Study - From Hiragana to Real Japanese

Japanese
#21

This is a great topic! I always like to read others’ journey and see how similar/different it is from my own. As for my own journey:

2013: Came across JapanesePod101 and thought that the idea of learning Japanese was cool. So I signed up for it, watched a couple of videos but never got any interest going so I stopped soon after.

2015/6: In my 2nd/3rd year of uni, I got to know about my uni’s exchange program and came across a prospectus of Waseda University. It looked gorgeous and kinda got me interested to study there/Japan one day.

2017: Maintained my grades well and got offered for the exchange program in my final semester but there was no Japanese uni offered that year (:frowning:) and chose South Korea instead (still a good experience!).

2019: Early in the year I got to know about MEXT scholarship. Researched a lot more about it, went to a briefing and decided to apply it. This is also where I decided to start learning Japanese again while waiting for the result. Started with Hiragana/Katakana by watching JapanesePod101 and other youtube videos. Also started using Duolingo and other apps like Anki, Drops etc.

2020: COVID happened. Dropped Duolingo because I lost the streak in a really busy period. I didn’t feel good about paying to ‘recover’ the streak because of my own discpline (I think I was being too hard on myself but also glad that I stopped Duolingo). Started researching about other ways to learn and decided upond enrolling in a local language school for 8 months. However, it turned out to be not worth the money I paid because by the time the classes ended, I felt like I was barely N5 and could’ve also saved money and learned whatever I learned by myself (Still had fun and made some friends though!)

2021: Still in COVID era. Stopped learning Japanese altogether in order to focus on what I was pursuing at that time.

2022 Jan-July: COVID restrictions finally eased and JLPT exams starts to be offered again in Malaysia. Immediately registered for July’s N5 exam despite not studying regularly. 2 weeks before the exam, started to feel the pressure and only did Hiragana/Katakana practice using realkana (similar to GoKana) and kanji/vocab practice using its kanji counterpart, realkanji. Passed N5!

2022 Aug-Dec: Similarly, registered for N4 and barely studied. Did the same practice + only learned 2 grammar points before the exam: ～ように and ～ために (I think I came across this a lot in mock tests and always got confused so just decided to learn these 2). Passed N4!

2023: When taking my N4, I realized that I could no longer just rely on my vocab/kanji practice and not learn grammar as I noticed the reading part got harder for me because I did not know a lot of grammar. This was the time I decided to actually learn and focus more on grammar. Researched and tried around a few apps and came across my savior, Bunpro! What I loved about Bunpro was that every grammar point was listed by JLPT levels, making it really easy for me to structure my grammar studies and schedule how many I should learn per day as opposed to other apps/sites where they are grouped by similarities rather than JLPT levels. And as I only have enough money to subscribe for around ~1 year, I planned my studies accordingly to this constraint I have. I learned 3-5 grammar points per day until I finished that level, took a month break before starting a new level. All in all, I managed to finished everything around ~11 months, which is just within the timeframe I wanted to and continued taking JLPT every 6 months when possible. Just to sum up, my JLPT journey was as follows:

July 22: N5 passed! :white_check_mark:
Dec 22: N4 passed! :white_check_mark:
July 23: N3 passed! :white_check_mark:
Dec 23: N2 failed! :x: (found out my reading was bad!)
July 24: N2 passed! :white_check_mark:

Honestly, I owe a lot to Bunpro for making it easy to learn grammar as it was my crutch for the longest time. Used to hate learning grammar and just stuck with learning vocab/kanji because I was good at that and didn’t want to leave my comfort zone but Bunpro changed that! (I still have a lot to learn though, learning Japanese never stops! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:)

For JLPT N1, highly likely taking it this July, expecting to fail and retake it Dec :laughing: My problem currently is that I can read and listen but my comprehension is lagging a lot behind. So by the time I finished reading a sentence/paragraph or listened to a convo, I lost track of what I read/listened to, which cost me a lot of time during JLPT. So this is what I will be working on.

