Try the Absolute Beginners Book club on here. It’s called Absolute Beginners, but it’s more like Beginners. They’re currently reading Doraemon, but will be starting a new one soon. You can look at the past manga they’ve covered. It has notes on grammar and vocabulary. I’m a beginner, too. A few sites that are useful and free for reading practice are Tadoku.org , Watanoc.com , and NHK News Web Easy. Good luck with all of your studies 
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It’s from the grammar learning site BunPro c:
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I’m learning Japanese for fun, so there are no pressured timelines for me. What I would like to finish:
-reach Wanikani level 30
-finish the first five book in the みんなの日本語 Level One series (I’m currently at chapter 7 of 25).
-read along with the Absolute Beginners Book Club (Possibly Beginners).
-continue learning to write kanji
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Thank you!!! Good luck on your studies as well
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Thanks!!!
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I managed to get two grammar lessons done in January. That was one of my goals, to do at least two lessons in grammar a month. Now on to February!
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My only goal that I posted in this thread was to listen to something every day, and so far this January I have listened to something 25/31 days, which I feel good about.
However I lied, that wasn’t actually my only goal. I also made a goal to start a daily reading habit, and so far in January I read 16/31 days. That’s not too bad, but I’m going to aim for 21/28 days in February.
In the background I am also trying to learn a bit of Spanish, but I’ve been much less consistent with that, I only listened 12/31 days in January. I always feel so guilty spending time on Spanish, like I’m afraid if I let myself fall into learning it I’ll drop everything else. I don’t know if anyone else here is studying multiple languages, but if you are, I’m curious: do you find that you can spend time with both/all of them?
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I do study multiple languages. I have a few tricks to make this work.
First, I’m very selective about how many languages I try to juggle at one time. At the moment it’s just three: one aiming for progress, and two aiming for maintenance.
Second, when I’m going to learn multiple languages at the same time, I try to choose languages that are not closely related to each other. This helps to prevent interference between them.
Finally – my most successful trick – I try to translate my goals for each language into tiny sustainable mini-habits that require no decisions or will power to complete.
So, for example, to maintain Finnish, I slap on my headphones and listen to Selkouutiset (Finnish Easy News) while I eat breakfast. I don’t have to think about it; it just happens every morning.
I have a small pad to practice writing kanji placed strategically on a side table in a location that I often pass by. A few times a day I’ll stop and test myself on a few kanji from past levels of WaniKani. (I don’t have any need to write kanji, but I find it boosts my retention.)
I have a lot of these mini-habits, for various purposes (not just languages), and I find they help me avoid the sense of overwhelm and guilt I used to feel when I set overly ambitious goals for myself, which inevitably led to disappointment.
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Someone liked my January update, which reminded me that maybe I want to update every month.
I regret to say that February went much worse. I only listened 11/28 days, and I read 8/28 days (and if anyone cares, I did basically no Spanish).
Stuff got really stressful at work, and I also had a pretty bad italki lesson (the way the tutor treated me made me really angry), so I sort of gave up during the last half of the month. But today I opened a favorite podcast, and it felt like catching up with a friend, so I’m hoping that March will be better.
Writing this has made me reflect a little on language learning as an autistic person, so I’ll indulge in a bit of thought here (granted all of this may be true for neurotypical people, I just notice how this stuff interacts with my autism…)
I actually love talking to people in general, but I find that it’s a bit of a love-hate relationship. People are interesting and I love to learn about how other people live, but on the other hand I can’t stand being misunderstood, especially when I feel someone is stereotyping me, which happens a lot when you’re speaking to strangers and also are not good at the various nuances of the words you’re using. I’ve had italki tutors who I get along great with, and those who just seem to dislike me from the beginning, and this stuff always reminds me of my childhood, when people would simply hate me and I didn’t know why. I still have this problem actually, it would be a mistake to say it ended in childhood. Thinking back on my bad italki experience, I wonder if it triggered some sort of deep trauma response from having to deal with all this in my regular life. I’m not sure, all I know is that looking back at my study journal, this bad italki lesson was basically a cliff’s edge: after that I stopped studying for the rest of the month. The same thing happens to me in my native language as well; a bad conversation can stress me out to unreasonable levels for days or even weeks afterward.
