1 Year into Learning Japanese

Well... 11 months, But it makes for a better title.

According to my Anki heatmap, I picked up learning Japanese again on October 28th, 2024. To be honest, even though I made it a goal to keep studying this year I didn't expect to keep up with it this long.

Though if you're coming for an update featuring massive progress... this isn't the one for it. I'm taking a more casual, "hobbyist" approach where I keep up with things like daily Anki reviews and light reading, and save the intensive study for when I'm the most motivated vs constantly forcing myself. So for this update, I think I'll focus less on technical progress (although I will touch upon that) and instead talk about my experience and interesting things I've run into along the way.

If you're new here, or need a recap, I recommend reading my 3 month update from earlier this year before this one: (3 months in on Japanese)

Ongoing Struggles

2025 has been a very difficult year for me, following up from an already rough 2024. Many of my hobbies, interests, and goals were negatively affected in one way or another, learning Japanese is no different.

For a run-down:

• Pre-existing struggle with focus & motivation - Even with stuff I'm passionate about. I'm unsure if I want to seek psychiatric help for this. It's a major problem, but I'm not comfortable seeking a diagnosis at this time.
• Anxiety & Depressive slumps - I physically can't focus if I'm anxious, nor motivate myself in extreme slumps. Resulting in days where I only do a minute's worth of reviews before it's too much for me.
• Tariffs / Less media to pull from - Yes, I know about 'alternative' means. But thanks to a certain racist orange in power, importing things is either prohibitively expensive, or impossible as many businesses stopped shipping to the US. I was hoping to buy a few manga, some more games, and maybe support a few doujin/indie creators, but I guess that's not in the cards anymore.
• Distrust in Platforms - Both learning specific and in general. Duolingo's the most notorious, but other learning sites such as iTalki have also jumped the bandwagon of prioritizing AI chatbots over human teachers & education. With social media being unstable, I'm also uninterested in taking the advice of making a "social media purely for learning Japanese" if I can't trust any of the sites I use.
• Rise of Fascism - Feeds into the anxiety & depressive slumps. I've had many restless nights fearing for my own future, safety, privacy, and ability to stay in touch with people. Especially as a queer person of color in the US.
• Questioning why I'm doing this - It's a hobby, but I don't have a practical use outside of other hobbies, and traveling is more of a distant goal. Moving has crossed my mind a few times (a glance at the US can tell you way), but ultimately it's not something I'd want to pursue. Right now I'm leaning on "it's a hobby that lets me enjoy rhythm games more", but sometimes I feel it's not enough. Arcade rhythm games have been a long-term fixation, and is the reason I picked up learning Japanese in the first place. But if something happens to kill that fixation, my interest in learning Japanese might go with it...

These are the main things I've been dealing with. I somehow managed to maintain a 219 day Anki streak through all this. But I've had to embrace inconsistency & the fact I'm making very slow progress in order to keep it up.

I think the best way to describe how most days go is "practicing in maintenance mode". There are days where I'll be able to sit down and do several hours of note taking & study, but a lot of days end up being only 10-30 minutes of Anki just to not fall out of the habit. On one hand, it's not efficient and I should be doing more grammar studies and intentional practice if I want to use the words I've been reviewing. But I feel like forcing myself, especially during high-anxiety days would result in me not being able to retain anything. So for the most part I've been saving more intensive study for the days I'm the most motivated & calm while doing what I can on days I'm not feeling well.

I do hope one day, whether it's I'm able to get help (psychiatric or study-wise), or the decade miraculously improves (I have my doubts at this rate), I can have more strong days & be able to be more consistent. But I think if I want to continue learning I have to take the slower, less efficient approach. For me, I feel like being able to maintain something, even if it's in a less consistent way, is good. It's something I can work on.

Anki, Study, Attempting Output

Right now, I'm nearing the end of the Kaishi 1.5 deck & have been trying to add new words to my mining deck. I managed to maintain a 219 day streak, which was only broken because I slept in that day. Though to be fair, it's because that day I came home from a lengthy train trip that I didn't sleep well on.

