Hey everyone! I’m Elfkan, and my main motivation for learning Japanese is for my trip to Japan in May! There are many places that my family and I want to go to, but don’t have any support for english. I wanted to make sure I got my feet wet first and getting into the rythm before posting (Lvl 3 as of starting this study log. Joined On Jan 2).
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Is it only for this trip?
No! I have always liked aspects of Japan when I was young, with being exposed to Gundam SEED being my first recollections of japanese media, as well as albums from Kimagure Orange Road being handed down from my parents.
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I was kind of big into anime when getting older, but I strayed away due to untasteful tropes in many shows, only stopping by to watch the ones I really liked. I currently really only read light/web novels (most of them being Korean now, but we don’t talk about that). I would love to be able to read some niche untranslated or dropped works that I enjoyed and get into media that usually isn’t translated!
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Nowadays, I’m mostly into the nature, history(I have spent a day at a single museum before), music(Yura Hatsuki!), and of course the food.
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How has studying been so far?
I know it will get tougher for sure, but I think I can manage it! I’m used to SRS on chessable and chessbook where I have a few thousand move repertoire so having something that actually has mmemonics and clearer meaning is easier actually.
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I have some commitments like a national team championship coming up and a full university course load, but wanikani should get more difficult only when I’m done with that, so things line up quite nicely!
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I also have been looking at some of the recommendations for things to do outside of wanikani. There seems to be a very wide sea of things to choose from, with many many confusing forums. I would love to hear from you guys and what has worked for you!
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Hopefully you will join me on my journey and I hope this inspires some people in the future! 
Welcome… just curious, what parts of Japan will you be visiting in May?
Not familiar with her work, but listening to this and finding it intriguing:
Thanks for the welcome! I will be going to Tokyo, Kanazawa, Kyoto, and Osaka.
It is! Her normal tracks are alright but what really shines is her “modern classical” or “modern baroque” tracks. As a big fan of classical music it is a great way of combining melody and harmony with new instruments.
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My favorite tracks have to be 雪の森の孤毒姫 ～Fluoriteの祈り～ & 鱗、装う偽り姫 for that reason
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Another Japanese Modern classical artist I love who is more modern classical in a purer sense is
Finished review today, a pretty surprising amount of fails for some of the level 2 content. Most of them were due to me fat-fingering or just rushing through, but there were two that I did forget. Honestly not mad when I fail to answer something correctly, but happy to review them and strengthen my memory of them!
Finished review today! It went well
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Only miss today was 内 where I remembered the mmemonic but my brain refused to believe that a vowel could be at the front of the pronounciation thus resulting in ‘tsuchi’ rather than ‘uchi’ I have reviewed the full mmemonic again and now can add the extra relation that it differs from 土
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Level 4 will be reached tomorrow! On another note, I am sad that I will miss so many highly regarded restauarants in Kanazawa due to them only being open for dinner. This will be rectified hopefully in a future trip
Cleared review, turns out I got baited into thinking I could level up today, it was just a stack of guru review 
. Well, I’m ready for it tomorrow anyways!.
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Guru review went decent except for some of the numbers + days, those are such a unique case. Re-remembering what I was thinking to make the connections helped a lot with the timely-re-review at the end of the day today. Excited for level 4 tomorrow!
Well we got there! Immediately went through all the lessons whenever I had free time between lectures. I hope I don’t have to break my streak when I play on the national championship next weekend which will eat a majority of the two days.
Reviews today went well! On pace to unlock rest of kanji tomorrow. Level 5 is quickly within sight!
I’ve found Bunpro to be very helpful for me in learning grammar, which is something Wanikani entirely omits to teach you. You’ll find some people say you should just learn that through immersion, but at least for me that seems rather painful. Textbooks like Genki or Minna No Nihongo are also useful for this. There’s also a few textbook study groups on this forum.
The next thing to think about is what your goals are:
- Since you’ve said reading is a goal, reading some beginner material is good. There’s a couple of sources from here like graded readers (material made for language learners that sticks to specific levels of skill, such as JLPT levels), or kids manga/books.
- For graded readers, the two I hear people have had success with are Satori and Tadoku, but I’ve never used either so can’t comment on them.
- For kids manga, this forum has an absolute beginners book club. The name is a little bit misleading I think, as it’s not really something for day 1 of Japanese learning, but more for the beginning of reading.
- You can probably start earlier than you think. There’s a wide range of opinions on this as to when to start from the AJATT people who think you should start reading right after learning kana, to people that think you need to finish something like Wanikani level 60 or Anki Core 6k first. I tend to lean towards starting early but not immediately, mostly because it’s worked for me. So I’d say a decent knowledge of N5 grammar (obtainable from doing like the first 7 sets of lessons on Bunpro, or a beginner textbook like Genki I or Minna no Nihongo 1) is the point where you should consider starting reading. We have the book clubs here which can help if you want to read along to something with people. There’s also this thread with more resources for the starting: Resources for Starting to Read Japanese Content
- For hearing Japanese (important if you want to get back into anime), there are a couple of options:
- Beginner podcasts like Japanese with Shun or Nihongo con Teppei where they’ll speak slowly and keep to basic language to get you into it.