Seeing everyone work hard studying Japanese here makes me want to do the same! :muscle:

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#22

My learning journey isn’t linear at all. I first wanted to learn Japanese in high school, but this was quite a long time ago and I had never attempted to learn a language before and all I had were whatever books I found at the bookstore (not great, didn’t finish). Throughout the 2010s, I went back and forth between Japanese and other languages. I think in 2015, I printed out some hiragana and katakana practice sheets from the online learn Japanese resource the NHK had (Easy Japanese?).

At some point I found out about Genki and I slowly worked my way through the first book, but it was slow going since Japanese wasn’t my main language focus at the time and I was focused on grad school as well. I think I found Wanikani around this time as well, but only did the free levels at the time (I’m a Lifetime member now - my kanji learning methods weren’t working for me…tried a lot of other things that didn’t stick.)

It was in the last several years that I found resources that worked for me: Bunpro, renshuu, Satori Reader, Tadoku, etc. And thanks to the Bunpro and Wanikani forums, I finally found the encouragement and community I needed to push myself to engage with native content. While anime without subs and most video games are still out of my reach, I’ve finished several volumes of manga so far!

So there you have it! Long story short, it took me many years of starting with various resources, and then abandoning Japanese altogether, to where I am now.

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#23

I’m still pretty new, but I figured I’d share my journey too.

I started learning Japanese at the beginning of 2023 because I had a trip planned to Japan in March. I used Busuu to learn the basics, and in my opinion, they actually have a pretty solid way of teaching hiragana and katakana. I just kept repeating those lessons for a couple of weeks until everything finally stuck.

At first, my only goal was to be able to get around in Japan, but after my three-week trip, I decided to keep going—mainly because I met my future girlfriend there :sweat_smile:

I ended up using Busuu for about three years and finished their A1 and A2 courses. That said, I want to take it a bit more seriously now. Looking back at the last three years, I feel like my progress was honestly pretty slow, so I’m trying to be more consistent and structured going forward.

That’s why I decided to change my approach and switch to Bunpro for grammar and vocab, and Anki for kanji. ^^

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#24
  1. Decided to learn Japanese. Somehow found out I needed to know kana first (maybe from the intro to Genki? The exact reasons are lost to the mists of time…)
  2. I brute forced kana with some app (can’t remember it, was very janky) but basically just drilled it over few days until I could get 100% on their kana quiz (reading only, no writing).
  3. Tried to learn with Genki but soon found I wasn’t getting the progress I wanted after a few weeks (naive as to what I was getting myself into).
  4. Heavily researched language learning and Japanese learning and gathered resources for about a month or two (you can be the judge as to whether this was procrastination or a very good decision).
  5. Tested various forms of SRS and worked out that basically all the kanji learning methods which were popular at the time were not for me, so decided on just doing vocab cards only. I do remember I had a very very high failure rate when I started. I think some explicit kanji study probably helps initial vocab study feel smoother, when you’re still new, but, in terms of time spent, you’re probably looking at a similar amount of time regardless as you are doubling up vocab reviews with kanji ones.
  6. Signed up for Bunpro when I had an SRS vocab size of about 500-1000 words (real vocab size of 50-100, maybe). Learnt basic grammar via a mix of Bunpro, google, and consulting basically all the common beginner resources (youtube channels, textbooks, DoJG, etc). Around this time I also started watching TV shows in Japanese and reading novels/manga, and just literally looked up everything to try work it out (this was 80% of my time, slowly climbing up to 100% as I dropped SRS after a couple of years).
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#25

Oooh story time! I think my story is probably super unique as well, lol.

TLDR backstory:

  • Thought I wanted to learn Chinese because I loved Hanzi, but hated it.
  • Took my 15 years to realize that Japanese uses the similar Kanji.
  • Fell head over heels in love with the amazing Japanese language, culture, history, food and everything - and here we are 8 months later.
Full backstory for those interested

  • It started when I was around 8-9 years old I think, after watching the first Lord of the Rings movie in 2001 and then reading the books. I was absolutely FASCINATED by the fantasy languages.

