Quick update – still moving through 怪人二十面相, a little over 40% through IIRC? Just started the first Ace Attorney Investigations game, which has been really cool because the first Ace Attorney game was just about the first real Japanese thing I read, barring a little manga. The experience of coming back and being able to just casually read it, occasionally looking up one word, is super nice. It’s a nice showing of how far I’ve come up to now.
I’m primarily posting to talk about my practice towards output, which is going better than expected! Shadowing can still be hard but it’s getting more comfortable overall, and while I need to get faster at coming up with the words, I’ve found myself way more able to write how I’d like than I expected to. I’ve been doing the daily speak/write challenge and a post like this shows it best if anyone wants to see, I mention what I’m shadowing (lol) and also there’s an example of something I wrote: 📝 Speak/Write Every Day Challenge (Winter 2025) ❄ - #17 by Daisoujou I’ve only been seriously shadowing maybe like a week now, and this was day 3 or so of writing, heh.
The main thing I want to point out is how, despite having a long way to go to fluently getting the words out, I feel WAY better at doing this than I did some months back in initial attempts to talk to Japanese friends. Basically, I think going 99% input for a few years the way I did paid off greatly because 我ながら my writing isn’t so bad, but the point I do want to make is making SOME small effort at Japanese use at one point was very useful to help me realize the exact pieces of grammar connecting tissue and etc that I had been slightly white-noising. From there, some more months spent reading and listening, and in that time I’m much more closely keeping at eye on the grammar and wording, leading to big gains now even though I was still just continuing to practice input. Essentially, if you have much interest in getting better at output at some point, I think it’s really valuable to make a brief attempt at output, and you can even put it aside afterwards, but I think if you manage to learn some about what’s lacking from that time you’ll come back way better. At least that’s how it worked for me.