introduction・the journey so far

my Japanese learning journey

I've been feeling like rambling about Japanese related stuff in a longer format than is permitted on Instagram for a while now, so I finally went for it, and set up this substack. I'm planning to write more expansive/detailed reviews of the Japanese media I've been enjoying; mostly BL visual novels, otome games, manga, and light novels (including 18+ media), as well as occasional language-learning reflections or motivational posts. If that sounds interesting to you, then よろしくお願いします！

I thought I'd start with a bit of an overview of my Japanese learning story, because I've never talked about this all in one place before, and I always find it really interesting to read other people's. This is a long one!

きっかけ

It would be disingenuous to suggest that it started in any other place than it did. In autumn 2018, after seeing way too much fanart of Kiryu and Majima kissing on tumblr, I started playing Yakuza 0. I instantly loved the game's mixture of gritty violent gangster life, mixed with whimsical side quests and karaoke. The characters were compelling and the combat immensely satisfying. But the thing that really grabbed me was the world. Set in fictionalised versions of Kabukicho and Dotonbori, the streets and shops were lovingly rendered, with details right down to plates of food in the windows of the restaurants. Although I was playing the English translation of the game, I was still surrounded by Japanese every time I played; neon signs emblazoning the red-light district, kanji on the vending machines, and of course the voices of the characters. Kiryu's reassuring baritone embedded itself into my consciousness, even though I couldn't understand a word he was saying. I had enjoyed Japanese media before— in fact the Yakuza game series bears a lot of resemblance to something else I used to be obsessed with, which is the world of Japanese pro wrestling— but for some reason nothing had lit a fire under me like this before, enough to want to take the plunge and start learning the language.

Kiryu and Majima. Where it all began.

序盤

For the next year I fumbled around a lot. I learnt the kana okay, old school style with physical flashcards. Then I started Genki, but I found it impossible to concentrate on it. I heard Japanese from Zero was easier, so I bought that too, but when it got to the section on counters, I felt so breathtakingly stupid that I gave up on that too. I did a bit of an app called LingoDeer, on-and-off. And I'd watch some learning YouTube videos occasionally. But I couldn't stick to anything, and I felt overwhelmed all the time. Textbooks made me miserable, so I started to dread learning. I was "studying" alongside my then-boyfriend, who had three years of Japanese at university under his belt (granted, it was ten years ago, and he hadn't touched the language since, but the knowledge was still rattling around in there), so while it should have been motivating to have a study partner, I just felt inferior all the time that he could "get" things that I couldn't.

In the end the only thing I found that I enjoyed and I could do consistently was Wani Kani. I did that most days in 2019 and managed to learn about 1000 kanji all while still not grasping N5 level grammar. Still, somehow, I scraped a pass at the N5 exam in December 2019. I also tried reading manga for the first time around then, and looking back it was obvious why I couldn't understand anything, but I felt like "I know all these kanji, why can't I make sense of the sentences?"

The first manga I tried and failed

ひらめき時代

I had planned to continue plodding along on the same trajectory, and wanted to take the N4 in December 2020, but of course, the pandemic happened, so the JLPT was off the cards. When lockdown dragged on, two pivotal things happened: I discovered BL drama CDs on SoundCloud (of manga which I had already read fanslated previously) and I found videos by Matt Vs Japan on YouTube talking about immersion learning. During our lockdown-permitted "daily exercise" walks, I would stomp round the park listening to these drama CDs on repeat; picking out the words that I knew, sometimes pulling out my phone to look up a word in the dictionary, and just letting the rest of it wash over me. In the evenings I would read the AJATT website (now sadly defunct) that was recommended by Matt Vs Japan, and read the outlandish tales of a man who attained fluency in Japanese in only 18 months while having fun the entire time. It should probably be disclaimered here that Matt vs Japan has scrubbed most of his useful content from the internet these days and is preferring to tout his scammy online tutoring courses, despite the fact that's not the way he learnt at all. But the man's abrasive personality and opportunism aside, it can't be overstated the effect that finding his three hour "AJATT journey" YouTube video had on me. It really made me believe that learning Japanese without textbooks was possible— and even more effective.

Drama CDs: a really good way to break into immersion

I really wanted to connect with other people to talk about learning Japanese, and also share my progress, so that was when I created my Instagram account. These ideas about immersion were ticking around my brain, but I was still frustrated by the fact I could barely understand anything, so I was in a limbo state. I tried to mimic the other people I saw on studygram by picking up apps and textbooks again, but my heart wasn’t in it.