  • Once in High School that interested outgrew the fantasy space once I learned about real-life logographic languages. Dipped my feet at a few different languages, but one set of symbols stood out to me specifically; Hanzi characters. I quickly learned that these were Chinese characters and this had me take an interest in China and Chinese culture.

  • Once at University, I applied for a local Chinese School to spend my free Saturdays learning Chinese for a couple of months. Unfortunately, I was 22 at the time and as a lot of young guys around this age I had other (the wrong) priorities. Besides, I came to the conclusion that Chinese was actually super difficult to speak and I had no real connection with the country and big parts of the culture. Decided to give up on learning other languages all together and also dropped out of University because I thought I knew what I wanted from life. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t)

  • Fast forward about 15 years. Had some big life-changing stuff happen in 2024 which made me realize that I should actually be doing the things I enjoy and want to do in life, instead of what others expect me to do. Rediscovered my absolute love for foreign languages and Kanji, and what do you know, I find out that Japanese uses the same Kanji as Chinese.

  • Decided to do some research into Japenese and Japan first - just to find out that basically everything I have ever liked or wanted in my entire life is either Japanese, rooted in Japanese culture/history or has some really big ties to Japan. Even the way I like to think or go about my life has much more in common with Japan then my home country.

  1. Decided to give it a go: Watched this 2 hour Youtube video around 5 times, used some Kana sheets on my iPad and used DuoLingo kana practice. I learned to read and write all Hiragana and Katakana in about 3 weeks.
  2. Have not enjoyed myself so much for years and decide I want to dedicate myself to learning this language. First thing I did: Booked a 4 week trip to Japan for the next year (Only 2 months left now!!) to be my first ever trip outside of Europe in my life.
  3. Started doing Anki to learn vocab (random words, no sentences…) and did some research in ways to learn grammer, Genki I was the best recommended textbook I found so started with that.
  4. Quickly realized that Genki I Lesson 3 is absolute shit and couldn’t wrap my head around it until I found Tokini Andy on Youtube. He explained verb-conjugation as it should be explained lol. Started combining my self-study lessons with his additional explanation. (And I still use his web-course to date as additional study for each lesson now that I’m working on Genki II Lesson 17 - together with the grammer explanations on Bunpro!)
  5. Waited a long time on purpose to actually start learning Kanji, because this was my main fascination in the beginning I was afraid this would take up all my learning time. Found WaniKani to be a great resource for me personally, to slowly pace this on top of my other studies.
  6. Realized learning random words on Anki is absolute shit as well, started looking for alternative decks or apps and accidentally found Bunpro which had pre-constructed cards with different sentences and nuances, absolutely amazing. And even a WaniKani integration, wooh! After trying it for a like 2 days I decided to switch over and delete Anki a.s.a.p… (Did have to move about 300 vocab in one day - but it was pretty early on so not that big a deal.)
  7. Started with ‘immersion’ (or whatever you want to call it) - and realized Bunpro is an ABSOLUTELY amazing tool to combine everything I learn from Textbooks, Lesson, WaniKani, Listening, Reading, etc. etc. in one single place and use the reviews to keep everything top of mind.
  8. Now, I’m using Bunpro for about an hour a day to learn some new words, check grammar write-ups, do some reading practice and do my daily reviews. (I still use Genki as a basis to structure my learning path, supported by both Tokini Andy resources and the Bunpro resources. I plan on continuing with Quartet after that.)
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#26
  1. Tried Duolingo in iunno, 2017/18 or so? Was kinda fun. Eventually wanted more and I think I dropped it.
  2. Late 2020, covid time, plenty of free time. Decided to give WaniKani a shot.
  3. Purchased the Genki books in early 2021 to help with grammar, but since it feels more classroom-oriented, never really gave it a shot.
  4. After using WK for ~a year and a half, realized I really don’t have much of a grasp on grammar and started using BunPro in April 2022.
  5. Went on vacation mid-2023 and fell far behind on BP and WK. While I eventually caught up on BP, I still haven’t caught up on WK.
  6. End of 2023, played through first video game in Japanese.
  7. Went to Japan in early 2025, which really brought back the desire to learn Japanese.
  8. As of now, early 2026, I have almost “learned” every grammar lesson on BP (177/184 on N1), and have almost caught up to the WK pile. No real daily Japanese reading, but I come across a lot of posts on Twitter in Japanese and I’m able to make out the gist of them probably 95% of the time which is nice. Challenging myself this year to play through any Japanese video game I start in Japanese so I think this is really the year where I start transitioning from “learning” to “applying.”

