Great!! It’s no problem – if I’ve got 'em thanks to past me’s over-enthusiasm, they might as well go somewhere where they’re likely to be used.
Oh, sure! Thank you! I probably wouldn’t manage to use it for anything suitably cool, so don’t feel obligated! But I would certainly cherish the gesture if you felt inclined.
Yeah, I’ll follow up there! probably tomorrow since I feel like it’s less awkward when the other person isn’t around and so there’s no expectation of a timely response 
Made it to level 56!
Another fourteen day level, and another slightly late update! I don’t have nearly as much exciting stuff to report this time, haha.
My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 5430 (and 4007 on KW!)
Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:
I’ve realized that my listening comprehension during wrestling shows has gotten good enough, I’ve already started to forget that some things that are understandable to me aren’t as understandable to some of my friends, haha. I was watching DDT’s 花より熱波2 show, the second 37Kamiina produce show, and Konosuke Takeshita (who could not attend the show in person) provided voiceover as a mysterious booker putting together different match configurations of his four stablemates in the main event.
My listening comprehension during wrestling varies a whole lot, but I’ve gotten pretty decent at understanding basic match layouts and stipulations (who vs who, what kind of match is it, etc.), though DDT likes to add unconventional stips in there that sometimes throw me for a loop, haha, so often I only get it partially correct. The new guy running the DDT English live translation account is a little slower than Mr. Haku used to be, so there’s a bit of a delay between the dialogue and when the translation shows up.
At one point, I was like: “Takeshita, you should make Mao and Yuki Ueno kiss,” and then literally right after I said that, I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard him announce that the next match would be a tag match where the wrestlers had to kiss their partner to tag in and out, haha. Sure enough, I’d heard correctly! Sadly, he retracted the stipulation right after, and it was just a normal tag match, but let the record show that Mao and Ueno were totally down to kiss, even though Shunma Katsumata wouldn’t kiss Toi Kojima 
.
I also heard correctly that the last portion of that match was an elimination match, then felt bad when the friend I was watching with was caught off guard by the stipulation after the first elimination . I wish I’d thought to mention it, but it legitimately had not occurred to me that I’d understood and she hadn’t!
Also, while watching TJPW, I heard the Japanese commentary say what sounded like “姫様落とし” when Himawari did one of her moves, and I wondered if that was what she’d named it (and if I’d heard correctly ), and I glanced over at the chat, and I saw other fans posting that same word (and asking that same question), so I guess I was right! It makes sense as a move name, because she basically holds the other wrestler in her arms (“princess carry”, お姫さまだっこ. I learned this one from translating TJPW, see below), then spins around a few times before dumping them to the ground. I guess maybe you could translate 姫様落とし as Princess Drop?
That TJPW show also featured a performance by the SKE48 idol group (which Yuki Arai is part of) midway through. There was a conversation between the Japanese fans in the chat during that show that amused me. I think it was prompted by a couple comments from English-speaking fans who were acting a bit impatient during the idol performance. Someone in the chat wondered whether the foreign fans understand idols (sort of!), and someone commented that they have a hunch that foreign fans on Wrestle Universe are well-acquainted with SKE (well… beyond Yuki Arai, I would say not really). Someone commented that in the US, every sports halftime show is a flashy spectacle, and one would think that this is similar (good point!). Another person commented that the image that overseas TJPW fans have in mind might be Maki Itoh (honestly, probably not off base).
It was amusing to me that the Japanese fans were gossiping and speculating about the western fan perspective right there in the chat and the English speaking fanbase had absolutely no idea. People seemed to be both overestimating and underestimating the western fanbase, haha, which I suppose is probably just how it always goes.
Keiji Mutoh’s retirement show happened on February 21, and putting aside my opinion on the man himself, it was a very good show! I have a few gripes with the booking, but the matches themselves were pretty much all good for what they were, though I surprised myself by wishing that just about everything was longer. The TJPW offer match was particularly a highlight.
I found out after the fact that they streamed the first, like, half of the show for free on youtube, so go watch the TJPW match at least!! There is Japanese commentary, so it’s nice listening practice I, uh, did not watch it with Japanese commentary because I was watching it with friends. But the English commentary team was the NOAH commentary team, and they sure did not know any of the actual TJPW storylines…
I’m so proud of the TJPW wrestlers for getting to have a match in the Tokyo Dome 
. I wrote about that match and a few others from that show here in my list of best matches/shows of the year.
上級へのとびら – Chapter 1
Finished chapter 1! I technically started SRS-ing the vocab for chapter 2, but not enough to really count it for the purposes of this update.
I’m still figuring out the best strategy for tackling each chapter, but I think my current plan is to:
There’s a bit of skipping around, haha, which might seem a bit confusing . It feels to me like each chapter introduces double the amount of grammar points and vocab that MNN introduced each lesson, so my two weeks per chapter pace is still doable, but it’s harder. I kind of wish Tobira was laid out in a similar way to MNN where the vocab and grammar lists are contained in a separate book that you could reference as you please, and then you could just work through the main textbook from start to finish without doing quite so much flipping back and forth.
Both Tobira and MNN seem to want you to try doing the reading first and then look at the grammar explanations, but I personally hate doing it that way because I feel like I get way more out of it if I read the explanations and then immediately see them in action. I’d rather come into it with all of the vocab already in my brain and the grammar fresh in mind, I guess. Then the reading is just solidifying and reinforcing my newly gained knowledge.
So far, my overall opinion on the textbook is positive! I like the amount of reading it asks you to do, and it introduces a lot of interesting cultural things, which is cool to read about. I don’t really like the style of the grammar explanations (I feel like MNN’s were much more in-depth and easier to read and understand), but the workbook gives ample opportunities to practice all of the grammar points, and I did feel like I understood them all by the end.
