I try to study at least one hour to one hour and half a day (Wani Kani + Grammar). Still somedays, I feel so exhausted because of my internship and just do the WK reviews to avoid from piling up.
(A random note: In my limited experience, I noticed that I can be more consistent with my Japanese studies while working compared to when I’m in classroom. Perhaps because work has a more structured working hour-frame and ‘I use less mental space’ compared to school where I was either in class beating myself to take lots of notes or studying outside the school).
I think it is not about the amount of hours a day you spent, but rather the consistency with which you study. Studying every morning as part of your routine doing all reviews and maybe some lessons is way better than trying to fit one hour in your busy schedule.
I work 8-9 hours every weekday, plus commuting is 2 hours a day most of the time. Making dinner + cleaning the house leaves me with almost no time, but I still manage to study every day because it is part of my morning routine. Sometimes I study more by doing some reviews throughout the day and if I have time on the weekend I study a bit then too. My goal is not to become fluent in Japanese in less than a year so this is the best way to study for me.
What works for me, does not work for everyone though. Try to find your own rhythm and don’t worry about studying less hours. The only one you need to compare yourself to is yourself
I honestly don’t know but I’ll guess around 2 hours. Maybe 3 if the day is bad enough. I don’t think about it I just simply do all my reviews everyday, and 10-20 lessons a day. Sometimes more if I unlocked new kanji/radicals.
I only just got a job recently, but have yet to actually start, my college is online and we don’t have meetings, I just do my HW within the allotted time.
Personally I believe people have more time than they think they do.
I spend about an hour and a half a day on kanji & vocab SRS. On the days I work in an office, I spend the 2 hours of my round trip commute listening to Japanese podcasts. On the days I don’t commute, I use those two hours to read, and sometimes I’ll read anyway when I get home. I listen to podcasts again when I exercise if I feel like it. At the end of the day, if I have time I’ll watch a Japanese TV show with Japanese subtitles, or anime with jp subs for half an hour.
That could easily add up to 4 or sometime 5 hours. Some days I will be too busy for all of that, I’ve not yet had less than an hour spare during a day, although I have had to get up a bit earlier that I would normally on occasion.
But then, I probably fairly lucky, I’m sure there are people who just have too much to do for them to spend that much time, or people who simply wouldn’t want to.
2 hours a day. Wanikani+vocab srs with kanji ordered by wanikani levels (15 words a day). Grammar at that point I only exclusively know through yomichan which to my surprise was quite nuff to get the gist of all example sentences.
I would devote more time, but I’m focused more on Chinese now, that language obviously would offer more career boost for international relations graduate than jp even though I do like Chinese recreational media so it’s not just for a job. Jp is definitely purely for recreational medias.
Because of my work schedule (I work long hours across 4 days with 3 days off) and how I learn, My study varies from week to week but I spend at least 30 minutes to an hour every day just doing reviews and new works/kanji on wanikani alone. On days I work, that’s the only Japanese I do unless I use break times for reading or listen to Japanese podcasts, music or audio books on my commute.
On days I’m off, depending on prior commitments and due to lockdown and restrictions still in my area, I can spend between 3 and 6 hours studying Japanese as well as using any additional downtime to play games (with Japanese voice overs) or watching series, anime or films in Japanese.
There have been times that I’ve found long study sessions boring or difficult to concentrate so when I’m starting to feel that way, I’ll switch up my routine and use a different way of learning to help get me through it but I genuinely enjoy studying Japanese and learning new word or recognising when I’m understanding something without having to translate it. I’m still a low beginner with regards to free speaking (having a full blown conversation for me is difficult) and freestyle writing but I can understand and pick out a lot of the words I know from the things I hear or read.
Studying time frames vary from person to person but I feel that when I’m studying, if the content is interesting and varied, then I feel I can study for longer periods of time without feeling bored or burnt out. I’ve been self-studying Japanese on and off for a while but only really picked it up again in august last year then knuckled down with it properly with longer study sessions since December last year. For me, it all depends on the material I’m using and how enjoyable the study session is.
I probably average around 2+ hours a day. I’m able to get all my WK and Anki reviews done while at work then make anki cards and watch stuff in Japanese at home. Once I can understand a bit more I’ll definitely increase the amount of immersion time.
Doing boring stuff like reading pages in a textbook is too painful so if that’s what I was doing I’d never be able to study more than like 20 minutes a day. Only doing things you enjoy is really the key. Anything that bores you should be immediately dropped for something else
Keep it up with the PhD, hope it all goes well. I don’t think I could have done Wanikani / learning Japanese when I was in the later stages of my PhD…
But after making it through that process and decompressing, I felt I had the time to take on a new challenge, so this was something I started working on.
I’d say my routine is pretty similar too. At the minimum, I do all available reviews in the morning and then all reviews after dinner. I try to keep the Apprentice level ~100 items, so if I’m feeling like things are getting easy I’ll add some of the lessons in.
Otherwise, I’ll watch a video about a concept in the grammar or I’ll try to read an article in the Todai app. Grammar is definitely something I need to work on, so I’m trying to improve by reading an article or doing something each day. This all probably comes to ~2-3 hours a day, depending on how motivated I am.
Keep at it, this is awesome to hear you are tackling Japanese while simultaneously working on your degree; just don’t take on too much and burn out!