It’s weird in that it feels like it’s taken me longer than most people, but at the same time, it still doesn’t feel like it’s been that long.

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#27

I technically did some Japanese in Year 7 & 8 of high school, but honestly barely remember anything other than saying what my name was or the word for horse. Around 3/4 years ago I learned Hiragana in a night using Tofugu’s guide and the testing website that he recommended, after that I started on Wanikani. Can’t even remember my account details, I think I remember getting to around level 20? Eventually I fell off for about a year, came back and decided to do an Anki core deck for vocab + kanji, and I think around that time I also discovered Bunpro and started doing grammar. I was pretty on and off with Anki for a few months, discovered jpdb.io and jumped to that without looking back. Was still on and off with studying for about a year, fell off once again since uni was keeping me busy.

I came back to studying around a month ago, still using bunpro and jpdb. I seem to have lost my main jpdb account and am using one of my alts that only had like 800 vocab learned, but a lot of the stuff I learned is still kicking around in my head so after spending a couple weeks studying the Sono Hanabira: Tenshi no Akogare visual novel deck I was able to finally do some immersion. Took me about 20 hours to read, now reading Sono Hanabira 1, about halfway through with 5 1/2 hours of reading. I’ll occasionally use jiten.moe to find media which may not be in the jpdb corpus. My current pace is 20 words/day, 6 grammar points/day. Making all of my reviews due at 3AM on Bunpro has really helped me keep the time I spend on Bunpro pretty low.

TL;DR for people wanting advice: Use the Tofugu katakana and hiragana guide, and don’t spend more than a day or two learning. Avoid services that try to tell you what your pace should be, pick what works best for you. I am also firmly in the camp of not bothering to learn kanji. Just study vocab so you know actual words sooner instead of wasting months or a year on pictographs that aren’t even words. I recommend jpdb.io since it gives you a very direct route to immersion, which you should aim for as soon as possible since that’s what makes learning fun. Bunpro is also very good. Make sure you clearly know why you’re learning Japanese. If you wanna watch anime and play games then don’t even bother with learning to properly handwrite (unless you’re having some serious issues) or speaking. These are skills you can pick up if you ever become interested in them, but what’s going to motivate you the most is doing what you want with Japanese ASAP. Similar with if you just want to speak, or listen (maybe there’s some freaks out there who just want to handwrite Japanese…)

For immersion, I personally think visual novels are one of the best ways to start. Not as many words or as long as a novel, and listening is not as vital a skill as watching anime (though you can still get some practice). I also found the workflow a lot easier than anime once you get it set up (look at the guide on themoeway for how to set everything up). You can pretty quickly study enough to pick up a visual novel (70-80% coverage) and if it’s a part of a series or written by the same author you will have a lot of vocab overlap with sequels. Oh and Yomitan is your best friend ever.

4 Likes
#28

I never felt I had a compelling enough reason to learn Japanese; I grew up hearing that cartoons are too different from ‘real’ language and didn’t see many potential use cases. That perspective changed when I booked a trip to Japan around the end of 2024, igniting a surprising amount of motivation to try. I learned German in a traditional classroom setting, but I wanted to see how far I can get with self-learning a language. Here is a summary of the path I followed in learning the phonetic scripts and my first sentences. I was introduced to many of the online resources through TheMoeWay website.

