Hi, Iβm Jerry!
Iβve maintained this study log in a very on-again, off-again way for nearly four years and I seem on track to do the same for the foreseeable future. In the past this has been more journal than study log, but Iβm very grateful for those of you that have kept me company, made me feel seen and supported over the years.
A bit about me; I live in Bath, in the South West of the UK, where I work in computing at a research university, with a special interest in automation and cyber security. Iβm an AuDHDer, have a school-age son, and am very much a tinkerer and a maker. I spend a lot of my free time reading, playing cosy games, or making lego. Iβm fortunate enough to have a really great D&D group too, which I play with every couple of weeks.
Oh and I also maintain Smouldering Durtles, a popular Android client for WaniKani
I actually almost exclusively use Apple devicesβ¦ itβs a long story, hehe
The Past
Some irrelevant stuff about other languages.
I consider my journey with languages to be disjointed and fragmented and for this I fully blame the British school system. I learnt French in school, in the same way that you learn any language in school, with a complete lack of focus. This is fine, as it turns out, because by the time I hit secondary school, they were teaching me Spanish instead. None of that stuck either, as you may expect. By the time I was doing my A-Levels, I had met my first real girlfriend and she introduced me to British Sign-Language. I did evening classes, got my BSL Lvl 1 certification, but by then sheβs moved off to university to do Deaf Studies and after a year we broke up and I never really used the BSL and so promptly forgot everything but the alphabet and how to say sorry and thanks. I worked in retail management some years later, so that was actually more useful than youβd think.
I left languages alone for a while, had some hit and miss experiences with Rosetta Stone, etc. and didnβt really do any self-motivated studying until about five years ago, in my late-twenties, when I came across Duolingo for the first time. I started out trying to learn French and found the service pretty good for that; there was a website and an app and I didnβt have to think for even a moment about planning anything. After I while I thought βwhy am I learning French?β and reasoned that I much preferred Italian food and so switched. I got most of the way through the Italian tree and then we got invited to our friends wedding in Sweden and so I started learning Swedish. I really enjoyed it and actually go to the point of completing the Duolingo tree, but I never reached any kind of conversational fluency and short of being able to read product names in IKEA (the ones that arenβt the names of Danish towns, anyway) I completely stopped practising and so failed to retain more than 50% of what I learned.
I reached Japanese mainly through becoming interested in playing visual-novel games, always having enjoyed story-telling elements in some of my favourite games. Games like Mass Effect were always more about the characters relationships and firm favourites like Life is Strange or The Longest Journey, that rip your heart to shreds, were always something I loved. I found, naturally, that most of these games are in Japanese with poor English translation for the most part and so I decided at that point to give learning it a try. There was also the fact that my mother is Buddhist and so Iβd grown up hearing her chanting in Japanese every morning and night for my entire childhood, which meant that I had little fragments of Japanese floating around my head like those βlearn a language while you sleep tapesβ just without any context.
Iβd never touched a language outside of the Germanic families before, so the challenge was exciting. My first port of call was Duolingo, but as many people have found, itβs just not great for Asian languages in general. So I quickly turned to google and /r/LearnJapanese and some highly ranked posts about learning Japanese. One of these posts recommended services ReadTheKanji for kata learning and so I did that for a while, but then stumbled across recommendations for WaniKani and finally began this wonderful journey in worship of the Crabigator.
Just because it has been wonderful does not mean that it has been smooth and this little section of my massively gappy heat map can reveal just how stop and start Iβve been.
I got up to Level 7 and then stopped. I canβt remember why I stopped and it seems extremely silly in hindsight, but there we have it. Past Jerry, you have a lot to answer for! Eight months later, I returned to WaniKani and, upon realising that Iβd broken SRS completely, I reset back to level 1 and started all over again. I had a good three months of learning, got myself up to level 10, but then started neglecting the reviews, which then piled up and up.
Then in late March of 2020 we were struck by a global pandemic and I realised that Iβd be working from home for a while. What I found after two months of lockdown was that I didnβt actually have all that much working to do from home and that I was just in front of the computer most of the day. It was a perfect time, I thought, to knuckle down and clear through those reviews and give myself a fighting chance at progressing. It worked for a while, but then petered out again.
I was then diagnosed first with ADHD, and started medication, and then with ASD, and there has just been generally a whole lot of chaos in life between 2020, when I started this studylog, and now in 2024.
The Present
2020 Archived Present
At this point Iβm probably still going to be working home until January since the university where I work is likely to have limited on site personnel and I have a child at home and therefore have got time a plenty. So over the past ten days, Iβve managed to clear over nine-hundred reviews and so am currently at the stage of working through all the shock-waves of recurring reviews, about two-hundred today for example. One the swells of that wave subside, itβll all seem a bit less hectic.