- I’ve heard of some people also having success watching Anime with Japanese subs. English subs are generally too easy and your brain will skip over the Japanese audio if you don’t understand it while Japanese subs give you a resource to reaffirm your understanding without short circuiting your understanding of Japanese. (That said, I suspect if your Japanese reading gets too far ahead of your Japanese listening, they’ll have the same issue)
- If your goals include communicating with Japanese people via writing, a good initial starting place might be to try the sentence a day thread here. Beyond that, there are language discord servers like EJLX or 日本語と英語 you can try which usually have text channels for beginners to write Japanese. It can be a way to ease into producing Japanese, and if you intend to actually speak it, you can move onto voice chat there if you’re comfortable.
- If you want to speak Japanese, probably your best option is to find a native Japanese tutor on iTalki. Otherwise the aforementioned discord servers also have voice chats for beginners in Japanese.
At some point you’ll probably also want to think about what to do for vocab seperate to Wanikani itself. While some attempts have been made by the devs to change it in recent months, Wanikani is primarily a Kanji app. So there’s a lot of common terms that are kana only that aren’t included, or use very common kanji that aren’t included because Wanikani’s original design saw vocab as a way to reinforce kanji so stopped adding vocab terms for a kanji if they thought they had enough for that. Also Wanikani orders things by kanji complexity mostly, so there’s some very common terms that are pretty late in Wanikani.
There’s a few options for learning vocab not on Wanikani. I did a little comparison of the SRS options in my own study log a few months back, and then there’s also the option of doing a lot of immersion and reading to get vocab that way.
Thank you very much for the thoughtful reply! I will probably begin to incorporate Bunpro soon!
Reviews went pretty well today, however, big repeat offender is 小さい in which I always remember to put “chi” but forget “chii”. Need to remember that. Anyways, got baited again and the actual guruing takes place tomorrow
Thanks to araigoshi, I have started bunpro! So far have learned 20 N5 lessons. Grammar is somewhat intuitive at least for basic things due to me being fluent in speaking Cantonese (only speaking). I had some problem with verb conjugation but that was because I didn’t take careful time to read everything. I am learning through reading after to see the examples and posts now!
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Review went well today except for mispelling ‘see’ as ‘se’ and ruining the perfect streak . Unlocked a bunch of new content and am working on it! Things are going well! 
Turns out the mispelling typo from yesterday has costed me quite a bit of time on my schedule 
. Reviews went pretty well today but need to sort out the inconsistent meanings in vocabulary containing 先。As 先日 is somehow different from 先月 and the others.
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On Bunpro, starting to get a hang of the differences with る, う verbs as well as the い and な adjectives. My brain can start to diffrentiate now and get what I need!
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Also found out that I already have a japanese keyboard installed so I’m using that now!
Review went well. Turns out i was being dramatic and forgot that you didnt need all kanji at guru to pass a level. Will be level 5 the day after tomorrow. 
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Added 5 more bunpro lessons to a total of 30. Feeling more comfortable with verb and adjective differentiaton now.
Review was once again very good today. Will reach level 5 tomorrow!
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Bunpro review back to good enough 80%+ levels to incorporate some more lessons tomorrow.
Tada!
Only have a few more vocab lessons to add in. Funny how I also just learned that いいえ is only really used for written nowadays with いや being used as the spoken alternative through a helpful 15 min vid (I will try to find the channel name).
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Did not add bunpro yet, today was a busy day, but I’m still progressing! Also found another interesting channel https://www.youtube.com/@learnjapanesefromnhknews that does NHK news but with additional commentary in both english and japanese, the level is too high for me right now though with the recommended JLPT3 level. Hope to continue my pace!
couldn’t post yesterday, but cleared reviews. Cleared today’s reviews as well with great accuracy! Currently posting this between National tournament rounds. 1 won and lost 1 but hopefully my team carries the second match (1.5-1.5 as of writing). Will see you guys tomorrow!
Quick update for those interested. I won 2/3 of my games today, and our team won all 3 matches total. We are in clear first place!
Finished reviews and back on the grind, the only thing I seem to be dropping so far is older vocabulary readings. Also need to look out for 不正 with the correct reading of ふせい . I keep getting it confused with 生 reading in this particular instance. Anyways, my team and I got 1st place in the CUCC, so
Have been reviewing. Cleared reviews. Onboarded second half of the level 5 kanji a bit ago and am at segment 3. Getting confused between 平 and 半 so I need to watch out for that also 多い as ooi need to rember.