However, in September 2020, I met Julianne, who was a likeminded Japanese learner-- enthusiastic about immersion but disillusioned by the toxicity of some of the other immersion learning spaces. We talked every day for a few weeks and eventually she confessed her desire to somehow recreate the positivity of a Japanese immersion camp she visited when she was at school. From this idea, we co-created Minimmersion, and its accompanying discord server: an every-other-month challenge to immerse in your target language for an entire weekend. The first Minimmersion was in November 2020, and even with my limited comprehension, I had fun trying things I'd never done before: reading Japanese wrestling magazines, playing Pokemon in Japanese, and watching my favourite anime Banana Fish with no English subtitles. It was also amazing making new female friends who were passionate about the idea of immersion. Although Julianne and I ended up parting ways in the middle of 2021, and I left the Minimmersion project in her capable hands, I still feel proud of the community we created together.

The short-lived Moe Puro magazine!

闘志時代

From January 1st 2021, I got serious. That was the day I started an Anki streak which ended up lasting over 1250 days. I was determined to drag my shaky foundation of Japanese up to where I could start immersing and enjoying it. For the next 90 days I had a three-pronged approach: vocab, grammar, and kanji every day. For vocab I did 10 cards of the Tango N4 deck evey day: I already knew most of the N5 vocab from Wani Kani. For grammar I watched one of Japanese Ammo With Misa's Absolute Beginner’s Grammar playlist videos with my dinner every night, and made Anki cards from the example sentences she used. For kanji, I repped a recognition RTK deck at a quite aggressive pace just so I had all of the jouyou under my belt-- I knew their faces, even if I didn't know how to read them in words yet. I also was immersing and sentence mining— I was super into Final Fantasy XV at this point, but the game was too hard for me to play in Japanese, so I sentence mined any i+1 sentences I could find from the anime (or from doujin).

One of my very first own-made Anki cards.

Going so hardcore for a relatively short sprint paid massive dividends. I read my first proper manga, and then my next one, then my next. I was enjoying the stories and getting the jokes! In March 2021 I started playing my first visual novel-- Brothers Conflict (which I would highly recommend for beginners), and then in April I read my first light novel, which was a Brothers Conflict novelisation. In July I read my first "grown up" novel, コンビニ人間、alongside listening to the audiobook, and heavily relying on yomichan. Even though I needed to do lots of lookups, the wins were coming thick and fast. Alongside all this I was sentence mining every day, mostly from anime: I did Junjou Romantica, Free!!, Ouran Host Club, Horimiya, and a bunch of others. Making high quality Anki cards with pictures and audio made my cards fun to rep, and I looked forward to doing Anki every day. I also had the satisfaction of seeing the words I'd mined in other places almost immediately.

My sentence mining setup, early 2021.

At some point towards the end of the year I also started making monolingual cards with Japanese definitions, which was another big milestone.

There were still setbacks all the time, of course. In September I set out to read all of Death Note, which I struggled through at around 6 hours per volume for the first three volumes before declaring defeat, I just couldn't grasp the dialogue. I started lots of things I couldn't finish: like the キノの旅 novel. But I kept trying things and chipping away. In October, I hit 50 volumes of manga read. In November, I finished my first full-length visual novel, Dramatical Murder, which was a dizzying high.

Some of the things I read in 2021!

図書館時代

2022 started out as more of the same. The Anki streak continued, the sentence cards continued to increase, hitting 5000 in April. I played the visual novels Sweet Pool and Amnesia, and finally finished all the routes in Brothers Conflict. In March I logged my 100th manga read, thanks to getting into series like Ten Count and Caste Heaven. I played Fire Emblem Awakening in Japanese, which felt like a long-held dream coming true.

While I was immersing happily all of the time, and reading manga was mostly no problem, I still found novels hard and time consuming, and felt insecure about this weakness. My reading speed was glacial and my grammar still had lots of gaps. In July I felt I was heading into a slump. I wasn't improving as fast as I had been for all of 2021, and it felt like a roadblock.

I did a bunch of different things to get over this slump (and I want to write more about that at a later point!) but the most impactful one was deciding, after binging the anime in one frenzied weekend, that I wanted to read the first 6 無職転生 novels. This was a fairly outlandish challenge, being that I had given up on more novels than I'd read at this point, but I felt buoyed by enjoying the anime so much, and determined to show myself that I could make progress again. I figured that by the end of those six books, I'd HAVE to be good at reading novels. It was inevitable, like all the other progress I'd made. So I blurted this plan out on instagram stories, as is my wont, and was surprised that a few other people wanted to join me. I started a group chat to discuss the books, but quickly hit the member limit, so it led to a discord server; which for the first few months of its life was called "Mushoku readalong". However, as it grew, we discussed reading other books together, and so it turned into a general light novel bookclub. It's now called 別次元の図書館 and has nearly 250 members.