  • Read Learn Japanese In 7 DAYS!: The Ultimate Crash Course by Dagny Taggart

    • Would not recommend due to errors and ambiguous authorship; I think these language books have finally been removed from Amazon

    • The book did offer a sense of whether I would like the language or not

  • Memorized kana characters using Quizlet flashcard decks

  • Read and practiced using Writing Japanese Hiragana by Jim Gleeson

    • I like that this book gives a bit of history and shows print, pen, and brush styles

  • Tofugo’s Kana Quiz

    • While I only stumbled across this resource later, I think it is great for drilling any irregulars/ones that you struggle with

  • Japanese Kanji and Kana by Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn

    • Introduction only, I enjoyed the historical outline

  • Kaishi 1.5K Anki vocab deck

    • Has full sentences, human-voiced audio, and illustrations

    • Practiced writing each word with Kanji and reading

  • IMABI

    • Read through the beginner contents and really like the explanations, but would have skipped some in hindsight

  • JLAB’s Beginner Anki Deck

    • Grammar (structured similar to Tae Kim’s guide) and listening comprehension

The resources above had plenty of sentences to my feet wet. From here on, I have been trying to consume more native content, drill grammar through Bunpro, and acquire more vocab through immersion (I just add it to Anki). With how much content and resources are available now (e.g. podcasts, browser dictionaries, etc.), I feel incredibly fortunate that I am starting now. I can’t imagine trying to learn 20 years ago, let alone in the 1900s!

  • Reading Content (Ordered ~ sequentially)

    • Tadoku Library

      • While great content for first books, some of the stories here are a little bizarre

    • eBooks (I have had good experience with Kobo)

      • Ruri Dragon

      • Konbini Ningen

  • Listening Content (Ordered ~ sequentially)

    • Nihongo Con Teppei

    • NHK Easy News

    • Youtube – 朗読

      • I enjoy readings of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s works, and it can be rewarding to pick up a little more each time you listen to a single story

    • NHK Radio News Podcast

3 Likes
#29

August 2017: Was searching for hiking groups using the Meetup app, stumbled on a free Japanese lessons group that met every Saturday morning and decided to join that.

April 2018: Discovered WaniKani and Anki, putting words I learned in the class into Anki.

November 2018: Went to Japan for the first time and realized my ability to converse was essentially nonexistent and I realized I wanted to take studying it more seriously than I have been.

December 2018: Failed JLPT N5 by one point, started using italki, HelloTalk, Bunpro, and dedicating more time to learning Japanese.

July 2019: Took and passed JLPT N4

November 2019: Went to Japan again, met my future wife (married 2.5 years ago), and realized I could speak a lot better (but still at a very beginner level).

December 2019: Took and passed JLPT N3

December 2021: Took and passed JLPT N2

September 2022: Finally went back to Japan after a 3 years hiatus due to COVID restrictions, conversation has massively improved at this point.

December 2022: Took and failed JLPT N1 (by 7 points).

July 2023: Went to japan again, some subtle improvements in conversation compared to last time.

August 2023: Wife moved to the US

December 2023: Took and failed JLPT N1 (by 5 points), got fed-up with JLPT at this point so stopped all study related to it including SRS, focusing on just enjoying using the language from here on out (watching dramas, conversation, reading, etc.)

September 2024: Went to Japan again, however not any remarkable improvements in conversation I felt.

August 2025: Went to Japan again to do our wedding reception there (we haven’t actually done one until this point), at this point my conversational ability feels like it has improved largely over the years, pretty much 0 issues with conversation unless it’s about a topic I know nothing about (but at that point I wouldn’t be able to really talk about it in English either).

October 2025: Return from Japan, decide I care about JLPT again and did some N1 prep.

December 2025: Took the N1, haven’t gotten the result yet but unlike previously I feel very confident I did well enough to pass it, hopefully that shows to be true in a couple weeks.

Future: Will be obtaining a spouse visa and moving to Japan hopefully in April.

In summary, randomly seeing those Japanese lessons on Meetup that day changed the course of my life haha.

4 Likes
#30

Thanks for mentioning this. I’ve never heard of it. Will be doing more immersion as advised.

