I’m looking forward to engaging with other learners.
Backstory
I took my first Japanese class in the fall of 2020. (what else was I going to do during covid?) My motivation was that my boyfriend’s (now husband) family on his mom’s side is Japanese. They really don’t speak much English and I want to be able to communicate with them. The class was 100% online, based out of a school in Tokyo. It was a good class, but I didn’t have much opportunity to practice speaking. My husband’s Japanese was learned while he lived in Tokyo for work, but it tends towards drunk salaryman vocabulary, which, while occasionally funny, isn’t particularly helpful.
We went to Japan at the end of 2023 to meet his family. I got “good marks” for knowing how to hold my chopsticks elegantly, but speaking wise, I was mostly clueless. I started back up with self-study at the beginning of 2025. I decided that for myself, what I really need in order to progress my language is more conversation practice as well as the forcing-function of regular classes. I looked into some summer intensive programs in the states, but quickly realized that 1) classes in the US are expensive and 2) I wasn’t necessarily going to get more conversation practice outside of class stateside. I started looking at some options in Japan and came to the conclusion that going to Japan would be a more practical and ‘fun’ solution.
So…I’m off to Tokyo in a few weeks. I’ve been brushing up on my basics: set phrases for shopping, getting lost, getting “unlost”, understanding directions, learning some kanji (WaniKani). My apartment is in Shinjuku, walking distance to school. It will be hot and muggy, but I’m looking forward to the experience.
05/30/2025 - Decided to clean up the post formatting. A combination of badge acquisition nerdiness and minimizing the real estate used in the original post.
What I'm doing for study
WaniKani - kanji
ChatGPT generated topics - not a solution I would recommend, at least with the current 4o LLM, my language partner reviews the content to weed out the mistakes.
Anki - vocab, based on ChatGPT generated content and weekly sessions with Japanese language partner
Weekly sessions with Japanese language partner - found her through Mixxer
Input from native language content - Netflix, YouTube, and 大人のラヂオ 大人のラヂオ｜エンタメ・カルチャー｜ラジオNIKKEI
Refold App - log daily activities
I’m thinking about joining the Absolute Beginner Bookclub starting at the beginning of June.
Congrats on starting your study log. I haven’t yet decided to do one of my own, but I enjoy reading the logs of others in this community.
It’s great that you will be able to visit Japan soon - One of my past trips was during the June rainy season (in Tokyo and beyond) - yeah, it can be a bit uncomfortable ‘swimming’ through the humid air to get from one air-conditioned oasis to another, but I survived
You mentioned an online school, and it also appears that you will be attending classes when you get to Tokyo. If you don’t mind providing a few details, it would be interesting to hear more about that.
Also, I don’t think that I had heard of Mixxer before reading your post - looks like that’s: https://www.language-exchanges.org/ - any tips that you may care to share regarding how you ended up successfully finding a language partner, and how the online sessions generally go would be interesting…
But I don’t want to put any pressure on you to actually respond - keeping up a study log is hard enough without having to constantly swat away stray requests that innocent bystanders may toss in your general direction
(I see that you posted in the ‘public’ study log area, rather than the ‘private’ one, which I guess means that it may be indexed by search engines and be visible to others who may not be community members, so it would be understandable if you may not want to go into too much depth here.)
Welcome! That definitely sounds like a practical and fun solution. Certainly agree that it seems more conducive than an intensive program in the States for the reasons you mentioned.
I don’t know that I have any amazing tips. Be clear in your profile what you want to accomplish and if you aren’t interested in a romantic relationship, be clear about that too. Lots of the online exchange sites are really just a variation of dating sites, which is ok if that’s what you want. Mixxer lets women turn off requests from men, which tells me that there have been problems. I liked that it is sponsored by Dickinson College’s Japanese language program, so I gave it a try. I totally lucked out. My language buddy is a woman in Osaka who teaches English to high school students. I’m helping her get ready for her Level 1 English Language Proficiency certification, she helps me with Japanese. I still have to figure out my own lesson plans, though as an educator, she often has good advice.
If you aren’t getting what you want out of a study partner, just let them know. I set a timer when we are online so we both get equal time.
Not a problem. I know that commenting on Japanese businesses can be sensitive, especially if you have something negative to say. Since I’ve only had good experiences so far, I feel comfortable sharing their info.
The online program and the in-person program is run by the same school, KCP International. https://www.kcpinternational.com/ I don’t think they are running their live online program right now, but I’m planning on asking when I am there. They currently do offer a couple of self-contained online classes.
