Hi all! This is my ~~ first time making a topic, ~~ please be gentle
I’ve been thinking a lot about building good Japanese-learning habits that I’ll actually keep, and I’m curious how the rest of you have managed to integrate the different parts of language learning into your routine. Probably like many of you, there’s the study plan I aim to follow, and then there’s what I actually manage to do (shoutout to my neglected Genki I book).
So I’m making a thread to share our current routines and hopefully get some inspiration from each other about how to work learning Japanese into your life with everything else. (Also, there’s a lot of talk here about how WK shouldn’t be the only thing you do, so hopefully it’s helpful to see a kind of full rundown of one person’s version of ~~all the things~~)
Here’s my work-in-progress routine so far. Also including my particular goals, since I try to gear what I’m doing toward those.
My interests: Japanese pro wrestling (Noah, NJPW and a little AJPW), Japanese food, fashion/design, 1960s Japanese cinema (Ozu, Kurosawa, Shindo, Kobayashi), politics & current events
My goals: Most of all I want to be able to read and consume Japanese media (i.e. interviews with pro wrestlers and wrestling magazines, but also reading general news would be cool). Also want to be able to get to a place with listening comprehension where I can understand wrestling commentary/movies/maybe the news, and to speak some survival Japanese for when I travel there.
The routine:
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I do WaniKani reviews and BunPro reviews most mornings when I wake up. This is the thing I stick to most consistently (though things happen and I skip a day here and there, or I’ll be overwhelmed with WK reviews and not get to BunPro).
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If my BunPro reviews went well, I learn 2-5 new lessons (depending on how well I felt things went and how hard the lessons are for me to grasp).
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I listen to one Mango languages (free w my local library card) lesson in the shower and try to actually say everything they prompt you to say. This gives me some practice listening and speaking, and they talk about some grammar things here and there, which reinforces the BunPro lessons nicely. I manage to do this nearly every day.
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While I’m commuting I listen to Japanese music on Spotify. I listen to the same songs often enough that I kind of pick out new words each time. (And it’s fun to recognize random WaniKani words, especially ones I didn’t expect I’d use – randomly I’ve come across two songs about summertime that mention かき氷).
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At work between things I’ll try to read an article in Japanese here and there or read some Japanese wrestlers’ tweets, sometimes with the help of the Japanese IO Chrome extension.
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When I’m heating up food/waiting for something to load/otherwise idle at work I’ll use the Genki verb conjugation review app. (I find this app really useful and have probably learned more from it than the Genki textbook itself, which for some reason I find very daunting). I’ll alternate between using this or using the Pastel Kana app to drill myself on Katakana and improve how quickly I read it. A time to do this doesn’t always present itself, but I do either app maybe once or twice a week.
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At home I usually have ambitions of reading a book in Japanese or going through a Genki I chapter, but I tend to end up doing something more fun/passive like watching wrestling with Japanese commentary or some Japanese YouTube videos (PDR with subtitles if I’m not feeling super motivated, his friends who don’t add subtitles if I’m feeling more ambitious/willing to be confused).
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On weekends, if it’s time for me to level up on WK I’ll write out all the new level’s kanji by hand and do what I think of as “DIY SRS” – I make 3 columns in a notebook, and write all that level’s kanji in each column, randomizing the order. I wait 5 minutes, quiz myself on the first column, wait 15, cover the old answers and do the second column, wait 30, do the third. (Being able to write isn’t a huge priority for me, but I feel like writing them helps me solidify them in my mind and tell visually similar kanji apart more easily). I used to do this every weekend, but WK has been kicking my ass lately so I’ve been leveling up closer to twice a month.
– Also on weekends, I’ll usually do at least one of the following:
- Read a little of a book in Japanese. The two I’ve got going now are: “Okada’s Room,” basically a bunch of transcripts of Kazuchika Okada interviewing other wrestlers. It’s generally easy conversational Japanese. I highlight all the words I don’t know but don’t stress too much about coming back to them later; A Doraemon manga where he travels back in time to witness the Meiji restoration. I ordered these both online from Kinokuniya.
- Watch wrestling (Noah or NJPW) and try to pay attention to what the commentators are saying / what the wrestlers say in their backstage comments.
