Accountability Post for a Large Study Goal

Japanese Language Study Logs (Public)
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Hello WaniKani community!
Just to provide context for everyone, this is my first time posting and I’m putting this into the Study Logs category because I want to share both my progress and a goal, as well as get people to keep me accountable for said goal, which leads me to believe my post fits in this category. If not, please correct me and I will delete or move the post. (I also apologize for the very uncreative title).

I started WaniKani around this time last year, did the first three levels and loved it. When the christmas sale rolled around I found lifetime access to WaniKani under my tree. At time of posting, I am level 43 with about 1430 Kanji Guru or above. I have been using the iOS app Tsurukame to work on WaniKani from my phone and hardly ever use the website, so I have no limit on daily lessons. When I hit a new level, I will do the 60-70 lessons and I generally stick to doing all due reviews every hour as well. Doing WaniKani and learning more Kanji is just so much fun and so addicting!

However, I may have been tunnel-visioning on Kanji a little too much…

A couple weeks ago, a remaster of a game which is of non-negligible autobiographical importance to me, Xenoblade X, has been announced to release 2024年3月20日. And ever since then, I’ve had this thought in my mind: “I wish I could play this game fully in Japanese and enjoy it” and I have not been able to get rid of this idea.

I am making this post to help turn this dream into reality.

The past couple days, I first started reading ネコぱら with a friend of mine in voice chat, who is also learning Japanese at the same time. And I’m still encountering a lot of Kanji, compounds and somewhat surprisingly, onomatopeia which I find hard to understand. Sometimes there are also times where I perfectly understand the basic words in the sentence, but cannot decipher its meaning. This is why I also started watching Cure Dolly’s Japanese structure lessons and taking notes along the way

If possible, I would like to become a much more fluent and fast reader before March 20.

Feel free to share your own experiences with goals like these. Is mine realistic? Did you succeed/fail at something like this in the past? Do you have any recommendations for reaching a goal like this?

I’m not sure yet if I will turn this into an ongoing blog of sorts but I will definitely report on how it went after the game has come out and I have tried playing it.

Thanks for the reading to the end, I’m looking forward to reading your reply!
よろしくお願いします！

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I guess you mean 2025?

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I don’t think you can do it but feel free to prove me wrong. It’s going to take a lot of effort and I’d say the best way is to play other sci-fi and fantasy games. It’s going to be painful at first especially since most games are quite front loaded when it comes to difficult vocab.

Monster Hunter Stories has quite easy to understand language if that’s your thing.
13 Sentinels is more of a visual novel but should have sci-fi language in it that might be helpful.
And of course you should probably try to go through 1 of the other Xenoblade games.

I went far too long avoiding the thing I like and trying to prepare for it when the thing itself is one of the best things to learn with since motivation helps you just so much.

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I can relate a bit, when I started learning I bought a specific book that I really really wanted to read in Japanese. I didn’t have a time goal, though. Ever since then, I’ve been using it as a benchmark to check every month or so how my reading ability is going, and now I can relatively comfortably go through it while checking stuff in a dictionary every so often (only when it’s necessary for my understanding of the sentence). Once I reached a certain point, about level 30, I’ve found much more improvement towards that goal through combining grammar practice and immersing myself in reading rather than just exclusively studying Kanji.
I don’t think that even at your current level the Kanji will be the main hindrance. There will always be plenty of Kanji, vocab you don’t know, etc whenever you start something like that you haven’t gone through before. If you’re wanting to be able to follow what’s going on in Xenoblade and be able to enjoy it, rather than have 100% understanding of every word that shows up, I think that’s very much possible. The best thing to do to prepare for that is to read a lot, and play other games exclusively in Japanese. Also possibly supplement your vocab study through Anki or similar if you have the time. Learning the structure and improving your reading is more important given your good knowledge of Kanji etc. But just get stuck in and start reading, learning grammar etc.

Good luck!

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I did. Wishful thinking I suppose.

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Appreciate your expectation-tempering take.
As it happens, I’m currently playing a Monster Hunter game for the first time. Will try switching that to Japanese then! (Edit: Just realised you were talking about “Monster Hunter Stories”
and not the stories in Monster Hunter games. Oops!)

I’ve played both 13 Sentinels and the other Xenoblades quite recently, so it might be neat to revisit them and fill in the gaps I don’t understand through memory.
I’m also playing through SMT V: Vengeance in Japanese right now, also a game that I’ve already played and it’s a lot of fun.

As for immersing in what you’re interested in, I think I tried Nekopara once with around half my current Kanji knowledge and it felt really humbling, despite being recommended as a good VN to start with. So I was scared of trying for a while. Now that I’m getting it into it and can read most things it’s definitely a lot of fun!

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Thanks! I spent a lot of time in Xenoblade X when it came out and I was in my early teens so I don’t think I’ll have trouble knowing how to proceed at least, which means 100% comprehension is not a prerequisite for enjoyment for me.

I’ve started looking at ways to build my own decks with things like Anki/Migaku. However, Wkstats says I will reach level 60 just in time for the game’s release next year, so I don’t really want to slow down WaniKani either. I suppose I’ll see how much extra practice I can/want to squeeze into my schedule.

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It’s been two weeks since I first posted and I’m sitting on the same bus bound for the same destination, so I thought I would give a little update. I’ve started doing a lot more immersion thanks to this post, which I see as a good thing. I’m reading 逆転裁判 which I find a lot more managable compared to Nekopara and has a unique advantage of keeping me accountable of actually comprehending the Japanese, because I have to solve the cases. (I’m playing for the first time!)
Unfortunately though, Metaphor has entered my life and I find it very difficult to put down. I’m not playing it with Japanese text since that’s way above my level at the moment. The only thing that remotely counts as immersion is the unsubtitled battle dialogue (I will never forget 往生際が悪い ever again).

I’ve also been making some of my own flashcards using Migaku, but I only take one new card a day because the WaniKani workload is still very high and I’m focusing on completing that by March.

I’m putting it in writing that I want to do at least an hour of reading every day before spending the night with Metaphor. Will update this post in another two weeks with my results if anyone is interested.

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I’m rooting for you. I’m also really looking forward to XCX’s rerelease as well, but I’m definitely not getting even remotely close to that level by the time the game comes out, lol.
Do you think that you’ll try to play through the whole thing in JP once it comes out, even if you’re not quite able to be fluent by then?

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Thanks for the kind words. Good to see there is someone else who cares about the game on here.

I’d put the odds of playing it entirely in Japanese at greater than 99%. I don’t think I will be anything close to fluent by the time it releases but I do believe that I can get good enough to enjoy it and learn from it. There are also long exploration/combat sections so there will be time to rest and focus on the game between the parts where you need to read a lot. (If you’ve tried reading, you’ll know it’s actually quite exhausting when you’re starting out.)
If I absolutely hate my time with it and don’t have anything else to play I might switch it to English but I don’t even want to entertain that possibility at the moment, I’ve started this thread to motivate myself after all.

See you on Mira! o7

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