Sorry for being sentimental ^^
I don’t know this person anymore. They used to be me a few years ago, but checking this email, I had zero memories of the actual contents of the email. I knew she did it, I remember the date, I remember the chain of events it has started, but I’m glad for her, I’d love to go back to her and give her a hug. Thank you for setting me for a world full of incredible adventures ^^
Sometimes it’s not about making a good decision, sometimes it’s about making any decision, and she did really well at it.
That person also used to be me a few years ago. It’s funny how decisions that were inconsequential, that you didn’t even bother to properly remember, end up influencing your life the most.
I remember going from work one day with a fully charged laptop from work, there were no easily accessible sockets at the room I was renting. I lived with another person back then, and had my small desk in there. I ran through the trial of WaniKani, looking at the radical for what could’ve been “enter” or “fins”, writing the kanji for what could’ve been “above” or “mountain”, it could’ve been 8pm, or it could’ve been 11pm, I wonder if she had fun back then ^^
Was it curiosity? Was it dread? Was it excitemement? Was it being annoyed?
It has been 1739 days since that day. Over that time she almost completely dropped Japanese altogether, looked for sources of fun in different places. Travelled all around the world, made a lot of fantastic friends. The old friend Japanese didn’t get the amount of recognition I would like to have had by today, but I’m proud of her regardless ^^
Sometimes you need when to leave, drop things, in order to find yourself. And was she able to find herself over that time?
I heard an older relative of mine say one day; “you are a searcher, it’s in your blood, you will never be able to be completely satisfied with things in life”, it’s the way how we roll here on the Bidoof island.
Make a decision. Stick to it for as long as you can still see the other side.
Enough with the sentimental bit though, you’re here to learn about Japanese language, right? ^^
o shoot the bidoof shield broke
yes i wear an egg in my hair
グテン・モーニンゲン・ツザッメン！！！
It’s your local correspondent, 飴, reporting whatever linguistic adventures she’s been up to, 28, this time from a hotel in Dublin, Ireland. It’s a fun parallel, to be able to finish WaniKani where it all actually started. or ended. either one of those. ^^
I have achieved the elusive level 60 on WaniKani for the second time!
Here’s one for the nerds that are into stats ^^
I read 43 volumes of manga and 1 book over this year so far. I studied 624 items of grammar on Bunpro over the course of 340 days so far, I clocked 152149 reviews on WaniKani all time and did it over the course of almost 1000 days (coming to an average of about ~155 a day!)
Kept doing Satori Reader for every single day (yes, that missed square was just doing the reading after midnight ^^)
Posted to my study log 341 times, and delivered a daily update every day since January 8th without fail!
(Thank you to everyone in this screenshot! It’s been an absolute blast to host you inside of my study log! ^^)
I did some number crunching, and removing all the formatting and links, I’ve written 142k characters of text in my study log alone (that’s three NaNoWriMos by themselves!) and I uploaded 4600 pictures to my study log. Somebody out there hosting on Discourse must be scratching their head and going like “oh god” seeing this thread ^^
Study Log
Should you create one?
Study Logs on WaniKani are great accountability tools, and tools that can help you make friends on the platform too! Cadence can be any, it’s every day for me, a week for someone like Malinkal, a month for someone like Nerdqueen666, or whenever they feel like it, if it’s someone like Shannon-8 ^^
By having a study log, your thinking about learning language changes, you start thinking in terms of, “uuu, others would like this”, or “how useful would it be to integrate this into my routine”, and journaling is an absolute must-have for me when it comes to getting a grip on my mental health as well. Plus, it’s wild to look back and see how much progress has a person done in a specific timeframe too. THIS USED TO BE ME???
It’s also an easy way to hopefully make friends! Ones that you’ll maybe hopefully even meet in real life? I still think of that day with flushed cheeks ^^
In case you need an inspiration, here are some of my favorite ones recently!