Still stings though... I could've at least broken it at a satisfying number like 220...

Stats for Kaishi 1.5k. Nearing the end of new cards, need to get on sentence mining soon

For now, I think I'll switch to sentence mining for new vocabulary. But I am open to picking up another deck if sentence mining stays too inconsistent.

Though, the amount of leeches has been growing. I think this is because of my inconsistency in both study & immersion & not being able to retain it as much. Right now I haven't been suspending them, but I think I might start trying.

Kanji retention has fallen off, but that's because I ended up adding furigana on the front of my cards. I expected it to drop off, but the reason I ended up doing it anyways is because the amount of failed cards due to kanji not sticking ended up being a major demotivator, especially in depressive slumps. I think I'll remove them once I run out of new cards for Kaishi 1.5k, since then I'll at least be familiar with the vocab. But it's definately become a problem with reading that I need to address eventually.

Outside of Anki, I've been slowly starting to try output in the form of writing. Right now it's very short & basic sentences about what's on my mind the day I wrote them, and a small bio I've been updating overtime. I'm not sure what to do with them elsewise? I guess I can make a new Labs page on my site so I have somewhere to point to if I want feedback. I think I'm still too shy for a language exchange/study group or tutors, but it's not 100% off the table. But I'm nowhere near comfortable speaking for now.

I've been trying to brush up on grammar for this as well, but I feel like my retention is inconsistent? I'm making sure to take notes in hopes it'll stick longer, or at least have them in my obsidian vault in case I need a recap. Right now I strongly prefer digital note taking, I tried a physical notebook, but I like the flexibility of digital notes more.

Right now, I haven't been tracking my study time outside of the Anki heatmap. I haven't found a tracking system that works for me. It usually ends up being an extra step that ends up getting abandoned. I think I should try, but I'm worried about falling into "productivity as procrastination" only for whatever I try to be another method I abandon in a week.

Watches, Plays, and Reads

Aka, "What have I been immersing with?"

Watches - I still don't know how to go about this

Can I confess something? I still watch anime & shows with English subs...

I've tried going unsubbed, even for media I've watched before. But I feel like the way I like to watch movies & shows clashes too much with immersion-based learning.

In the immersion learning community, there's a concept called "tolerating ambiguity", which is more like "understanding and accepting that you won't understand everything in your target language". I feel for media where I'm able to go at my own pace, like reading and games this is fine. But for movies & shows, it's either I throw it on in the background as noise, or I give it my total attention. Sometimes, background noise can work since if I'm working on something else I'm not reading the subs anyways & instead use them to 're-orient' myself whenever I glance at the screen. But it does mean my attention is divided.

Total attention, is the harder one. I prefer to give it when it's something I've wanted to watch for a long time, is visually stunning, or is more 'cerebral' / on the artsy side. It's why I don't use anime for immersion, as I feel like too many of the shows I want to watch meet one or multiple of those. Only having 20% of the context via language will make it harder for me to fully enjoy it. One of my favorite recent watches was "Look Back". It's a story that resonated with me in some aspects, and I feel if I just treated it as immersion fodder it wouldn't have hit nearly as much as it did for me.

Still, I don't want to throw out listening comprehension. So I'm on the search for new media to watch. I've been thinking about looking for Japanese Youtubers to keep up with. I found a few more I liked while looking for sewing tutorials, though I'll talk about them in a later section. Though with Youtube's recent changes, I'm currently not comfortable using the site & have been watching videos via front-ends. It's made finding new creators to watch clunky in general, but I think this can be resolved by seeking recommendations offsite or (trying) to search on my own.

