こんにちは！I’ve never written a study log before. I tend to be a lurker in spaces like these, but I also wilt without structure and a sense of accountability so something has to give. I thought this would be a good way to shame myself into using all the time that I unfortunately have (unwillingly unemployed) to achieve something useful. Or if not useful, enriching.
Any (friendly) advice/cheerleading/conversation is welcome, and I’m always on the listen-out for any (free or cheap) resources. ありがとう！
Why Japanese?
The short answer? My grandpa is Japanese-American, so it seems the logical option.
The long answer? He was born in the Minidoka Internment Camp during World War II. Because of my family’s attempts at assimilation following their return to Seattle, he never learned to speak Japanese, but I grew up watching him try foster a connection to his heritage in himself, in his sons, and in me. He taught me origami with gum wrappers and receipts. He bought me Basho when I was far too young to appreciate him. He watched anime and kaiju movies and documentaries on Japanese culture with me. He drove me 3+ hours to the Seattle Art Museum anytime there was a temp exhibit centered on Japanese art. So on and so forth.
I don’t know why he never tried to learn to speak Japanese as an adult, but he is an artist and a musician. Often the ways he chose to reconnect with his heritage was through art. Try as I might to follow in his artistic footsteps, I’m much more of a words person. I have a masters degree in comp lit and a home library of over 1500 books. If there’s any way for me to build upon the lessons he taught me as a kid, it would be to combine those lessons and my passion for reading and writing. So here I am!
The Journey So Far
In late 2023, I was slogging through a Masters thesis that I no longer had any passion for. In the previous semester, I had managed to wrangle a professor with the knowledge to lead an independent study on Japanese and Japanese-American fiction. It was just him and I in a room every Thursday, talking about the novel we read in the last week, and it was the first time since that Basho that I had seriously focused on Japanese writing beyond manga. I thought, to break up the mind-numbing boredom of hundreds of pages of academic reading I was doing, I could just learn kana. I stumbled across Tofugu and within two weeks, I was messing around with the WaniKani free trial. I thought… why the hell not? I’ll try to learn Japanese.
I took it slow and ended up getting to level 11 in 2024. I had also dabbled a little in Genki (maybe 3 chapters) and had poked around on the Renshuu app. But academic burnout hit me hard, and the crummy job market dealt the killing blow. By 2025, I had gotten hundreds of reviews behind on WK, and my textbooks were collecting dust. I still did a handful of reviews on Renshuu every day, but that was it.
In May, I took the plunge and wiped my progress on WK to start over from scratch. It feels like a new beginning, but I’m worried that I’ll simply fall back into the groove of collecting kanji and vocab without actually learning how to use them.
Goals
I will say, I’m not the best at learning languages. I took two years of Spanish in high school, and I struggled with it. I do have a more personal connection to Japanese, but it’s also a much harder language for monolingual English speakers to learn. I want to set myself up for success by not aiming too high, but if I’m really underselling myself or if it looks like my goals are missing anything important, feel free to give me a little nudge in the right direction.
2025 Goals:
- N5 Level. I’m not concerned with taking the JLPT (at least right now; I won’t discount the possibility in the future), but I would like to reach a point where I could conceivably pass it.
- WaniKani Level 20. Not sure if this is an undershoot or an overshoot… I’ve been cruising through these early levels because I did a good job learning the kanji and vocab the first time around. I suspect things will get a little slower once I hit level 8 or 9, but I want to do the first 10 levels full speed ahead. After that, I can reassess.
- Join the Absolute Beginners Reading Club. I’m not sure when the best time to insert myself into this is. How much grammar is the right amount of grammar? If anyone wants to advise, I’d be glad to hear! Either way, I’ve always been told that reading a language is the best way to learn it even if its a steeper learning curve. With that being the case, I think I should at least TRY to start fairly early.
- Yotsuba&!. Yotsuba was one of my favorite manga as a kid. I have continued to collect the volumes as they’re translated. Since I’m familiar with it, I think it would be a good thing to read on my own. I don’t know a good ballpark of how many volumes I should aim to read in Japanese this year. For now, I’ll just say that I’d like to be able to fully read one volume, but you can let me know if I’m selling myself short. Or I can reevaluate later.
- Find a conversation partner. I have a horrible fear of making mistakes, but there’s no way to learn a language without messing up. A lot. I think finding someone who I feel comfortable making mistakes in front of and being corrected by will go a long way in building my confidence to participate more in forums and other more public avenues of practice.
Resources
I would love suggestions for listening and/or speaking practice that is beginner friendly! That’s definitely my current weak point.
- WaniKani. I use the bog standard WK. I do occasionally use Tsurukame to do reviews when I don’t have access to my ipad, but I think regular old WK is perfectly functional for me. I listen to and repeat vocab every time I’m quizzed on it, and anytime I get a kanji wrong, I physically write it down 5x and repeat the reading(s).
- Renshuu. I originally started using Renshuu because WK doesn’t really teach you Japanese. It just teaches you kanji and vocab. Renshuu has grammar points and sentences. I think it’s decent for initially introducing a grammar point, and I like the way it approaches sentences as patterns (and it has some nice videos that go over some of the grammar points in depth… like an hour’s worth of explaining and practicing just one or two different patterns). And, it does teach you how to write kanji, which really helps me memorize them. That said, it has a lot of weaknesses. The SRS isn’t as good as WK’s. You only get reviews daily, so I often struggle to solidify things right after I’ve learned them. It also doesn’t teach radicals, so I found that a lot of the higher stroke kanji they were teaching me were VERY hard to memorize to the degree that I could write them. It also doesn’t let you type out the meaning of a kanji or vocab word (it prioritizes learning a wider range of meanings), so those are always multiple choice, which is naturally easier than recalling fully from memory. I’m keeping it in the docket for now because it has been helpful, but focusing on Genki videos may make this redundant.
- Genki. I have the physical textbooks, but I think I’m going to try ToKini Andy’s videos and the online quiz/practice resources. I’ll probably follow along physically, but I think listening to someone speak will add an extra sense to pull from when I’m trying to remember something.
I have a handful of other books that were kindly purchased for me by family members, but I’m not sure if they’re redundant and/or something that should wait until I’m a little more advanced. Advice would be appreciated!
- A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar by Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui (should I wait until I’m done with Genki to approach this?)
- Kanji Learner’s Course by Andrew Scott Conning (redundant since I have WK?)
- Japanese Stories for Language Learners and Japanese Tales for Language Learners by Tuttle Books (I suspect these will be good once I have some grammar firmly under my belt)
Routines
My daily routine right now is pretty minimal, but I’d like to beef it up in a way that’s still efficient. Currently, I just do my Renshuu reviews in the morning and hit all of my WK reviews as they come in. I’m going to start using ToKini Andy’s Genki videos to work on a chapter of Genki a week (plus the online resources for quizzing and practice). I’m also going to add posting a daily update to this study log onto my routine.
- WaniKani Reviews (daily)
- Renshuu Reviews (daily)
- Genki Chapter (weekly)
- Study Log Update (daily)
Joining the ABBC can be done once you have a little bit of grammar learned, but it will be hard any time.
!