I laughed when I saw the page on あいづち at the end of the first chapter. I didn’t know the name for them until now, but these have caused me so much trouble while translating wrestling stuff (where naturally they come up all the time, haha, including every single one that the textbook tells me I don’t have to memorize)! I’ve struggled a lot with how exactly to translate them to convey the right flavor for each instance.
The Tobira workbook has a lot of open-ended questions rather than strict grammar drills, so that part is harder than the MNN workbooks, which usually had a few open-ended questions, but not nearly this many. I feel downright spoiled for getting English translations along with the instructions, though, haha, because MNN didn’t have that 
. I think setting aside a full week just for the workbook is probably a wise idea, because I tried to squeeze it all into like four days and that was a bit tough.
The workbook asked me to write a sentence talking about something from my country using 〜は〜(こと)で知られている, and I amused myself by coming up with this one: “AEWは流血を使いすぎることで知られている。” (My friend joked that he fixed it for me: “ジョン・モクスリーは流血しすぎることで知られている。”)
I did start an extra Tobira deck for all of the words I come across in the textbook/workbook that aren’t in the vocab lists and which I haven’t learned yet from other sources. I’m also planning on learning any new kanji I come across that aren’t in WK or my existing kanji Anki deck. I just added my first one of those: 鷺, meaning heron, from 白鷺, which Yomichan defines as “heron with all-white plumage (incl. egrets)”. I also added 鞄 from the workbook, used for the extremely common word 鞄, with the kanji having basically that same meaning (bag). I was a bit surprised that WK doesn’t teach this one, honestly! But maybe it’s not actually as common as its use in an intermediate textbook leads me to believe?
In total, I ended up adding 34 extra vocab and 2 kanji for this first chapter. I’m not sure if I’ll be adding less words as I progress through the book or not, but I already felt it paying off, so I’m going to keep it up.
Reading/Listening:
I slowed down my reading pace a bit, so I’m currently only 22% of the way through the book, though it’s longer than Sí, si es contigo was. I’m not honestly sure what I think of the book quite yet. I think overall, I like it, and it’s definitely at least compelling enough to keep me reading, and I’ve had nights where I had a hard time putting it down.
The read every day challenge is going well still, though we’re about to wrap up in a few days! I’ll be starting a listen every day challenge for the off month.
No manga read this week! I did translate one senryu:
It has been quite the busy past couple weeks for TJPW! (And for me, the translator )
2023.02.11 第3回“ふたりはプリンセス”Max Heartトーナメント (part 2) — (6 words added + 1 kanji)
2023.02.17 TJPW press conference with Miyu Yamashita — (3 words added)
I’m close enough to the end of WK, I’ve started to add every non-WK kanji that I come across in my translations. I just added 掴, from the word 掴む, which in a wrestling context means to win or capture. I also added 剋, meaning victory, from the very fun word 下剋上 that I learned from Himawari, which means juniors dominating seniors, retainer supplanting his lord, etc. I find that word just very pleasing visually haha!
I’m currently about halfway through the Nagoya show, which was another long one, translation-wise. TJPW sprung two press conferences on me right before it, only one of which I finished, and then not only do I have the Nagoya show, but also the TJPW match in Mutoh’s retirement show to translate stuff for, and then two more press conferences the day after that, and a VOD show tonight… . So I have a very busy week ahead of me, haha.
New resources:
I wasn’t using Notion before, but I saw this cute template that bellynx made, and I totally couldn’t resist trying it out . The last things I need right now are more Japanese learning tools/distractions, but I did like the thought of having a more organized place to keep track of stuff.
I’ve currently filled out the main page and the 図書館 page with my reading goals and progress. If I have the time or, who am I kidding, if I get distracted enough when I should be doing other things, I’m hoping to compile a bunch of links to resources that I commonly reference during my studies (and a separate section for translation resources), and also go back through my study log and compile all of the media recommendations I’d earmarked for the future, but wasn’t ready for at the time.
I think this study log serves already serves a lot of the purposes that other people use Notion for, and I like having it because it preserves a record of my process and growth over time, but I had been thinking that I could benefit from having some sort of hub document that I can keep up to date with my current progress on the goals I’d laid out for myself at the beginning of the year, plus just keep track of media I wanted to read/watch, but hadn’t got around to yet. I have some stuff wishlisted on places like Natively, but I’d like a more medium-agnostic space where I can also include detailed notes about everything that’s on my wishlist. It might also be fun to have a page of all the senryu translations I’ve done, or at least the best highlights.
If I get the rest of my Notion pages together, I’ll share a link to it in a future update!
Next steps:
I’m hoping to get as caught up as possible on the translations over the next week or so, so that’ll probably be my main priority. I also have a few writing deadlines coming up at the end of the month, so I’m trying to finish three short writing projects by the end of February 28.
Between those two things, I don’t expect to have a lot of spare time over the next week, though I think I’ll still be able to keep up with my normal studies just fine.
If I miraculously finish all of that work and have time/energy left over, I’m going to try to get a thread started for MNN advice/resources so that I can just link to that when helping folks on the forum instead of linking them to billion word long study log posts .
I’m also going to maybe try to build out my Notion pages a bit more, which’ll involve combing back through this thread.
