2025年1月9日
hello fellow wanikani users and welcome to my study log !
i’ve decided to make a study log so future me can happily look back on my progress at any point in my language learning journey and hopefully motivate others. 
background
i spent roughly a year focused in on learning korean after i convinced myself that japanese would simply be “too hard” for me or “take too long” to reach an advanced level. even though i got to a high intermediate or low advanced level in korean in a rather quickly, i still felt like i hadn’t accomplished much. i hold a lot of appreciation and interest in the korean language itself, but i found a lot of my motivation melting away whenever i saw posts about people learning japanese and their progress. as i thought about it more, the reasoning as to why this were the case became clear: japanese is the language i want to learn the most. somewhere during my time studying korean i had convinced myself otherwise despite my initial reasoning for learning being related to japanese to begin with! it’s a little funny thinking back on it.
since i’ve put so much time into studying the subtle intricacies of korean, i’ve unintentionally set myself up for a smoother journey learning japanese! the SOV sentence structure already makes perfect sense to me, i understand what the topic, subject, and object of a sentence are, and many parts of japanese grammar have an equivalent in korean or can be easier explained with a korean example than an english one. with all that being said, i’ve chosen not to focus on learning japanese grammar too much until i have more vocab memorized and more hours immersed in japanese. my biggest fault with korean was not immersing enough and not relying enough on my brain to subconsciously recognize patterns and drill in vocab through exposure. i plan to do my best in avoiding that with japanese.
what i expect to struggle the most with is speaking, recognizing different pitches, and retaining vocabulary. i’ll get more into that in the “methods” section!
methods
for grammar and some vocabulary, i’m using bunpro! as a grammar nerd, i love seeing some of the longer explanations and other references listed at the end of each grammar page. i’m currently sticking to 2-4 new grammar points per day depending on how many reviews i have on wanikani and migaku. for vocabulary on bunpro, i have my daily goal set to 16 words per day, but only work to meet it if i have no lessons on wanikani or did limited immersion for the day. if i did a lot of lessons on wanikani that day, i opt for 0-8 vocab words depending on my mood.
for kanji and some more vocabulary, i’m using wanikani of course! i’ve found that making vocabulary stick in my brain is much easier as i learn radicals and kanji. now that i’m able to break down words on bunpro, i have a higher retention rate than when i’ve tried my hand at bunpro in the past. i’m currently trying to level up in less than 10 days by completing all radicals and available kanji when they appear. for leftover and new vocabulary, i work through them during the days i’m waiting for the radicals and kanji to hit guru. i also do my best to group similar words together so i associate them and their meanings with one another.
for immersion, i use migaku for the dual subtitles and mining. at the moment, i’m only mining individual words. as my grammar knowledge grows, i’ll mine sentences too. migaku’s pitch trainer has also proven useful as i finally hear the different between the patterns! since i have an easier time recalling words with context, i also learn another 5-10 words per day on there.
anything else i struggle with is aided by miscellaneous websites i find online. for example, i learned hiragana and katakana at the same time thanks to help of kana pro. when i was failing miserably at recalling the patterns for conjugation, i used don’s japanese conjugation drills.
finally, for output, i just write to myself in the note app on my phone! i practice speaking by shadowing while i immerse. i practice handwriting and utilize rote memorization in a notebook. i know rote memorization isn’t suuuper effective, but i enjoy it a lot and love to handwrite, so it works out well for me! 
when i one day reach an advanced level, i hope to lower the studying time by a lot and instead learn primarily through immersion.
goals
to keep myself motivated, i have a few goals that are either short or long term. i’ll list my long term goals here and update my short term goals in my following posts! none of these have a deadline nor do i view these as an end goal – they’re just my main motivating goals that’ll take a longer time to hit than, say, passing n5 level.
long term goals: be a translator in a manga scanlation team or translate chapters for friends, make friends that speak japanese, write short stories in japanese, and reach a minimum of level 30 on wanikani by the end of the year.
lastly, i do have two goals that i don’t think fits into short or long term goals: keep my wanikani level ups under a 10 day period and stay consistent!
current progress
here’s my current wanikani and bunpro stats! these are almost entirely from dec. 27 - now. i’m not counting the “official” day i started wanikani or bunpro (back in october iirc), since there was a long 2 month gap of nothingness between then and dec 27. i presume less than 75 words came from then, and in the grand scheme of things, i don’t want to group a 2 month period of nothingness in with real productivity! but since i’ve properly committed myself this time, any inactivity periods will be counted of course. i’ve properly begun my journey to learn japanese!
my plans on the wanikani forum are to update this log once a month and do lots of lurking. i’ll likely include any progress i make with korean in here as well. thank you for reading and please excuse any typos! 
