good sides like my reading speed is growing in real-time, my understanding is better, and chatting is easier, so I’m not going to give up my fast pace at least for a few more months, and I’m already making my mind up to prolong term from 01.03.2025 to like June, I’ll see how my understanding will go, but for now I hope I’ll be able to do something like Frieren - doing travel for a travel and not for results
Thanks for reading!
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I’m glad you found a Japanese human to talk to as opposed to a Japanese macaque or a Japanese bear or something. 
I’m impressed if you can read Frieren with little issue. Is the grammar fairly simple?
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Ye I guess that is the regular approach in most jp learning cases 
Grammar is fairly simple, of course there were some hard sentences while I was mining cards from anime but I managed to resolve most of them using google translate, ChatGPT, and my mentor. + I’ve watched it so many times that I can just guess what some structures mean, probably
So It’s been a long time with no updates.
I’ve been going with steady speed but did a little brake 5-day break for a new year.
I don’t have particular results to share, so I’ll just write some results and plans.
- I’ve reached 99/219 n3
- 220k or about 500 symbols or reading on bunpro. right now 1/3 through the third book of Mushoku Tensei, it’s not hard anymore. I just switched to no-furigana mode and I’m still going with a speed of 30 words/m (or about 75 simbols/m). It’s only 1/4 of my whole study time, so I assume I’ve read around 800k symbols so far.
- Bought more manga, Yotsuba is easy, and reading 100 pages of Chainsaw Man (from the middle of volume 5 where anime has stopped) wasn’t hard as well, I did about 10-15 word lookups (used Kanshudo on my work phone for it). Furigana sometimes is awesome.
- I can not watch youtube, maybe I just didn’t find content I like. So I decided to watch Italian content during my labour time.
- I can watch anime sometimes switching subs on. Not something smart, but something like Solo Leveling. Also, I’ve watched Dandadan fully in Japanese switching bubs on sometimes as well (I probably didn’t get a lot).
- Isekais are stupid, I’ve tired of giving them chances if they look different from the first view, all they are trash if they are coming out now and you haven’t heard about them. Isekai Ojisan is basically top, I knew it was good, now it’s my top 1 isekai anime. Mushoku adaptation is good but I strongly feel it’s lacking something.
From now on I’m doing 2-3 hours of reading and 2-2.5 hours of Bunpro. I want to finish n3 by 21.01 so I have to do 9 points a day. At that time or somewhere near I want to start a new challenge, but closing n3 bore seems pleasant for me.
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I want to say that what you are doing is incredible even if … very intense. I am glad that you did not burned out and actually reached a level of proficiency with Japanese that allows you to enjoy the language - I have seen many examples of people crashing and burning. Good job!
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Thanks a lot for your encouraging and motivating words!
I still have a long way to go to make this language comfortable (and even usable) in a daily internet live, but it’s also true that I can enjoy some of it already!
Thanks!
I wanted to say this is very impressive, and also ask - what apps are you using to read books/novels? It seems like you mentioned, that you can change furigana mode on and off, so I imagine it’s an app and it’s honestly something I’m looking for 
Thank you!
Concerning apps, I’m using lingq, an app - pop up dictionary.
You can click on the word and the the community translations. It’s pricey (12$ month) and for Japanese often messing up division of words, but it’s easy to get used to it. You can switch on and on furigana (there is romaji furigana as well by default, but you change it to hiragana in settings). I prefer it better then yomitan because I love to read on my iPad in my sofa, with is hard with laptop.
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A little update:
Grammar
I finished n3 
It was super easy, at first I was going through 4 points a day, but then I was able to start adding up to 10 points a day, and even 15 sometimes a few times without spending too much time. There were not many ghosts, never more than 45. More than half of all points were known from reading or anime listening cards.
Compared to n5 and n4 it took me so little effort!
N5 with 126 points took me 50 hours
N4 with 177 points took me 95 hours
Almost all the way there were more than 70 ghosts.
N3 took me 44 hours while it has 219 points!
I can comprehend most texts, most problems with unknown words and long sentences, but except that grammar is no longer a problem.
Bunpro is the best!
Words
Well, nothing happens, I do not use anki for now.
Reading
I was reading 2 hours a day with almost no missed days.
Right now speed is 40w/m or ~95ch/m.
I’m reading through the 4th volume of Mushoku Tensei.
100k words of reading in the last 30 days.
It’s quite comfortable from a language perspective, but I want something less retarded to read. Also, I know the story which makes it a little bit unfair compared to stories I don’t know yet.
Listening
Didn’t do much, watched a few anime titles, last week returning to watching YouTube. Most stuff from learning channels is comprehensible, real YouTube is not yet (maybe I just don’t have any interesting content to watch)
Speaking
I was able to speak with some learners and even Japanese people a few times (5-6 hours in total) and it felt quite comfortable! I don’t stop every second to find a word or something like that. There were not too many topics, language learning, films, music (music was tough)
6 months of learning
Tomorrow will be 6 months since I started learning Japanese!
Generally, I’m ok with my results.
I had 725 hours of dedicated studying (-1 week I didn’t track yet)
A few hundred hours of watching.
Some hours of writing and speaking.
The best thing is that I am generally accustomed to the language, its sounds are not foreign to me anymore. Right now I can just learn words and for everything else input should be sufficient.
Plan
25.01 - 04.02 I’ll be visiting my friend, and I’m not willing to study too much. Maybe I’ll read for 1 or 2 hours to not lose shape but that’s all.
After my trip, I want to study all the on readings for jōyō kanji in pair with words related to them (words are optionally, but If I do not learn them, I want to learn more kanji per day), I feel it can be super hard but at the same time limitlessly efficient (at least for me) (there are 2400 on readings for them, a little bit more then one for kanji)
I’ll return from 4-5 hours a day to a challenging 6 hours and will try to accomplish it in 40-45 days.
I don’t even know if this is possible, but I’ll try my best. I will be writing kanji, creating pepper cards for them, learning them with anki, learning words for those kanji to improve retention. Maybe create audio with words to reinforce while cooking (ask GPT to create 60 n+1 sentences, and get audio with another ai and just listen over and over while doing stuff). Everything for good retention will work.
So yes, thanks for following my long, I’m glad there is such a calm and smart community!
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By the way, my friend asked me for an interview)
He just wanted to try how to ask questions, to get some experience, as well as my story was interesting to him, and this is what we have now: https://youtu.be/tq39HZg7-0g 
I’m glad my English is sufficient enough)
I’ll never forget the word “fasten” anymore 
Not using anki at all or not learning new words in Anki?