So, considering all of that, Romeo vs Juliet probably won’t be happening over the next few weeks, but hey, you never know…
Onward to level 57! 行くぞ！
Hey, just wanted to pop in and say hi since I’ve been away for a couple months on a break (only briefly mentioned it in the visual novel club cause I needed someone else to take over). Wish that didn’t have to happen, but life/health things got a little overwhelming. Finally getting back to reading again and wanted to see how you were doing. Very glad you’re still at it 
I’m so glad to hear from you again! I was worried about you since I hadn’t seen you around lately. I’m sorry life/health things got overwhelming, but I’m glad that you’re able to get back to reading!
And yes, I’m still at it! Coming up on my second anniversary on the forum, actually! Just realized a few days ago I gotta get on that year two overview post if I want to post another one… Still translating wrestling, and still going with WaniKani. Finished Minna no Nihongo, though, and now I’m on Tobira!
Made it to level 57!
I spent my usual fourteen days on the past level. I realized a few days ago that I was fast approaching my WK forum anniversary, and that that day was almost certainly going to coincide with my level-up day, so I wanted to get this post out as soon as possible so that I could post my year two overview (which should be coming very soon!).
Also, I’m going to be reducing my daily lesson count to 8 (3 kanji + 5 vocab) instead of 10. I came very, very close to running out of lessons at the end of this level, so I did a bit of math and realized that either I needed to do more kanji each day (and therefore level up quicker), or do fewer lessons each day and keep my two-week pace. I chose the latter because I think this is a better pace for Tobira, and I like using my WK level-ups to motivate me to stay on track with the textbook. The good news is it should lighten my review load a little bit, because I’ve had more older items coming back, and the latter half of the 50’s don’t tend to stick as well.
Last level was me sowing (neglecting my translations to work on some writing projects instead), so this level was me reaping (having to crunch extra hard to catch up on the translations before TJPW’s biggest show of the year) . I did kind of get into a groove with them, though, and they weren’t as hard as I was expecting! My stamina has improved a lot.
I tried timing myself for the first time, and I determined that at my current rate, it takes me about an hour to translate 600 characters. This includes the initial rough draft of the translation, researching the words and grammar I can’t figure out, watching the video and following along with the transcript, posting my questions in the pro wrestling thread, and then implementing edits and doing the final polishing.
So standard TJPW shows are about 2-4 hours of work, press conferences tend to be 4-8 hours (depending on if they have one or two parts), Korakuen shows are about 9-10 hours, and big shows like Wrestle Princess are like 15 hours. I’d estimate that maybe an average month’s worth of shows is about 20 hours (minimum) of translation work for me. This month is, uh, not an average month!
According to one of my friends, professional rates for a translator are like 500 characters an hour, which felt shockingly low to me, considering how so much of the time I spend on it is due to a lack of Japanese skill, which presumably a professional would not have to deal with . I think I still have plenty of room to get faster. I kind of wish I’d timed myself for some of the earlier ones, just to see how much I’ve already improved.
My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 5556 (and 4100 on KW!)
Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:
While watching a DDT show, I noticed these comments in the chat: “頑張れ電波！” “電波がんばれ”. I was like “Huh? Radio waves?” My immediate thought was that they were referencing ふりーWiFi (TJPW tag team consisting of Hikari Noa and Nao Kakuta. ビビビビビ!), but this was DDT, so that didn’t make any sense. Then I realized that the stream was bugging out, so the fans were trying to encourage the video signal the same way they’d cheer on a wrestler, haha! Here was another comment that made me smile: “このシングル楽しみだけど、電波…ファイト！”
I also was amused by this comment during a TJPW show from a fan who was remarking on Hyper Misao’s, er, way of schooling the rookies: “噓を教える悪いセンパイ” .
I found out that a friend I’d made in a pro wrestling discord is Japanese, though he’s not currently living in the country. He was incredibly charmed by the fact that I’m learning the language for wrestling, and that I’m attempting to translate TJPW. He also loved my senryu translations, and asked if I was familiar with kakekotoba (掛詞). I confessed that I wasn’t, so he linked me to this famous example. I’ll admit, it did my head in a little bit, haha!
This is another one that isn’t exactly “fun”, but the Pro Wrestling NOAH wrestler Daisuke Harada had to retire unexpectedly (after a 17 year long career) due to health concerns from a previous injury making it unsafe for him to keep wrestling. His retirement match was a one minute exhibition match with his longtime tag partner Atsushi Kotoge, who was also his debut opponent. Their tag team, 桃の青春, was one of my favorites in NOAH, so I was devastated to see Harada retire, but I was very touched that he chose Kotoge to be his retirement opponent.
They played a short video recapping Harada’s career before the match, and I think I understood almost all of it! It was mostly just a list of notable moments, with text in the corner of the screen giving the details, so it’s not a huge accomplishment or anything, but it was still nice to be able to fully appreciate the video. It’s amazing to me how Kotoge was there for practically every major moment in Harada’s career…
One of my friends found a Light/L Death Note doujinshi that I had stumbled across in a thrift store in Alaska and bought for her probably ten years ago. It occurred to me that I can in fact read Japanese now, so I asked my friend to photograph it for me so that we could finally understand the plot, haha.
It’s the Mother of Ultra!! Oh, sorry, the Mother of Ul*ra, ahaha.
I recognized her immediately thanks to having translated Kamiyu comparing Juria Nagano’s hairstyle to hers (see this post). I didn’t read enough of the doujinshi to get the full context for why she’s here, but I’m sure it’ll be an adventure.