I picked them originally because they are affiliated with Western Washington University, the University of Idaho, and Lincoln University in the US and you can receive academic credit with those schools as well as transfer credit with several hundred other US schools. I don’t have any special knowledge about language programs, and I relied on the fact that these Universities have some standards to maintain. I was very happy with the online program, I just didn’t have a very good plan for myself once the program was over. Looking over some other options for in-person study, they still seemed like a great choice. The school administration is good about answering questions and providing information. Most everything is done online, but physical correspondence comes out of Bellingham, WA. The website has tons of information about the program, plus they have the usual social media exposure.
I’m planning to. I’ve tried one before, but fell behind, hopefully this will be my first successful book club; it seems like a fun way to keep on track
Ain’t that the truth…actually, my study partner suggested I try ChatGPT. I learned more about writing prompts than it helped with the Japanese, but it can create an acceptable framework and study plan, just lousy content that isn’t how a native speaker talks.
I’m about to stop using ChatGPT because it has outlived it’s usefulness. You still need to know more than the LLM to generate quality content. One of the things I want to discuss with my instructors is my follow-on study plan once the course is over. ChatGPT may or may not figure in to that plan, we’ll see.
BTW, I found using the Universal Primer GPT much better for developing content than the Default or the Language Teacher GPTs. I think it might be useful to uploaded a week’s coursework and have it summarize the content and propose a study plan. I’ll probably try a few experiments but I haven’t been overly impressed with the results overall.
I have watched a few YouTube grammar videos (Cure Dolly, Japanese Ammo with Misa, Tae Kim,…) but nothing has really swept me off my feet. I mainly just look up grammar when I see something I don’t understand. I end up reading lots of Tofugu posts. It’s faster than watching a YouTube video and I don’t feel like someone is trying to sell me something. I also talk to my study partner to clarify grammar.
My grammar study will probably change as I advance levels. For now, vocab, kanji and recognizing the spoken word have been my primary focus.
I find that it’s better suited as a breakdown tool.
So instead of having it generate Japanese, if there is an actual native Japanese sentence, asking it to break down all the vocab and grammar generally works pretty well…but still want to double check it just in case.
I intend to post weekly on Sunday, local time. 29 days until I leave for Japan.
I’m enjoying the supportiveness of the WaniKani community.
Study this week:
Refold App - log daily study activities - this app has helped me maintain daily study consistency
WaniKani - kanji, leveled up to 3 - wow! it is already helping me with improving my vocabulary
Joined the Absolute Beginner Book club
Anki - some vocab, mostly using it for minimal pairs right now. Uploaded the vocab for June’s Absolute Beginner Book club.
Weekly sessions with Japanese language partner
Input from native language content - Netflix, YouTube
Ditched ChatGPT as a planning tool. Will look into giving it content to parse when school starts up at the beginning of July
Bashing my head against the wall getting my laptop set up correctly to do online lookups for the Absolute Beginner Book club. Stumbled across this cute manga about a cat’s diary: mokuro 0.1.1 demo I’m definitely putting it on my wish list.
I was shocked when I first started my log. I’d heard about the people here being nice but I never thought I’d receive this much support and encouragement Congrats on the level-up! And the courage required to join the book club, wow. I’m still too shy
I’m in the same boat minus the setup work being slightly less in progress in more of a “oh, maybe I should do something about that” kind of way. But I’ve already decided that my plan for it is going to be to just read through as best I can the first time or two each week before worrying about lookups.
Funny you say that, I ended up working out a little more structures schedule using Microsoft’s CoPilot, though as always I had to nudge it in the correct direction several times. I originally was just going to start it to see how many days there were until 30 days before the JLPT exams in December so I could assess my trajectory, but it knew about the test so I figured what the heck.
Heh, heh…it “knows” about lots if things. It will very confidently tell you something that is absolutely untrue. In a GPT you started a day or two ago, try asking it what day it is.
I was able to get something to work today. Maybe not as elegantly as I would like, but definitely enough to read the first five pages and get the gist of what’s happening on the train. Feel free to ping me when you ready to take the plunge. Just installing the OCR reader is a big help with the kanji.
Oh, yeah, it is frequently inaccurate. The thing I was mainly wanting to do was to confirm my math on when I’d be done with the N5 kanji and then the N4 kanji here. It actually knew to pull the stats from wkstats, but because the table was formatted with ‘—’ after 100%, that threw the AI off:
So it thought that at level 17, for example, the N4 column was now N5 because it was first. I had to give pretty detailed instructions to correct that:
Please re-evaluate the table again. Please consider the lookup for any value by checking the column for the N level first, and then go down to the row corresponding to the wanikani level, rather than by wanikani level. Please also consider any value of “—” to be equal to 100.01%, as an indicator that it is complete (and distinct from 100% which is also complete but maybe only during the level).
But it was really good at consolidating my thoughts and arranging schedules and whatnot. I wouldn’t trust it as a source for anything I can’t confirm independently, but at collating information it worked well.
Congrats on the level-up! And the courage required to join the book club, wow. I’m still too shy 