I wonder what I can do to be more resilient to this type of thing? When the conversation is good it’s so motivating, but when it isn’t, it’s so hard to shrug it off, and it hits like a ton of bricks. Are there any other autistic language learners around here (I think there are…) and if so, do you have the same problem? Have you found a way to deal with it?
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My brain’s poison of choice is bipolar disorder rather than autism and it wasn’t noticeable enough to diagnose until adulthood but I relate to this a lot. Talking past someone or being spoken down to sucks because even when it can be corrected later in a conversation, it’s already happened. The feeling that I’m being misunderstood is frustrating and usually feels like it’s my fault and if I’m not careful about how I relax after something like an angry conversation I’ll just stew on the stress and anger until the cows come home. I usually try to plan out what I’m saying even in person but especially when writing. Trying to work around that and avoid misunderstanding through writing has (in my opinion) made me better at writing persuasively. Though my English teachers would probably like to take credit for that themselves.
One thing that I think helps me to get over it and let go sometimes is the thing that gets called mindfulness. Being present in the current moment and making yourself aware of your presence and breathing. Things like that calm the adrenaline fueled part of the brain’s response. I can never remember without looking whether it’s the sympathetic or parasympathetic response but look into behaviors that trigger the calming response out of those two and see if that helps to focus your mind on something that isn’t as stressful. Emotional deregulation gets bad when you let it boil over so find ways to mentally turn down the heat. Try not to beat yourself up over it when something does go wrong.
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Today achieved one of my 2025 goals - finished a whole manga series (よつばと - all 16 volumes)!
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omg congratulations! that is huge!!! 
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Yeah, I’m really pleased! One of the next goals I want to work towards is to read my first LN - debating whether I should start one for the Readathon
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I got another grammar lesson done today. I’m glad because I’m behind on my grammar!
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Great job!
I didn’t post here, just in my study log, but I might as well update too since it was one of my year goals – a little while back, I took one of those full N1 practice tests that’s just an old test, and I passed it pretty comfortably! Had like ~17 minutes left on the reading section when I finished it so I’m good on time too. Maybe I’ll take the real thing sometime, but it’s nice as a little progress benchmark to point to.
I had to just assume equal weight to all questions, which isn’t how it works but you can’t do it the “real” way. But under that assumption my score was:
Language knowledge: 45
Reading: 50
Listening: 45
Total: 140
Most of my other goals are kinda vague and vibes based unless I ever actually get around to comfort with output. I can talk about how it goes when I start Muramasa anyway, but I know other projects I’m doing are pushing that off for a bit. Next year I gotta make more proper goals cause clearing one was fun, haha.
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I got my two grammar lessons in this month.
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I started reading my first book together with the bookclub and I will even Finish it this year.
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Late to join, but here are my goals for 2025
- reach WK level 19
- repeat Bunpro N4 course
- finish Bunpro N3 course (resetted)
- read at least 1 page of a japanese book per day
- write a message in the teachers communication book without husbands help
- go through the N4 & N5 vocab books by Soumatome
- work through the “japanese smalltalk” book and start more conversations from my side
I want to reach the same Kanji proficiency as our soon to be 3rd grader, so I can help him with homework and find mistakes more easily.
Until now, my focus was more on listening and speaking - but since we moved to Japan, my lacking reading skills make life more complicated than it could be.
I also lack confidence when talking to people I don´t know well yet. Overthinking every sentence and am hardly able to write a line message without tripple checking with translate.. so.. that has to change. I have 2 years until Mini will enter Kindergarten and as a long term goal I want to be able to be part of the PTA Team!
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First of April, and things were better last month. I still did way less than January, but I read 6 days and listened 13 days. I also tentatively got back on italki, and I had a really great conversation this morning. I really like this teacher, so hopefully things will continue to go well with that.
Work has been really intense and it feels difficult to do things when I want to spend any free time zonking out, but I hope I can do more in April. Through the ups and downs we keep on keeping on, long term goals require persistence, etc.
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I did three grammar lessons in March!`
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