上級へのとびら – Chapter 2
Managed to finish the second chapter, though it came kinda down to the wire. My translations have been keeping me busy, and there was a certain five hour AEW PPV last weekend…
とびら：今週末、何をしますか。
私： 日曜日には長いプロレスのPPVを見ますから、普通より土曜日にはもっと勉強しなければなりません。
This is another one where I feel like a lot of what the chapter taught me, at least in terms of the reading (which was on 日本語のスピーチレベル), was stuff I’d either picked up on my own or had learned though Tofugu and this forum and the like. It did occur to me that with my translations (and manga reading, honestly) I’m getting quite a lot of practice with 話し言葉 and not quite so much practice with 書き言葉, so that’s probably something I should keep in mind . I already feel like I have a tendency to answer the exercise questions with language that I encounter in my translations, which tends to be 話し言葉. I’ll eventually even this out a little more when I have the time/energy/skill to dive into reading novels in earnest.
I did laugh when the 読み物 mentioned different speech styles and warned that if a woman says “俺も腹へった”, people will be startled. I remember Shoko referring to herself and the rest of the TJPW roster (remember, this is a pink princess-themed women’s wrestling company) as “俺たち”, and I’ve heard the wrestlers use tough guy speak on multiple occasions, though perhaps not as commonly as wrestlers in other companies use it.
Reading/Listening:
I managed to get 29% of the way through Cantoras before the read every day challenge ended! I’m hoping I can finish it by the end of the next reading challenge.
I started watching Bob Esponja again for the listening challenge. I can’t tell if it’s any easier than the last time I watched some of it, though the difficulty usually varies pretty heavily depending on the episode. Some of the settings/themes are in areas where my vocabulary is a lot weaker, and my comprehension suffers as a result.
I finished the winter read every day challenge with a perfect score! As usual, I signed up for the listen every day challenge for the off-month. I haven’t really had to try at all to keep up with it with Japanese, since I’ve been really busy working on the translations and watching shows .
I translated two senryu!
I finished… a lot of TJPW translations . The Nagoya show was already partially done, though.
2023.02.18 TJPW CITY CIRCUIT WINTER～名古屋公演～ (part 2) — (24 words added + 2 kanji)
2023.02.21 KEIJI MUTO GRAND FINAL PRO-WRESTLING “LAST” LOVE ～HOLD OUT～ (TJPW portion) — (0 words added)
2023.02.22 TJPW press conference (part 2) — (20 words added + 2 kanji)
2023.02.25 TJPW CITY CIRCUIT WINTER～蒲田公演～ — (9 words added + 2 kanji)
2023.03.02 TJPW press conference (part 2) — (13 + words added + 3 kanji)
From the Nagoya show, I added 云 from the word 云々, meaning “and so on, and the like, etc.” (or “yadda yadda” as rodan put it), and I also added 溢 from the word 溢れる, meaning to overflow, to brim over, to flood.
From the first press conference, I added 絆 from the word 絆, which means bonds (between people), (emotional) ties, relationship, connection, link, and I also added 峙 from the word 対峙, which means confrontation, squaring off against, standing facing each other, etc. (I love this kanji!).
From the 2.25 show, I added 禄 (fief, allowance, pension, grant, happiness) from the word 貫禄, which means “presence; dignity”. I’m guessing that this one shares the same phonetic component as 録, which makes it nice and easy to remember. I also added 涛 (waves, billows) from the word 怒涛の勢い, which means “with great vigour; in leaps and bounds; with the force of surging waves”.
From the second press conference, I added 嫉 (another one with a phonetic component that I think I can guess, since I just learned 疾 a few levels ago. And hey, looking at the keisei script on that page, it looks like I’m right!) and 妬 from the word 嫉妬, meaning jealousy or envy. Both kanji have that same meaning. I also added 曖 (dark, not clear) from the word 曖昧, meaning vague; ambiguous; unclear. This is kind of a neat one because it looks like 愛 is the phonetic component (yep, checked the page, and sure enough!).
Very grateful for the keisei script for teaching me these things! And to rodan for the help as usual. I want everyone to appreciate their brilliant solution for translating the pun in Mahiro’s apology here: “睡魔”に負けて“すいま”せんでした” (“My falling asleep… was inexsnoozeable!!”).
New resources:
I finished getting my Notion page set up! It’s optimized for a smaller window, so it might look strange if you fullscreen it on a wide monitor. I even found a spot to feature my latest senryu translation on the main page. I compiled almost all of my senryu translations here, with the newest ones on top and the oldest ones on the bottom. I’ve done a lot more of these than I thought!
The 図書館 page has my progress on the actual books I’m reading (not a lot of activity there, as you could probably guess from all of the times I’ve posted about failing to make progress on my manga reading ), and the 勉強 page is mostly just a compilation of quick reference links for my TJPW translations and Japanese resources in general. I was going to delete the timer, but I decided to try it out first, and I found that having a timer running actually did help me be more productive. The spotify playlist on the main page is a bit vestigial, though. I don’t listen to music while studying, and I don’t really use spotify, but I liked how it looked aesthetically, so I kept it .
The sticky notes page is basically a collection of odds and ends that don’t really belong anywhere else, like Japanese study resources that I want to hold onto but aren’t actively using at the moment, various projects that I want to do but currently have on the backburner, etc. I also went back through my study log and compiled all of the media that was recommended to me or which sounded interesting according to other people’s descriptions. The list is almost entirely recommendations from other people, or paraphrased descriptions from my friends on discord or folks on twitter. At some point, I hope to get around to actually reading/watching some of the stuff on there!
I’ll probably add and remove stuff from Notion over time as my own process shifts, and as I start to check out the things that have been recommended to me, so don’t rely on it as a stable resource, haha, but pretty much everything in there will remain immortalized in this log. Notion is sort of just a distilled down version of my study process that cuts out all the messiness in my study log and threads like the senryu thread, so it’s a convenient resource hub, but all of my actual learning happens in the messiness, so I think of Notion as like something nice to have but optional.