I've also been considering live-action TV more. Losermanwins, a rhythm game youtuber I follow recently posted a Japanese language learning update of his own & recommended live action shows as good immersion media (His update video). I've been watching Terrace House on Netflix since I heard it recommended in the language learning community a lot. Initially, I wasn't sure if I was going to like it since I don't watch reality TV that much anymore. But it's honestly a really chill show (especially in comparison to US reality TV. It's night and day). The premise is following 6 people sharing a house together. There's no script, and the show keeps up with their lives and the relationships that form. I feel like a large part of what made me like it is a nostalgia factor? It reminds me of how it was living in a dorm in college, an experience I've been missing a lot these days.

I have access to streaming services via family, but the main downside is I can't take full advantage of sentence mining from them thanks to DRM (aka, no screenshots or recorded audio for cards). Maybe I'll find a different way (ex: mining a word & finding a different example sentence), but it's irritating I can't jump right in with the services my family's been throwing money at for years.

Plays - Tomodachi Collection Brainrot

In my last update, I noted I wanted to leverage Animal Crossing for reading practice... well... that didn't end up working after a while.

I did switch over to New Horizons, but I think the problem was I don't like New Horizons as much as the older games & got bored. I also ended up kicking one of my favorite villagers by accident because I misread a prompt (RIP Carmen).

The game that did end up holding my attention however, was Tomodachi Collection; New Life. aka - Tomodachi Life. I had a massive fixation on the game earlier this year to the point I figured "Hey, since I'm already obsessed with this, why not try the Japanese version?" There were a few quirks, mainly because I was playing on out-of-region hardware (you can play out of region games on a modded system). But this was genuinely one of the best things I did for learning Japanese.

Think; with ACNH, after a while I was playing out of obligation to 'immerse' and got too bored to play it outside of that. Meanwhile with Tomodachi Collection, I was playing just for the sake of keeping up with my Miis. I was running both my JP and EN saves at the same time (which... says a lot about how much I hyper-fixated on this). I think a large part of it is the fact you get to create & take care of your Miis, so it's like you get to learn with all your blorbos & some outliers like Hamburger Mii. If you're curious on who ended up on my island, a lot of OCs and Roots 26 characters. Same with my EN save.

Here's a few highlights from my island:

This is fine

All hail the mikan

Anyone want an Ereki T-shirt?

The burger children haunt me

And everyone together

I used some of the same Miis in both games, but I ended up stopping this since it got confusing to keep up 'islander lore' for some of them. It was interesting seeing a lot of the regional differences in foods, items, and events.

Though I don't like the romance mechanics in this version. The JP version is infamous for letting child & adult miis date (though you have to use the age-o-matic to let them marry), as well as letting miis have feelings for already married ones. I have to shut down 3x the amount of unwanted pairings & it gets really annoying after a while.

The other heads up I'll give is the mini-games can be difficult if you don't know the vocab for them. Especially names of food & treasures. I've failed many of them early on because I didn't know the word for something until one of my islanders threw it at me in a quiz minigame.

I'm very excited for Living the Dream by the way. I imagine it'll have multi-language support, so I hope this ends up being a great game for learners as well. I'm curious if you'll be able to switch your system languages & still use the same save like you can in ACNH.

Reads - Could be great...

Reading's my favorite for sentence mining. I think it's because compared to other mediums like videos & gaming it's much easier to slow down, as well as less intrusive to my enjoyment. But it's also a type of media I have trouble motivating myself with? In general. I'm very awful with overdue library books due to checking them out to finish at home... and never doing it... and having to return it in shame because I kept forgetting to read it. There's also the aforementioned issues with regognizing words, leading to a lot more look-ups than I'd like to admit.

As for what I've been reading, I've read a few IIDX fan comics on Pixiv, I've been slowly chipping away at Chobits (since i watched the anime earlier this year), and I read Look Back (which made me cry... again). Though like I mentioned earlier, my ability to get reading material is hampered indefinitely. So I think I might want to consider webmanga, or figure out a sentence mining / active immersion approach for video-based media.

Chobits caught my attention for two things; I had a Chi wallscroll as a kid (and now I know why I never got to watch the show then 😂), and of course, robots & a ton of computer motifs. It's interesting seeing how things played out differently between the anime & manga

The latter was especially true for Look Back. Also read due to watching the anime beforehand. And it's fun and interesting, especially as someone who was pursuing comics at one point to see how differently you'd show the weight of an event in illustrated form vs animation.