1 Like
#31

I have an unusual route as well, that is slightly backwards.

Back in 2004 I started traveling to Japan and subsequently wanted to start learning the language. Back then the primary resources were Rosetta and Pimsleur, so much of my learning was listening based. This was reinforced through learning by trial and error in Japan through real world conversational experience. Learning was slow and roundabout. My reading ability was also non-existent and I relied solely on conversational Japanese. Back then there was very little English anywhere, so i had to recognize the kanji for train stops. I would usually write it down or have a paper map on hand. Smart phones didn’t exist yet so traveling there was the ultimate forced immersion.

This continued for many years until COVID travel restrictions. During COVID, I decided to study Japanese more seriously and used Busuu, Duolingo, and Human Japanese. At this time, my kana knowledge was scarce as most everything I was learning with was romaji based. Once I stalled out after completion of those, I tried to self study with various books; Japanese for Busy People, Genki, Minna and Practical Kanji. However, with the other obligations of life, it was hard to be consistent and self-motivated. After traveling again to Japan after they reopened post COVID, I decided to take things a bit more seriously. From 2022 to 2024 I took 2 years of uni level Japanese through extension/continuing education. This helped me greatly in establishing consistency for learning and provided the right level of obligation since I needed to attend a class and do homework. That was when I finally really learned kana. And that was through typical traditional learning methods. Flashcards, stroke order, and handwriting. For both kana and kanji, it came relatively easy to me since I already had a decent amount of vocab already. It actually made learning new vocab easier since then I could connect vocab phonetics that I knew with vocab that branch off through root kanji/radicals.

In 2024 I started using Bunpro and Wanikani which are the meat of my self study now. I always read all of the sentences in Bunpro and Wanikani to work on reading speed. It also exposes me to different phrasing, etc. I kind of stick to the same types of material in my immersion options so I get stuck in the same rut of phrasing that the material offers.

For immersion tools, I use language reactor (for Netflix and Youtube) and Lingopie. I don’t really like Lingopie, but its useful for exposing myself to short snippets of content on subjects I wouldn’t normally be interested in. I like the music selection though (Nishino Kana was heavy in my music rotation back in the 2010s) since I like to do karaoke with the tool. Visual novels, video games, native language books, meetups, hellotalk, italki, and izakayas form the backbone of my immersion study.

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#32

It was the weeb route for me, with multiple steps.

I first started with kana when I was 15ish, mainly to be able to write my friends’ names with dubious pronunciation. That’s all the japanese I did back then and I learnt with a random book and pen+paper.

A few years later I took an intro to japanese course while in engineering school. It was only a few hours so we didn’t learn much but it’s what consolidated my kana knowledge. Once again, pen and paper. I was 20ish.

And THEN two years ago, then aged 31, I decided it was time to learn seriously japanese and so I started with the Duolingo course (lol). I didn’t spend much time on the kana since I remembered them pretty well, but I still enjoyed the in-app writing method. It’s what I use to learn kanji today, with Kanji Study.

1 Like
#33

Relatively new here, so I haven’t gotten anywhere close to “real Japanese” yet.

Last summer my wife and I took our kids to Italy, and spent a few months before the trip picking up some Italian. We decided that our next family vacation would be to Japan, so I started noodling around on DuoLingo. I doubt this will be a shock to anyone on this board, but I found trying to learn Japanese was vastly different than adding Italian to my English and Spanish! (also that DuoLingo is a video game, and not much of a language learning tool).

In my stage of life (married, fulltime job, two kids), taking classes wasn’t really an option. Google searching led me to various resources for self-study. I started with Genki and an assortment of YouTube lessons, such as CureDolly, but it was rough going. Since I’m what my teens now refer to as “Unk,” my little hand-written 3x5 flashcards with chicken-scratch hiragana weren’t doing the job. I’m in my 50’s - and yes, it took me a bit to realize that study techniques from the 1980’s aren’t the way to go. Then I found TheMoeWay (and a bit of a rabbit hole on how language acquisition works).