Honestly, I’m glad I only found it fairly late into my language learning journey, because I feel like as a beginner, I would have either gotten overwhelmed by it, or would have gotten way too distracted trying to figure out the perfect way to study, haha. But at this point, I already know basically what works for me and what I’ve got going on and where I’m headed, so I can remove all of the chaff and just keep the stuff that I actually need and let it be a nice supplemental tool rather than taking over my studies.
I found out that unfortunately, Yomichan is no longer being maintained. The good news is that it looks like TheMoeWay has forked it and will be rebranding it as Yomitan. So that will be a bit of a shift, but hopefully not a huge one.
I discovered YomuJP from Tofugu’s Winter 2022 resources. It’s another place to go for free graded readers (they have stuff from N6 through N1). As I think I said before, I’m reaching a point where I feel increasingly less of a need for graded readers, so I haven’t felt particularly inclined to browse these, but I thought I’d hold onto the link in case I changed my mind.
MissDagger is starting a book club for A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar! As one of the enablers who encouraged her to start it, I’m totally planning on participating! The goal is to very gradually read through all three volumes of the dictionary cover to cover, with people encouraged to ask questions and share examples from their immersion along the way. Conveniently for me (and inconveniently for anyone who hates pro wrestling), I have compilations of my wrestling translations saved in easily searchable master documents, so people might be getting some TJPW examples, haha.
I think the timing of the club might actually work out just about perfectly for me. If we make it all the way to the advanced volume, and if I stay on pace with my own studies, I think I’ll be studying advanced grammar by that point. I just ordered myself a copy of the third volume, so I’ll be ready !
Next steps:
My immediate next step is finishing that year two overview!
Besides that, I’m about two (short) TJPW show translations away from being caught up, so I’m on track to finish those soon and then have a few days to rest until Grand Princess. Then I’ll, well, have Grand Princess to translate .
I think that’s enough to focus on for the time being.
Onward to level 58! 行くぞ！
Today is my two year anniversary of joining the WK forum! 
As I mentioned last year, I consider this the day I started seriously committing to learning Japanese, so this marks two years of consistent study! This post is an overview of my journey so far, touching on where I’m at now and all of the main tools that have been the most helpful for me.
I’m still using most of the tools mentioned in the overview of my first year, so I’m not going to repeat the information in that post.
Kanji
I’ve reached level 57 on WaniKani, so I’ve learned over 1,900 kanji, including 32 kanji that I learned on my own which are not in WK.
Grammar
I’ve completed book one and two (lessons 1-50) of Minna no Nihongo and the first three chapters of Tobira, and am somewhere between N4 and N3 in grammar ability.
Vocab
I’ve learned over 6097 vocab words through WaniKani, as well as 1,073 vocab through Anki that I mined from native Japanese media. Additionally, I’ve learned 2,129 words (through Anki) from my textbook Minna no Nihongo, and 217 from Tobira, many of which overlap with WK, but many of which don’t. These are the words I consider essentially my working vocabulary, which I am comfortable using when producing Japanese.
What I can do:
What I can’t do:
As introduced in my last post, I still use Yomichan, Anki, and KaniWani every single day! If you don’t know what any of these are, or are looking for resources for them, please see my previous post. I don’t really have anything to add there, except that Yomichan is no longer being supported by its creator, so I will probably eventually move to a different tool that does the same thing when another person inevitably takes up the mantle.
I do have one new Yomichan addon:
I no longer need ichi.moe, and I haven’t been practicing writing kanji lately.
Textbooks
I finished Minna no Nihongo (described in the previous post), and am currently working through Tobira. I also own the grammar workbook, though not the kanji one. I like Tobira so far, though I’m only a few chapters into it. I don’t feel that there was a large jump in difficulty after MNN, though I’m also coming at it from the perspective of having read lots of native material over the past year that is far more difficult than any textbook. Your mileage may vary if your only reading experience is from textbooks and graded readers prior to starting Tobira.
So far, I would say that Tobira has been useful for helping refine a lot of my slapdash knowledge that I’ve picked up by necessity through my immersion. The grammar workbook also has a lot of production practice, which might not be what everyone is looking for, but I think I’ve benefited from it despite finding it difficult in terms of the amount of time and mental effort it takes to produce sentences in Japanese.
Smartcat
This one is a translation resource, not a Japanese learning resource! Important distinction there. I felt compelled to mention it because it has been really helpful for me, but it’s obviously not necessary unless you want to full-on translate something and not just read it.
Smartcat is a CAT (computer-aided translation) software. It’s web-based, so Yomichan still works on it, and the way it splits everything up line-by-line is pretty helpful. It’s also free, which is awesome.
It learns from your previous translation choices, which is really handy for stuff like wrestling, which machine translation and dictionaries often struggle with. You can also upload your own glossaries (I made a word list from the NJPW English book, for example). The cost of it being free is that your own translations get used to train machine translation, but honestly with wrestling stuff, that’s almost more of a plus . Ultimately my goal is to prevent false rumors and such from spreading, and the better machine translation gets, the less that happens.
Something that’s especially fun about Smartcat is that it tells you what percentage of the text you’ve translated, so it’s really handy for tracking overall progress and splitting up the workload into more manageable chunks, and it’s good for the part of my brain that likes to watch numbers go up, haha.
WaniKani userscripts
Again, see my other post for the full list! These are just the new additions that I’ve discovered since then.
For WaniKani itself:
For KaniWani:
For the WaniKani forum:
.
Useful resources:
Again, these are in addition to the resources already listed in last year’s overview!
Notion is a note-taking and productivity app which I only recently discovered thanks to this cute template that bellynx made, and I totally couldn’t resist trying it out . I really like it so far, though! Click that first link to browse my Notion page.