- Watch a movie or TV show in Japanese with English subtitles. I have vague intentions of going back and rewatching something I’ve seen without subtitles, but haven’t gotten myself to do that yet. (Recent favorites: “Erased” on Netflix, “Kuroneko”)
OK, sorry to write a novel! I’m pleased that I’ve found a couple of things I can keep up with some regularity – but my routine changes all the time and I’m hoping I can improve it with some inspiration from yours.
How do you work learning Japanese into your routine? What resources do you end up actually using & how often? What fun things do you read/watch/listen to? Please share with lots of detail and links and I will eagerly read it allll 
UPDATE 12/7/18: I was looking back on this on a whim and thought it might be interesting to add a progress report on how my routine has changed, eight months later. (Especially for people just starting out, you might see someone post their routine and wonder how well it all worked out, or what results they got with it.)
So here's the new version (hidden so the original post doesn't get even longer).
Eight months later I can read wrestling magazines and understand 70-80% without looking things up (and can guess a lot of the words I don’t explicitly know because there aren’t a lot of unfamiliar kanji in the mix any longer) and read whole news articles and understand what’s going on, despite the words I don’t know.
Listening is harder, but it’s definitely not the giant wall of incomprehension it used to be for me. And when I visited Japan last month I was able to make myself understood and communicate with people in a lot of different situations (explaining a mistake with a ticket I bought, signing up for a day pass at the gym and being walked through the lengthy list of rules, chatting with a guy working at a restaurant in the countryside when I was the only person eating dinner there) – so I think I’m ready to set the goalpost beyond survival Japanese.
My new goals for 2019 are to get better at listening to the point where I can follow the conversation in chatty, non-NHK Journal podcasts; get more comfortable reading books, so it feels less like dedicated study and more like reading for pleasure; talk to more people & be able to have conversations where you show your personality instead of just communicating to accomplish a task.
My routine heading into the new year –
Note: There are a lot of items in this list, but I’m not really doing a crazy amount timewise; I just get really bored sticking with one resource for too long, but can keep going if I hop between lots of different things for shorter amounts of time.
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Anki for JLPT/non-WK vocab (now adding N3 words)
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3 BunPro lessons (now starting N3 grammar) + reviews (usually around 20, I have minimal ghost reviews turned on)
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3 lessons in this language shadowing book (review the last 2 I learned + do 1 new one) to practice speaking/listening
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Read for like 20 minutes (usually a short story or magazine article), highlight unfamiliar words just to pin down what it is I don’t know, and look up as many of them as I have the stamina to without overdoing it
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Look up at least one word in J-J dictionary app and read entry closely (I use the スーパー大辞林)
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Study one entry in the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, sometimes taking notes about the nuances and usage in a separate notebook
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Do some WK reviews, but usually not all of them. I’ve settled into trying to keep my review queue hovering between 100-200. I slowed wayyyy down in WK when I hit level 40 because I was preparing for N4 and realized my kanji knowledge was really out of proportion to all my other skills. I’m looking forward to starting to do new lessons again now that the test is over.
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Still put on a Mango languages lesson in the shower and talk to myself in Japanese using the prompts
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Listen to a Japanese podcast in the car on the way to and from work. I was listening to a different one each time, but now I’m going to try listening to the same podcast episode 2-3 times before moving on to the next and see if that’ll help me slowly pick out what’s going on.
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I subscribe to the Weekly Pro Wrestling magazine app on my phone. When I get the notification a new issue is out, I’ll read my favorite wrestlers’ columns real quick first (sometimes furtively at work, which I think unintentionally served as a kind of timed reading exercise that helped when the JLPT came, ha). Bottom line: it’s nice to have a thing you look forward to reading that comes out at regular intervals of time.
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I’ve been a big fan of reading Japanese magazines on the phone generally – a lot of different kinds on different subjects seem to be available on the Fujisan app.
… Anyway, glad to see your post. Great way to make a first post, sharing all these 
. For contrast, I first started ‘learning’ in 2008 before my first trip to Japan, but that consisted of buying a phrasebook and copying a few bits into a notebook that I learnt how to parrot and then dropped. My next visit was 2010, and at that point I bought the Pimsleur CD set to listen to in my car (I was doing a ton of driving then). There was more parroting of isolated phrases and my vocab did improve but it again tailed off after my holiday.
but overall I’m able to follow the story and understand most of the conversations.
Finally trying WK has been the best thing I’ve done in a long time! 
