What's been your greatest achievement in your Japanese studies this year?

This year has been the biggest for me in terms of Japanese skills:

  • Lived in Japan for half a year as an exchange student and used Japanese in real conversations
  • Stuck with WK for a year everyday
  • Doing N2 on bunpro but that’s on a hold for now. Not really looking to study grammar formally anymore.
  • Listening Japanese podcasts everyday (this is one of the most important things I could have done)

But probably the best actualized things are:

  • Being able to hold a conversation and understanding mostly everything in everyday talk
  • Started reading my first book (コンビニ人間)

I feel like I got over some imaginary wall and now learning feels a lot easier as I start to utilize more and more native content. Super excited to improve.

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Omg the listening section totally killed my confidence :persevere: I really need to work on that!

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It was N4 and I thought the test was more like a race against time than anything else. Had to rush through a few questions because time was running out in the first section. I thought I did pretty well with kanji, grammar and reading. Can’t say the same with listening though :expressionless:

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I started watching the new Pokemon series without subtitles this year on a whim, and actually being able to follow a good percentage of the content without having to rely on visual cues has been such a breakthrough moment for me in terms of confidence, as listening has always been my weakness. Hopefully I can build on this massively in 2020.

Otherwise, similarly to some of the other people in this thread, actually getting back into studying and creating a consistent habit. I’ve never formally studied before and just picked things up as I’ve gone along, so I’m missing a lot of really basic things in my knowledge, but can sometimes understand things that are above my average level. So, I’ve taken things back to basics and I’m working from the ground up, even if it means covering things I’m already familiar with, with the intent of reinforcing what I know as I introduce the unfamiliar stuff. So far, so good. :raised_hands:t2:

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turning the vague desire to learn Japanese, to an actual study routine, and finding out it’s not as overwhelmingly difficult as I thought(still difficult, but manageable).

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checks time
no, not midnight yet…

Ask me again in 8 hours

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Just the fact that I actually started to learn at all haha :sweat_smile: I’ve always said that I wanted to learn Japanese, but I never thought I would be able to stick with it… I’m honestly really surprised how far I’ve come. Because I knew absolutely nothing 6 months ago

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I am also reading the first Harry Potter book in Japanese right now!! I got the book about three years ago and have started, painstakingly gotten a few chapters in, lost interest due to the level of difficulty, and restarted a few months later several times. That being said, I again started reading from the beginning about a week ago, but for the first time I feel like I am finally capable and making steady progress! It’s cool to see how much my Japanese has progressed and recognize that I think I will have the ability and endurance to finally finish it this time.

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That’s far more books than the average American reads in English yearly. (About 9, according to Bustle.) I’d say that’s an impressive number.

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Getting my great-nephew interested in Japanese and teaching him what I know. He also loves watching TV Japan and listening for words he knows. He’s back with his mom now, though, so I doubt he is able to continue, but at least he has the interest. Maybe he will pick it up later in school.

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For me, finally getting myself to take the JLPT N3 in July after a long break from JLPT stuff. I failed but it helped me get back into it and realise I need to get over my grammar fear (hello bunpro!).
Other things: Joining Wanikani and realising my listening skills have actually improved after watching an old anime dvd I haven’t seen for a few years. :slight_smile:

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The hardest part of reading Harry Potter for me it is the names, honestly. Katakana seems like it would be the easiest part of Japanese but it throws me off so often.

Having the book on my Kindle with Japanese and J-E dictionaries and being able to touch-screen search things on Wikipedia really gave me more confidence, and helped to me get into the habit of reading consistently.

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I’d say that my greatest achievement this year has been getting through portions of media that I’ve been wanting to read. (この恋はこれ以上綺麗にならない and コルヌ・コピアめぐる春色〜不思議の住む街〜) It was kinda difficult having lacked most of the needed vocabulary, but I’ve gotten a lot better at using search-by-radical.

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Picking up Japanese again 6 months ago and having quite a streak (only missed out two days of study).

More concrete milestones: reading some small short stories, reaching wk level 20, finishing genki 1 grammar points.

I wanted to achieve more, but some days just doing your reviews is hard by itself.

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This is the path that I hope to take, going to be adding kitsun and bunpro next month. Could you tell me a bit about how you feel your reading comprehension is at your stage? :slight_smile:

Thanks

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I passed JLPT N1 in July and Kanken level 2 in December.

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After a nearly year long hiatus, I started doing reviews again in December, and even managed to (almost) finish my first two Japanese books - all thanks to the wonderful Absolute Beginner Bookclub.

Also, I set up my first bookclubbing thread for another book I’ve been meaning to read since last year :blush:

I’m feeling optimistic about reading more beginner books and steadily (if not speedily :stuck_out_tongue:) chipping away at WK reviews in 2020!

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Yeah, for me, the toughest part is the onomatopoeia! This book uses a ton of gitaigo and giongo, especially when characters are laughing/whining/yelling/sitting down/etc., and it’s hard for me to pick up the nuance without looking the word up as there are not really a ton of clues linguistically that are intuitive to me as a non-native speaker (vs. with unknown kanji words, which I can often guess the meaning of if I have knowledge of the characters).

In that same vein, one hump to get over when reading a physical copy as I am is that sometimes I will just find a long string of hiragana characters I can’t get through and not even know how to parse it to figure out what I need to look up in the dictionary :joy:

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In no particular order:
-WaniKani Level 60
-JLPT N2
-Getting full points on my first KanKen (even if it was only level 9)
-Reading 3 native Japanese books
-Finishing Pokemon Shield in Japanese
-Watching several shows/movies in Japanese and getting the general gist

and most importantly, but least measurable:
-I’ve felt a drastic difference in comfort during Japanese conversations, and have been getting genuine praise beyond 「日本語上手‼︎」in recent weeks especially as the year wound down. Specifically, one of the Vice Principals asked how I was studying Japanese and as I explained WaniKani and BunPro she said 「あっ、そっか。でも発音は?」Ah, okay. But what about pronunciation? which was huge to me that she was so certain by how well I spoke that I must be also studying pronunciation somewhere.

Still a long way to go, so here’s to 二◯二◯!

Edit: words

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For me: Just getting back into it after taking a break for a couple years. Finding Japanese Level Up has helped me a lot, too.

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