Nihongo Stats is a stats aggregation tool that a WK user put together for Japanese language learning apps (Wanikani, BunPro, Anki)! It’s similar to wkstats, but has a different presentation and offers some graphs and data that wkstats does not have. My two favorite parts are the review accuracy and total items graphs. I don’t think other tools have offered visualization for this kind of data before, so it’s cool to see!
WaniKani History is another WK stats site with a heck of a lot of stats and other information!
昔話童話童謡の王国 is a website with a collection of 450 Japanese children’s stories with audio. I had fun listening to these as I read along for the listen every day challenge last year. They’re pretty accessible if you’re somewhere in the N5-N4 range and are equipped with Yomichan.
A Year to Learn Japanese is an in-depth guide to, well, learning Japanese that I really appreciate because it lays out different paths and gives multiple options without trying to claim that any one is the right way. I don’t really reference this guide much, but I did work through the pronunciation section last year and feel like I benefited from it a lot.
The Japan Foundation overdrive library is a digital library for US and Canada residents which consists of broad genres such as manga, literature, Japanese language, art, history, culture, society, cooking & food, etc. There are 1,800 titles total, and they’re completely free to read! Many of these books aren’t in Japanese, but they do have some that are. Last year, I enjoyed reading Japanese–English Translation by Judy Wakabayashi.
Book Manager | ッツ Ebook Reader is a tool for reading epub files in the browser so that you can take advantage of Yomichan while reading. I haven’t done a lot of actual book reading yet, but just from trying it once, I could immediately see how useful this is, and am anticipating that I’ll be using it a lot going forward!
The daily senryu thread on this forum is a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to learn random new things about Japanese and/or Japanese culture! It took me a while to really warm up to the style of senryu poems to the point where I felt like I could understand and appreciate them, but now I’m quite fond of them. Don’t be afraid to just jump in and try your hand at translating the latest poem! I have a compilation of most of my senryu translations from this thread on Notion.
Also, I wrote a short guide to learning Japanese with a pro wrestling focus! There is probably zero new information in there if you’ve been following my study log and/or the pro wrestling thread. It essentially gathers the resources that have been most useful to me (minus the WK-specific ones, though I do mention WaniKani), which I wish I’d known about from the start. I’m sure that whoever comes after me will figure out an even better and quicker path, but hopefully it’ll help pave the way a little for other fans 
.
Disclaimer: I am currently unemployed and don’t have family commitments, so I have a lot more time to study than most people. Learning Japanese is currently one of my primary hobbies, along with watching Japanese pro wrestling, so putting this much time into Japanese is neither desirable nor achievable for many people .
I spend quite a lot of hours immersing myself in Japanese each day. A lot of this time is passive immersion that I don’t count as studying, though I am steadily picking up more and more in my passive listening. Sometimes I have partial translation, sometimes I’m completely on my own. It’s a lot of (unsubtitled) spoken Japanese as well as written Japanese on places like twitter and interviews and blog posts and such.
For active study, I have sort of a three-pronged approach which is only slightly modified from my routine last year, as laid out in the previous post:
WaniKani
Tobira
Reading/active immersion/translation
I’ve told this story many times on the forum, and readers of my study log got to watch it all unfold in real time, but the short version is that my favorite wrestling translator, Mr. Haku, left CyberFight (an umbrella company for several pro wrestling promotions, including DDT Pro Wrestling and Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling) at the end of 2021, which devastated me. I was super depressed at the time for other reasons and cried a whole lot over this, but eventually dragged myself to my feet and decided that I would try to take up the mantle and translate as much as I could on my own, hoping that I would soon get replaced by someone who was actually qualified to be doing this.
Well, fast forward about a year and four months, and I’m still here! I started out translating for DDT, then took over from a friend with TJPW after DDT got an actual professional translator again. I took the TJPW translations public last summer after I got fed up with misinformation circulating due to bad machine translation, so there’s a bit of extra pressure, since I’m now doing this for hundreds of strangers in addition to the handful of friends I was translating for before .
I still can’t do everything that Mr. Haku could do (live translation on twitter is beyond me), but I’m doing the post-match comments now like he used to do. Slowly but surely, the quality of my work is improving, and I’m making a lot less mistakes. It is, however, a huge time suck with pretty much weekly deadlines (if I want to stay ahead of the next show), so I have to sort of fit the rest of my non-TJPW immersion around it whenever there are lulls in my translation workload.
I just calculated my average translation speed, and it factors out to be about 600 characters an hour (at least for pro wrestling. I imagine it would be slower for a domain I’m not familiar with, haha). This includes the initial rough draft of the translation, researching the words and grammar I can’t figure out, watching the video and following along with the transcript, posting my questions in the pro wrestling thread, and then implementing edits and doing the final polishing.
So standard TJPW shows are about 2-4 hours of work, press conferences tend to be 4-8 hours (depending on if they have one or two parts), Korakuen shows are about 9-10 hours, and big shows like Wrestle Princess are like 15 hours. I’d estimate that maybe an average month’s worth of shows is about 20 hours (minimum) of translation work for me.