Some of the many books I’ve read with the bookclub!

Friends have been the most important and wonderful part of this whole journey. I feel so lucky to be surrounded by such smart, cool people, both on instagram and in the bookclub. I've even been fortunate enough to get the chance to meet a few of them offline, and nerd out about Japanese stuff in person. Because I live with chronic illness, a lot of things are challenging for me, especially travelling-- so visiting Japan itself remains a distant dream, but in a way I feel like I've been able to bring Japan to me, through immersion.

The bookclub quickly turned into a Japanese learning space that really felt like home to me, which I hadn't felt since the early days of Minimmersion. I'd tried other big discord servers: like Refold, The Moe Way, and JPDB, but their vibes were off and I never felt welcome. In the bookclub I think we've managed to foster an atmosphere that is both encouraging and productive. You should totally come check out the read we have planned for September!

I also need to specifically shout out Powz here for being a massive supporter of the bookclub and helping to cultivate it being such a cool place, as well as thank her for our DM conversations in that Slump Summer that helped me forge a path forward. She's a very good friend, and I'm very lucky to know her.

一万文時代

2023 meant more books, more visual novels, and my reading speed gradually increasing. It was not unusual to be reading at 5k characters an hour while struggling with Mushoku back in Summer 2022, but in Autumn 2023 I hit 20k characters an hour for the first time while reading the visual novel Re:Birthday Song with the bookclub (we expanded into visual novels after a brainstorming session I had with the wonderful Jun in August 2023).

In September 2023 I reached the 10,000 sentence cards goal which Khatzumoto outlined on the AJATT website as being the secret guaranteed path to Japanese fluency. The 10k cards represented hundreds of hours of immersion: of novels, games, VNs, manga, VTubers, drama CDs, doujin and magazines. It also aligned with my 1000 day streak of Anki. I had turned up every single day for nearly three years. I certainly didn't feel fluent!! But I was seriously happy with how far I'd come. The simple idea that I just needed to collect 10k sentences had pulled me through these 1000 days, following my curiosity, having fun. And It turned every Japanese media I interacted with into a learning resource.

10k!!

After this, I slowed down a bit with sentence mining, but I still use Anki for loads of things, and I can't recommend it enough.

Honestly, it was eclipsed by the enormous quantity of good things that happened that year, but it'd probably be remiss of me not to mention that in December 2023 I sat the N1, my first JLPT exam since I took N5 in 2019. Unfortunately, I failed, which was pretty on track with what I expected from my mocks. I felt like perhaps I might be one of those cases of people who pass N1 with no problem from immersion alone, but it wasn't enough for me. I felt a bit sorry for myself for a while, but weighing it up, it wasn't really important at all, and I'll try again some time.

そして、今

Well, this year isn't over yet, but a few things that have happened so far: I started thinking about output more seriously, after one lone disastrous iTalki lesson the previous year. Talking isn't an enormous priority to me, but I still felt the urge to want to be able to express myself in Japanese, and Powz felt the same, so I turned her idea of a 100 days of output challenge into a channel in the bookclub. I still am super wobbly with output, but I'm improving slowly through journaling and writing posts on Journaly.

In April I summoned a bit of that crazy fighting spirit from the start of my proper journey in 2021, and hit the textbooks hard for Accountability April, intending to have a revenge run at the N1 in December this year. Unfortunately, I later found out that my nearest test centre isn't intending to host the JLPT this year, so that plan is scuppered for the time being. However, I do feel like that 30 days of intense grammar, listening, and reading study has helped me in general, especially with comprehension and reading speed.

Back in front of a textbook for the first time in many years.

In May I won my first Tadoku contest, after competing in it semi regularly since November 2020!

I've already read 36 novels in Japanese so far this year, and I can officially say I've beaten my demons with regard to novel-reading. There've been so many things I've enjoyed reading this year, from the amazing prison drama novel Deadlock to the theological horror visual novel Shin Gakkou. I don't plan on slowing down any time soon!

This October, I’m turning 35, and it’ll be six years since I first started learning kana. Looking back, there are lots of ways I could have done things differently— I could have started a lot earlier, I could have worked harder in the beginning. But all in all, things worked themselves out. I’m happy with where I am and proud of where I’ve come from.

If you've read this far, thank you so much!