Weekly Update #2
WaniKani
WkStats has been incredibly useful for tracking my progress. While my accuracy isn’t perfect, I think it’s good enough. I’m also about to reach Level 14, and my vocabulary backlog is still manageable. I already knew some of the kanji through exposure, like the super common 僕 and 俺, which made things a bit easier.
Migaku
I’ve been consistent with my daily reviews and managed to learn 300 new words this week! That brings my total to 3,600 known words. I’ve also noticed that watching Netflix in Japanese has become significantly easier, with my comprehension score improving a lot.This week, I started adding Migaku flashcards for words I encounter in manga. Migaku makes it so much simpler, just input a single word, and it auto-generates audio, example sentences, and explanations. This saves so much time, especially since I’d normally be too lazy to add these details manually.
Grammar
I didn't study a lot of grammar this week since I haven't started Quartet 1 yet, but I continued the Migaku japanese course and I've also begun using Bunpro for N3 grammar, although the Bunpro explanations are somewhat confusing at times.Immersion
Finally, this is going to be the most interesting part. I’ve heavily focused on immersion this week, I’ve only red 30 pages of カードキャプターさくら, but I’ve watched 3 episodes of Alice in Borderland and two episodes of Demon Slayer in Japanese and sentenced mined subtitles. Exposure has really improved my overall understanding, a couple weeks ago I had trouble understanding sentences in ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん, but now I can flawlessly read and understand way faster in カードキャプターさくら for example. I’m still having trouble understanding casual nuances like だっけ,もの to express some kind of emotion and なんか… What I really like about Alice in Borderland is that it isn’t an anime and that it therefore mostly uses more real life japanese and doesn’t have too many weird casual speech contractions. I’ve not bought a Nintendo console yet, but I’ve tried to play Nine Sols in Japanese and I feel like I can understand a bit of whats being said, but I’m still not quite there yet. For now I’ll keep immersing through netflix and manga, I’ve also ordered 3 new manga volumes, even though Chainsaw Man hasn’t even arrived yet.鬼滅の刃 1 , 鬼滅の刃 2 and 約束のネバーランド 1. As you might guess, I’m a big Demon Slayer fan! I’ve also joined the ダンジョン飯 - Delicious in Dungeon Anime Club but haven’t started the series yet as I’ve been pretty occupied with other immersion stuff.
Japanese Phonetics
Out of curiosity I also started Dogens Japanese Phonetics Course as I also wanted to practice my pronunciation overall and also be able to recognize pitch patterns since I could theoretically passively pick them up with a lot of immersion in anime for example, but you have to train your ears first to really hear them all. I’ve also practiced a bit of shadowing and used Bunpros and Migakus audio sentences as a reference for example. I think my base proncunciation is pretty good since german and japanese have a lot of sounds in common, the あ for example sounds just like the german “a” and the う sound often sounds like the german “Ü”, but the られりろる sounds sometimes just randomly change into an “L” kind of sound and I’ve still not figured out that one. And Dogens course really goes in Depth about everything regarding pronunciation and phonetics. I usually watch the video last video lesson that I’ve already seen the day before and then watch the next one, just to be sure to not forget or miss any important stuff, especially at the beginning of the course.
As for this week I’ll probably still keep immersing a lot and expanding my vocabulary again because I’m really not in the mood for grammar studies this month.
May the sacred Crabigator 
protect you all!