I’m not sure I’ve ever posted my actual process for doing the translations before? I’ve refined it a lot since the early days, thanks to having better tools now and also a better grasp of the language. Here is basically how it goes:
) along with the original Japanese so that I can quickly go back through and search for previous instances of a certain word or phrase, or find examples of how I translated something in the past. I’ll highlight all of the lines in the original Japanese that are particularly confusing to me as I go through it, then un-highlight them when my confusion has been resolved.Currently, pro wrestling is the only domain that I am actively mining additional vocabulary from, since it’s obviously my main priority right now. I do plan on eventually moving on to mining words from manga and novels and other sources, but I have more than enough on my plate with wrestling, so that’ll have to wait until the wrestling words have slowed to a tiny trickle, and I’ve gotten through the backlog of cards on Anki. I’m planning on ramping up my Anki workload after reaching level 60 on WK, so hopefully I’ll be able to actually clear that backlog soon. Also, believe it or not, a lot of the wrestling vocabulary shows up in other places, including my textbook, manga, and even senryu poems. And yes, putting in the time in Anki has absolutely paid off here.
I’ve also really enjoyed doing the read every day and listen every day challenges on this forum, but honestly I get more motivational benefit out of those with Spanish than I do with Japanese, because keeping up with the TJPW translations is pretty much daily work as it is .
Something important to note here is that yes, I’m aware that spending all of this time translating instead of merely reading and learning to process sentences in Japanese inevitably slows me down. Translating requires you to understand every single sentence, even the ones that are far above your level, and even the ones that are poorly phrased or riddled with typos or improperly transcribed.
But as much stress as it has brought me, it also brings me a lot of joy, and it makes each week an adventure. It’s a path I chose because I didn’t want to give up being able to watch TJPW with my friends who aren’t proficient in Japanese. I chose that over fast-tracking my own Japanese skill. Unlike with a medium like manga or a video game or whatever, I didn’t exactly have a choice in the timing. I couldn’t afford to wait.
So I guess if there’s any advice in all of that, it’s that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this path to anyone else, but it definitely was the right choice for me. Sometimes I think you have to make choices that let you actually use what you have now at this point in your journey, even if it’s inefficient and therefore pushes back that theoretical endpoint of fluency.
I’m very, very close to reaching level 60! I’m definitely going to write up a way too long post synthesizing everything I’ve learned over the past 2+ years, so that should be coming within the next couple months. I’ve already started transitioning to using Anki to learn kanji that aren’t covered in WaniKani, and I’ll be ramping up my vocab mining there as well when I’m no longer doing WK lessons.
I just started Tobira, and at the rate I’m going, it’ll probably take me another six months or so before I finish it. I’m planning on using Shin Kanzen Master after that, though I don’t have a concrete plan in place for that in terms of scheduling.
I’m not planning on retiring this study log once I hit level 60! Obviously the format will shift slightly, since I won’t be able to time my updates with WK levels anymore, but the central structure will remain the same. I’ve really enjoyed tracking my progress and watching how it has evolved over time, and I’m hoping I can keep it up as I work through the intermediate level and beyond!
Here’s to another year!
Happy cake day!
It is impressive how far you’ve come in 2 years. The dedication and the consistency!
I wish I could say the same, but considering my own grammar study have basically been standing still since I left Japanese language school… I just don’t know how to study grammar in a way that would work for me. Maybe I’ll figure it out, or I’ll keep muddling along and remind myself to actually lookup grammar sometimes too, but I find that I do so many vocabulary lookups that I don’t want to slow down my reading even more to look up grammar unless I really can’t understand what I’m reading (and it seems critical). 
It isn’t something I’m worrying much about, but sometimes it does pop to the front of the brain and wave at me. xD
I recently installed this script, in fact I changed around a lot with my dashboard so it would be more useful for the little bit of info I can get from it. ^^
Anyway, just wanted to say hi and let you know I’m still here cheering you on!
Congrats on your year 2 milestone!
I really appreciate all the resources you listed. The pro-wresting one is so good!
Something that might help is getting a setup that makes lookups way quicker and easier? I know you enjoy manga (and I enjoy it, too!), but manga is notoriously difficult to do quick lookups with, which means extensive reading tends to sound a lot more appealing than spending nine million years trying to intensively read every page. I’ve found that I tend to let grammar go with manga a bit more because of that, whereas with my translations, since I’m working with easily copy-and-paste-able text, and in a browser with Yomichan, it’s way, way easier to do lookups, so I’m much more likely to actually do them (though I guess having the pressure of publishing my translations also encourages me to get it right… ).
Maybe you could look for a novel in ebook form that you can use for intensive reading purposes? Or find a website with content that you like. Then you can keep extensively reading manga and visual novels guilt-free, haha.
I’ve had by far the most luck learning grammar through textbooks, but I am aware that this is directly the opposite of most people . For me, the scaffolding there really helps, where it slowly adds new grammar on top of what I already know so that I have time to get really familiar with the old stuff and can just focus on learning a handful of new grammar points at any one time. Then I don’t have to worry so much about not fully understanding some grammar in my reading, because I know I’ll get to it eventually in my textbook, so I can just try my best with my knowledge at the moment.
Thank you!! The continued support means a lot! 
Thank you! I’m so glad to hear that the pro-wrestling guide is helpful! I put a lot of time into it trying to create the resource I wish I’d had, so I’m glad it’s helpful to others!
happy cake day! you’re so inspiring! 
I am planing to get to novels this year, but I suspect I’ll spend too much time figuring out more complex sentences to try intensively reading. 
Early on, I found intensive reading necessary I guess to understand anything, but now I feel like it is so hard to squeeze that last bit of nuance out, that I usually don’t bother. Also, I’ve realized I tend to be confused now mostly when stuff is kinda wispy anyway (in manga), so while I know I could grasp things a bit better, it won’t be as good as I wish it could become.
Maybe when I stop filling my reading time with book clubs all the time, I can get back to some easier (vocabulary wise) stuff, so I can focus on squeezing that last bit of grammar knowledge out of it. I feel like that is kinda where I fall now. But it still takes a very different mindset.