The biggest benefit from that was that it led me to Anki, which I’ve used for core vocab and kanji, and to (finally!) appreciate how important immersion was. I also used RingoTan for some Kanji practice, as well as Renshuu, since those were more mobile friendly. I still struggled mightily with grammar, which Anki isn’t great for, and I found the Tae Kim and CureDolly “textbooks” to be somewhat impenetrable.

I found BunPro about a month and a half ago. I knew WaniKani was out there, but I had learned so many kanji from other sources that I found the deliberately slow onboard for WaniKani excruciating and noped out quickly. BunPro has been much more useful, especially the cloze format. So now I’ve moved away from the other apps. Still using Anki decks for kanji and to have a different format for vocab learning, I’m working through very basic graded readers (and the BunPro sentences) for reading immersion, and listening to as much Nihongo con Teppei and Japanese with Shun as time allows.

Recently started working with an italki teacher for conversational/output practice. It’s humbling to try to have conversations with an adult when you sound like a toddler, but I’m powering through. And very happy to have found BunPro for much-needed help with grammar and vocab reinforcement.

2 Likes
#34

Anime and manga were pretty popular in my family and friend groups growing up so I was always a bit interested in picking up Japanese, but there was no formal learning available near me at the time.

As a kid/teen I bought a book called something like “Japanese in 10 minutes a day” which I did not stick with. As far as I remember it had no kana or kanji in it at all, and it focused on making things easy by giving you lots of simple phrases and loan words. It came with a pack of label stickers for household objects like “tokei - clock” which I may still have on some things.

After that I picked up a pocket textbook and a pocket EN-JP dictionary. The little textbook, of which I forget the name, introduced kana early on. After writing the kana a couple times to try and remember them, I ultimately forgot about the book entirely. The dictionary didn’t require kana anyway, so I just pored over that from time to time, especially the introductory part which explained things like counters, and ultimately taught me the word 単語, very important in a dictionary.

Fast forward to university and I think what got me back into Japanese was the Game Grammar channel on YouTube. I may be misremembering, but I think TinyCartridge may have made a post about them playing through Pokemon FRLG, and so I watched a couple of their videos. I set up Anki to use their vocab decks and stumbled through a few videos, occasionally poring over online resources like Tae Kim’s guide and eventually TextFugu. Through that, I found Tofugu’s kana guide and Wanikani. I crammed all the kana using their guide just so I could use Wanikani. Finally that part stuck at least. This was in 2015.

For years after that I did mostly just Wanikani, and I’d occasionally toss in non-kanji vocab flashcards on Anki or other platforms. As much as I actually find kanji fascinating, the process was slow and unrewarding, as I didn’t have the grammar to understand most anything in practice. It was some time before I found Bunpro, and I guess I didn’t click with the way it worked at the time. I mostly stopped studying, save for a few spurts of motivation here and there over the years, where I’d force myself through an overwhelming backlog of flashcards, maybe try a bit of largely-incomprehensible immersion, and then run out of steam again.

Now I feel like I finally hit my stride though. I randomly met some local folks who are actually from Japan, and some online friends motivated me to try more manageable forms of immersion (like watching Wanderful PreCure with JP subs together). Last summer I had a bit of time off and managed to power through a ton of flashcards, while also using Renshuu to do more fun stuff like language games and making decks based on media I’m consuming. Nowadays I set my daily learning goals much lower than before since I’m using three different spaced repetition systems (Renshuu, Bunpro and Wanikani), but I actually manage to achieve them almost every day. I also recently started consuming way more media completely in Japanese (I even beat a few games!) and started hanging out in Japanese communities on VRChat and on Discord, which all has me more motivated than ever.

Ultimately I guess it’s the fun stuff that got me interested in Japanese, and it’s the fun stuff that gets me most motivated to actually keep on my studies (with a little help from SRS). I wish I hadn’t taken so long bashing my head against things that were not fun (including more resources I won’t list because this is already too long), but it is what it is, and what I learned back then does still serve me. Now at least I feel like I’ve finally got the ball rolling, which is all that matters for me.