- Study log and place to ramble - a super inspiring study log from a guy who is going for N1 at the fastest velocity I’m aware of on this forum so far. Malinkal, the author of the study log, often posts about his personal life as well, does reviews of the books he reads and just, chill, wholesome!
mitrac’s study log and 
periments 
- this is one of the study logs where Mitrac is trying to research different ways of learning Japanese that go against the common consensus, and sometimes those experiments actually lead to unexpected results: Mitrac does very detailed breakdowns and analyses of the experiments and you can learn a lot from different attempts having been taken! Not aiming for JLPT, but around N3-N2 level.
the taiyousea study log - taiyousea is a huge contributor to the community and you can see that every post she posts is getting a TON of response from the community, there’s a good balance of life, Japanese study, ramblings about things, and if I think about “connection”, this is the first study log that comes to my mind! N2 level.
Weeb’s Study Log - the most aesthetic study log regularly updated on WaniKani, Weeb is an artist through and through and this reflects itself very clearly on the content matter of the study log, it’s just pleasing to look at this study log! Currently going for the N3 level.- Queenofthegods’ N2 and grad school grind (pls social pressure me into studying) - just a more recent one, but from the very beginning, you can tell that Queenofthegods IIIIS A STORYTELLER, she knows how to make mundane stories feel interesting and she shares really cool details of her life, so I can’t wait to see how the study log develops!
Should you do WaniKani for the second time?
My answer to this question is yes, but not necessarily just for Japanese study: one of the best things about WaniKani is that this tool can teach you discipline and sitting down every day to study, no matter if you’re having 38 degrees fever or you’re jetlagged as frick, you just sit down and do reviews.
In the current attention seeking economy of short form video content, having an uninterrupted pomodoro every day that your brain is already anticipating can really do miracles. In addition to all of the things that you’re going to learn that you missed the first time around!
I’m not denying the possibility of doing WaniKani for the third time one day, but I probably want to learn all items first, then burn them, then maybe give a chance to jpdb.io first ^^
Tools used
I’ll mention a few of the main tools and give them short ratings and descriptions based on how useful I found them ^^
WaniKani
I find WaniKani to be the best SRS I’ve ever used, I know you can fully customize Anki to recreate most of the functionality, but I found that my brain had adopted this cadence of WaniKani reviews, the expectations of specific levels and durations, that I can’t help but love it. Unfortunately, I do not agree with every decision that the development team behind the WaniKani is doing and I found out that for every decision that takes two steps forward, they also do take one step back, which is where I’m incredibly grateful for the Userscript community for just doing things that the WaniKani team reluctantly refuses to roll along with: I truly believe that WaniKani without Userscripts would’ve been much, much worse as an experience.
The list of the scripts I used this time around is still pretty similar to the list I left in the level 60 post from 2021, they still work, they still are great!
Is it worth your money? Yes, I’d recommend to wait until the end of the year sale to get the lifetime!
Bunpro is a bit of a funny scenario, as it’s a bit of an opposite to WaniKani: they listen to the community, you don’t need to add any userscripts, they add a MEEETRIC ton of content… but their central product leaves a lot to be desired.
I have a feeling that it’s hard to SRS grammar, and I find myself hitting the same leeches over and over again and can’t get over them, while my retention for the items studied weeks ago is almost at a zero, because I haven’t seem them for so long.
That being said, if grammar SRSes are something that personally does work for you, Bunpro is the absolute best example of a product that just does eeeeverything you ask it for. It has cramming settings, mock JLPT tests, reading passages you can practice your recognition on, just this alone is worth a consideration!
Here’s my longer thoughts from one of my study logs about me finishing the N2 grammar on Bunpro!
Is it worth your money? Mmmmostly yes, but use the trial to find out if grammar SRS is something you are going to vibe with after a month of using it!
Here’s a bit of a hot take: I really appreciate what Satori Reader sets out to do, and how much effort is involved in manually curate the content on the platform, to make it easier to read and listen at the same time… I think it’s a service that’s meant to be used as a stopgap in order to propel yourself to using something different than Satori Reader, like 高校講座.
I find the stories have an unusual appeal coming from the fact that the episodic nature of the stories is incentivizing the stories to take a WILD direction to have something happening every episode, and then you look back at the whole story and you go like, “well that escalated quickly” ^^
This will probably be the spiciest take of all of them so far: I think the offering of Duolingo is really, really good. I don’t think it’ll get you where you want to be with Japanese, and also it overrelies on gamification, but the different types of exercise are forcing you to think about Japanese in all sorts of different ways: production, translation, listening, speaking, it really is an all-you-can-fit buffet.