I'm not counting social media posts for this, as those are more so quick reads & I'd rather not feature those in cards I make (that's like, people's personal posts...)

I'm not sure how to introduce the next two sections. They're related to learning Japanese, but also not? I'm planning on articles for both separate from language learning, but I feel they're relevant enough to bring up here too.

The Linux Gauntlet

For some context, I've been making the switch to Linux and have been using my old laptop to test things before putting an OS on my main laptop. And one of the first things I tested was my language learning tools.

I think "the Linux gauntlet" is the best way to describe this. This was honestly a nightmare.

Technically in modern Linux, you don't have to use the terminal if you don't want to. But nearly everything I wanted to try involved using the terminal. It's how I installed Anki based on their onsite guide. For the most part this one was painless.

Next was getting text and typing to work properly. On windows this was as simple as 'install the Japanese language pack'. I'm not sure about other desktop environments, but just adding a second language in KDE plasma didn't do anything but make my display text a mix of English and Japanese. So I ended up having to add the locale via the terminal, and I used Fctix5 as my keyboard with Mozc.

The worst one to setup was Manga OCR, a python-based OCR tool optimized for Manga. I think part of it is because it's not well documented, but there were more steps to get it running on Linux. I took notes on all the steps I've taken and have been thinking about writing a tutorial just because figuring this out on my own was that unpleasant.

edit 10/15/25: guide has been written (Manga OCR - Linux Setup and Thoughts)

And while this one isn't a complaint, most of the guides I've found for learning Japanese on Linux were centered around Arch. It's useful that it's out there, but it left me feeling lost at times on Kubuntu & I don't think it's worth switching distros for a tertiary use case of mine. Maybe I'll try on a secondary computer.

Nuigurumi

This started because I saw a few people on the JP side of the IIDX community make dolls of their favorite characters, and I thought it'd be fun to try making one of Nix. Right now I've made a 10cm one as a bag charm, though I'm also planning on making a larger one as more of a regular doll. Just waiting on the materials as of posting.

I love him so much guys I haven't been able to get over the fact I made him since I first finished the base doll

Many of the nui-specific guides I found were not in english, so it ended up 'semi-active immersion' while trying to learn more about doll making. In terms of my language abilities, I'm not familiar with a lot of sewing terminology & end up getting lost without visual guidence. The differences between material names in Japanese & English speaking communities took a while to get a grasp on too. Though to be fair I'm looking at them as sewing tutorials rather than purely immersion material. Two channels I ended up enjoying are Piyopico, and Tacute. Piyopico does have english subtitles on most of her videos, and I found her guides to be very helpful in when starting out, especially when it comes to learning embroidery teqniques. Tacute's channel and website are entirely in Japanese, but I found his sewing tutorials to be very detailed & visually clear that I'd still recommend them if you're not a speaker or learner. I based my current projects off his 10cm & 15cm patterns.

Outside of tutorials, I've been working on sewing while doing passive immersion, as a way to keep my hands busy. I think somehow my brain has tied crafting to immersion to the point Japanese language content ended up being the default for working on them. Maybe I should ride off that & take on more sewing projects, or see if there's other crafts I can pick up that also have tutorials available in Japanese.

What's Next?

Right now:

• Wrap up Kaishi 1.5k
• Sentence mine more
• Continue pushing for output practice
• Try the best I can

It's difficult. I'm trying to learn a notoriously difficult language for English speakers to learn during one of the roughest years in my life (and a very rough year for the world as well). I've considered dropping out a few times, but I think I want to keep learning to give myself some form of routine. I'll see how I feel at the end of the year. I guess at the end of the day, it's better that I tried at all.

I'm not sure how many update posts I'll be doing going forward. I think like this, they'll focus more on the journey & things I find interesting than technical progress.