I had about three-hundred lessons pending and I worked through sixty of those before realising I was being incredibly stupid and doing some filtering to clear out specifically the Level 10 kanji. Iβm going to be a bit more cautious with how I clear through the remaining vocab lessons so I donβt give myself premature burn out with the number of reviews.
Iβve also, perhaps foolishly, decided that not keeping my Swedish knowledge practised is a massive waste of the months of Duolingo time I spent on it the first time round, so Iβve committed myself to trying to get to the point where that tree is 100% gold again. Doing two languages at once is perhaps somewhat misguided, but since one is North-Germanic and the other is Asian, there isnβt really much there that can cause language muddles and itβs probably fairly safe. Iβm primarily focusing on Japanese though, so if I let anything slip, it will be my daily Duolingo. I decided after about two months that doing Swedish alongside Japanese was just too much language at once. So yes, it was foolish.
2021 Archived Present
By November of that year, I had hit level 24 and was maintaining a great average of around 8 days per level. Unfortunately⦠the new World of Warcraft expansion came out and then I had a bout of horrible dental issues that made it hard to concentrate on anything and so I completely lost my streak.
I didnβt put vacation mode on and I still did a few reviews every now and then, but I otherwise just let things built up until I had over 1700 reviews.
Iβve jumped back into things now and will try and do at least 200 reviews a day to get through the back log before I move onto the mound of lessons I need to clear before I can start levelling again. Taking these breaks has made my Wanikani Timemachine grap look a little skewed. It was a train before, now itβs a train chasing a smaller train, coming out of a mountain tunnel.
2023 Archived Present
While lockdown was the major motivator in my life in late 2020 and early 2021 a major upheaval happened in my life which caused me to completely lose track of my language learning as well as a great many other things. As of today, 1st Jan 2022, Iβve reset back to level 1 and intend to start fresh as I enter my third year on WaniKani.
I wonβt deny that part of the reason Iβm resetting and picking back up again is that itβs becoming really hard to properly feature test and debug Smouldering Durtles without review session happening regularly, but Iβm also feeling in a better place with myself than I have been over the past few year, and at a good point to start studying again.
The Future (or My Study Plan)
Archived 2020 Goals
So my plans for the near future are as follows and Iβll try and comment below to keep my progress updated and accountable. If for no other reason my own fear of failure being a motivator; if Iβve said Iβll do something, itβs easier to be motivated to do it. One of the reasons a monthly fee is sometimes better than a lifetime sub; it feels like youβre paying, so youβd better keep up, hehe.
- Reviews at Zero -Iβll try and end each day with my review count at zero, no matter how many I have to get through at the moment. I know if they pile up too high again, Iβll feel that same failure to resolve guilt and so Iβm determined to work at this. - I mainly managed to do this
- Clear Those Lessonns -
Iβm going to try to do at least a dozen a day so that I can clear all remaining lessons by the end of June.Done ^-^ - Get That Grammar - Iβve got a lifetime LingoDeer sub that I always forget to practice with (see above point about monthly fees as a motivator) and so Iβm going to aim to complete one topic a day, and complete at least one 5 Minute Review a day. -
I didnβt really manage to do this consistently - Take Notes - Iβve got a BunPro subscription and Iβve got a dotted journal, Muji pens, and Mildliners. I sure do love stationary. So Iβm going to try and get into the habbit of working through BunPro lessons and reviews when I can and making notes about each grammar point. LingoDeer helps to reinforce these through their grammar notes too, but itβs proven that you recall more clearly what you write with your own hand, so Iβm going to try to do that as much as possible. -
Likewise, I didnβt really manage to do this particularly consistently - I was writing things down for a while, but in the end I didnβt fine it very helpful.
I made some plans in 2020 and half of them workedβ¦ half of them didnβt. That in mind and with a greater idea of how WaniKani fits into my life, these are my 2021 2022 2024 study plans. Theyβre the same as last year and Iβm keeping them because theyβre modest and because itβs good to set achievable goals, hehe.
- Reviews at Zero - I consider this pretty crucial to my succeeding and staying motivated. When I was maintaining a 0/0 streak every level, I felt much better about my progress in general. Iβm going to try to get back onto this streak in order to keep up that feeling.
- Consume More - Iβm enjoying watching anime in Japanese and Iβm going to continue to do this. Iβd like to also try and watch more regular Japanese TV.
- Learn Japanese Prefectures - Thereβs a great prefectures map deck on Kitsun that I am determined to complete I consider this my white whale, since Iβm terrible with maps in general!
If youβve read all that then most sincerely thank you!!
): I have not been writing as much as I am typing now so, they are hidden away in my Lihit case for another day. Maybe when I pick up the strokes, I will use those again for kanji. (Side note: For cursive writers, it is interesting to see how oneβs script changes throughout the years. Wonder if learning Japanese will affect it? )
(
.) So, the self-study route it is, just like with WKβ¦
- pity the neighborsβ earsβ¦) and be more intentional.