I struggle to recommend it whole-heartedly because Duolingo loves to cut over its contract workers in favor of new and emerging enshittification technologies, and the machine generation is a bit oblivious to Japanese language grammar or pronunciation rules, and Japanese language is really hard to teach over a platform such as Duolingo, but if you use it as a secondary or ternary method, it will keep you accountable, it will give you the streak and since it’s so casual, your circle of acquaintances might keep you accountable to keep climbing the leagues!
Oh my freaking Lord this is the best tool ever developed for Japanese language and I am not even kidding. And the craziest thing is that you can use it for other things than just language study as well, it’s so wild!
Yomitan is an absolute must have on all of my devices, including mobile browsers (mobile Edge on Android and iOS can run it too!)
It’s a pop-up dictionary that, if you install any EPWING dictionaries on it, in any languages, like those ones for example, unlock an almost endless supply of Japanese language consumption. You highlight a word, you press shift, and would you look at that!
And it works with so, SO many different tools: asbplayer for anime subtitles, Yomininja for OCRing any windows, Textractor for text hooking visual novels, Mokuro and Reader.ttsu for manga and books respectively, Jidoujisho for Android Japanese consumption, I am not exaggerating when I say that I use Yomitan every single day, and have been for at least a year now!
So at first, I was really reluctant about this tool, wondering how much of it I’d be able to usI JUST EVERYTHING FROM IT
It’s so, SO helpful, it’s an absolute swiss knife of different ways you can immerse yourself in Japanese language. You can read manga on it, watch anime, watch youtube, read books, receive and store visual novel text from a hooker, all with Yomitan support, with local savings and from the comfort of your Android device.
The only reason it’s not getting 5 stars is that it currently has a few pretty significant bugs that are caused by the fact that not enough people are working on the project and they could definitely benefit from another engineer working on it, but if you can do some creative workarounds, know how to use Mokuro, know how to use ffmpeg, you can get over all of the restrictions of this app.
Yep, it’s great. Mokuro is built on top of OpenCV, a Python library that makes optical character recognition possible: it scans over image files and it attempts to create hover blocks over them that contain plain text that can be highlighted and read over by Yomitan. It makes it possible to consume things that are much, MUCH more difficult than what you’re familiar with just by the option of highlighting words and trying to make sense of manga.
Mokuro can be used either manually, by providing your own Definitely Legally Obtained zip files with manga, or there is a catalog created by the original author of Mokuro that contains hundreds of gigabytes of pre-Mokuro’d manga that often goes down, but you can still find it on the Cat site ^^
Thanks to Mokuro, I’ve been doing a lot of graded reading and have been slowly getting more and more comfortable with the more difficult text ^^
This is a tool I’ve been using a ton recently, it’s a large database built on top of Amazon.co.jp listing data that contains information about a specific publication and allows for people to log if they’ve already read it, assign it a difficulty score for other people to brace themselves and leave comments and reviews based on either the enjoyment of a series or how difficult Japanese language felt in this one.
I love the idea of it, and the forums, despite struggling a bit in terms of the amount of people there, have a really dedicated fanbase and a huge book club collection going.
At the current state of the platform though, the platform just hangs sometimes and doesn’t do manual syncs for literal months, there are some entries that can glitch out and require manual intervention of the admin, and the tools to do cleaning up of the imports of syncs from Amazon are leaving a loooot to be desired: sometimes page counts can’t get synced as there’s no data for them and the page count just shows “1” or “0”, sometimes the title of an Amazon listing has a lot of trailing characters you just can’t get deleted, and from a person who’s big into Letterboxd and Goodreads, I seethe at those dozens of tiny UX things that absolutely get into my way of enjoying the platform, but I can still use it regardless.
Learnnatively is going to be great in 2030, start an account already ^^
Manga sites: Bookwalker, Kindle, Ebookjapan, cmoa.jp
Japan has a lot of great digital manga stores: they’re great less because of the platform and more because of offerings that they provide: all websites mentioned above provide you with huge, HUGE selections of manga you don’t have to pay for in the first 1-3 volumes to do graded reading on.