Like, maybe, get back to Zenitendou that was just a bit difficult for me last year, and the difficulty mostly lay with the grammar and nuances that I hadn’t been able to grasp when I was learning the basics of those grammar points.
Haha, yeah, unfortunately, for me the main thing that has really helped with understanding that nuance is more directed grammar study like working through a textbook . I’ve started to see loads of gains recently just from spending time with the proper grammar explanations in Tobira with lots of examples that are understandable at my level, and then immediately seeing those same structures in my wrestling translations, and suddenly they’re way easier to understand than they were before, even when I felt like I had enough of an idea to at least get the gist of it. There’s a lot of “this has this specific sort of feel to it” nuance that I miss from just using Yomichan to look a lot of stuff up.
Happy (belated) cake day, @fallynleaf !
Your post wrapping up your progress after 2 years is great and inspiring – you have made a lot of progress in one year (I read your first-year wrap up too), especially in the writing aspect. Congrats! 
While it may be too early, I’m already looking forward to your next assessment next year (no pressure for your studying until then, though!). It’s just so satisfying to see one’s hard work pay off and I hope you can continue to strive and reach the point you’d like to be at when it comes to Japanese proficiency.
頑張れ!
Apropos: just noticed that this overview post has excellent timing and could end up being doubly useful if you decide to repurpose some of the things in there to use it for your soon to be made level 60 post. 
Thank you! And I am planning on writing an update next year ! I think a lot of the time it can be hard to see our progress in the moment, but year by year, you’ll see a lot of growth, so doing these types of reflections can give you a lot of confidence in your learning (and help inspire others in the process!) by proving that you are actually getting somewhere with all of this.
I especially enjoyed looking back through my “what I can do” list from last year and realizing how much further I’ve come. I’m definitely going to try to keep doing those for as long as I can because I feel like it helps contextualize my progress both for myself and for other folks. If I do manage to make it to an advanced level with Japanese, I’ll look back on all of these posts and compile which resources were most useful to me at each stage. Maybe if I ever manage to burn all of the WK items, that would be a good time for that post…
You discovered my secret plan 
. The benefit of keeping a study log is you can repurpose your own writing over and over again and only bore your handful of regular readers. It’ll be new to everyone else .
Well, kinda the reason I came up with the crazy cover to cover dictionary read honestly. To get review of that stuff now that my grasp of the basics is pretty solid. I don’t know if it’ll work, but I decided with so much interest it couldn’t hurt to try. ^^
What I find with textbooks is just that there are too few examples in continuous text. Where you can put it in context and where the usual parts are skipped, so you get used to seeing it more realistically. Example sentences by their very nature have to include the context or be bad example sentences; and also can often feel contrived. So if there was a textbook that mainly focused on a lot of texts with grammar explanations, maybe having a 50/50 split, and where each grammar was shown off more than once in the reading section… Well, I would seriously consider that. I don’t know if that would work, but I know the typical format hasn’t worked well for me in the past, so…
Also, maybe I haven’t had time for enough immersion while doing grammar studies before, so maybe if I study just a small bit while also immersing (a lot) so I see the grammar used naturally more while studying… Something like that, maybe.
Otherwise, I do know that things will get clearly very slowly over huge amounts of consumption, lol. Maybe not in a way I can explain it, but it certainly worked for me in English, so… :3
A happy belated WaniKanniversary - keeping at it for so long is an achievement, and I hope you continue to provide your (very) comprehensive posts in this log for some time to come
Thank you for the continued support! You’re one of the few people who started around when I did who managed to stick it out all the way to level 60, so I’m glad to see you still sticking around!
I worry all the time that my posts are too long or too full of information that doesn’t matter to a single other person here, haha, so I’m very glad that they’re appreciated!
First off, thank you for posting this log, I love organization and when I discovered you using such a organized study log of Japanese apart from your enthusiasm… I just couldn’t anything but see you as a godsend (some kinf of guidance for my own Japanese study). I started rather recently but I just learned Kana (in a very different way than yours, though), but well, enough talking about me. Could you tell me how did you do this whole “add audio to each MNN vocab card” exactly? Like, the resource you grab these audios from, and some tutorial to add them? Thank you so much.
(PD: I’m Spanish and although I’ve read just up to this point, your commitment to the language learning seems insanely amazing, again, thanks).
Thank you so much for your comment! That really made my day! I’m so glad this log has been so useful to you! 
Wow, you are very brave for reading this log from the start (prepare to learn more about pro wrestling than you probably ever want to know… )! I’d recommend taking my recommendations with a grain of salt, haha, since I’m sure my path is far from the most efficient one! It has worked out really well for me, though. I can say that.
I do highly recommend creating your own study log if you love organization! I truly wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t have mine, I think.
The easiest way to add audio to a preexisting Anki deck is by using the Forvo pronunciation downloader addon. There’s also the Yomichan Forvo Server addon which lets Yomichan pull from Forvo audio if it doesn’t have audio for a word.
If you have further Anki questions, I can try my best to help troubleshoot, but I’ve been tinkering with it so much over the past few years, I’ve forgotten a lot of what I’ve done with it to get to the point where I’m at now, haha . My one year overview and my two years overview have the most complete lists of my current setup/tools.
I’m so jealous of you for already being bilingual! That’s super, super cool!
I’ve found that my love of language learning has only grown over time. When I started this log, I had no idea that I’d get as far as I have with either Spanish or Japanese! The WaniKani community is a really friendly and encouraging place, and it has got me to try so many things!
Good luck on your own journey, and I hope you stick around!
thanks, I’ll try those add-ons out. If I stick around (which is very likely) don’t get surprised if I contact you again in search of your Anki layout (very neat and appealing). 