Bookwalker and Kindle offer additional subscriptions that allow for you to access a true treasure trove of unlimited manga reading where you can just never leave the page and always discover something niche and cool, and for a lot of those mangas: they can also even not be on manga piracy sites in the first place. In case you actually wanted to support them financially, digital manga is really affordable compared to physical prices of manga in the west, so just give them a shot!
The biggest obstacle holding me from recommending those sites whole-heartedly is that if you’re just new and starting with Japanese language, you might really benefit from using Yomitan, and none of those services allow for you to do so unless you circumvent their DRM and try to Mokuro the respective volumes, wink wink ^^
Where are we headed next?
The mission is still ongoing ^^
To be perfectly honest, I still don’t think I found the proper joy of learning Japanese language, there is a ton of moments over the course of a study that make me go like, UUUU, I just discovered something unexpected, this was cool! But as for the actual language?
I think I might have hit the intermediate plateau, where I know that if I use Japanese, I might be able to get my thought across… but I’ll also sound slower and dumber because I don’t know the correct words to use in every scenario and it’ll take me longer to do so.
That will not stop me from trying though xddd
But this is probably my weakest side of German and Japanese at the same time, feeling too ashamed to speak up before preparing the actual sentence in my own head, and then not being able to spontaneously come up with an amusing answer, that makes me less interested in trying to do so. If I were to overcome this, either in German or Japanese, I would become grand… but I don’t know how to realistically overcome this fear.
Listening is also one of my weakest parts: I try to listen to podcasts and Satori Reader, but it’s definitely going in with one ear and going out with another ear.
Five years ago, I wrote the following:
Funnily enough, none of those four goals came true back then ^^
I played Tsukihime as a remake, and in English, same for The Great Ace Attorney 2 and Monster Hunter Rise. I almost completely dropped anime, though I really need the speaking practice, so maybe I should return there too ^^
I’m not even close to being done with WaniKani yet, I still have something like 900 lessons to go, and then there’s this whole part of burning everything, and this time around, I’m hoping to go the extra mile, wherever that mile leads ^^
In December, I’ll be writing JLPT in Düsseldorf at the N2 level!
But, you can help me figure out when I’m going, and check the blueprints of humanity, where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and where is the project Bidoof taking me today, or tomorrow, or in the next month. We’re taking it one tiny step at the time, and I’m very easily influenceable, so please drop in and write something nice! I enjoy every single message any of you writes, and I am trying my best to make you feel heard and appreciated as well ^^
CAKE
Yes, it’s real, celebrated in Dublin with my colleagues today, TofuguKyle might have fixed the cakes magically materializing at level 60 because WHAT WOULD EXPLAIN THIS???
More reading
Here are some of the most notable posts from the most recent memory:
- How I (re)learnt to read: 50 Japanese novels in a year - very in-depth breakdown by Malinkal into how does one define themselves as a READER, and I might not be mistaken in saying that thanks to this post, at least me and Shitsurei stated having a lot of second thoughts about the idea of reading
- From 0 to Reading Everyday: Step by Step and Comprehensive List of Resources - a very helpful post by Akashelia that set off many reading journeys, definitely did mine, I’d love to become as versed in reading as Akashelia is one day ^^
- the taiyousea level 60 post - absolute banger of a post, the quality I wish to actually achieve one day, Taiyousea really delivered with that post ^^
Thank you for reading my level 120 celebration post! I hope you found something insightful over here, and I hope it was a fun experience! I’ll still hang around this forum, I hope that we still have a ton of adventures to go through together ^^
I’d like to call out the people that participated in my study log the most, that made the biggest difference to me over the course of a year and the ones I loved interacting with:
@Shannon-8 @mitrac @Malinkal @Akashelia @YandrosTheSane @WeepingWeeb @akatsukinoluna @shitsurei @SpiderWeb and @pembo, unfortunately, Discourse caps at only ten names, so that will have to do for now: I’d like to let you know that I appreciate each and every one of you and I’m curious to see where future brings us next!
…then, see you in like, an hour in my study log? An update for November 4th will of course get posted in there as well ^^
)
Is the WK staff holding you hostage!?
. I’ll do my best to keep up with the log.
I ended up confusing myself even though I’m the one who made it that way ahhhhhhahaha
love how you wrapped in your journey and experiences, such a great read 
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