Please forgive length of this self-serving post.
Everyone’s journey with the language of Japanese is different. Some pick it up fast, others struggle trying to remember the difference between the katakana for “so” and “n”. In response to ta90210’s progress threads, I figured I too would share my own experiences and what I’ve done to learn the language.
It all started in the summer of the year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand-and-Three.
An avid nerd, I was a regular importer of Japanese games, so one thing I always encountered was the Japanese language. I thought that these strange hieroglyphics were impossible to understand, but the katakana titles to the games were pretty doable.
Starting in September of that year, and in my second year of college, I thought I would take advantage of the services available and sign up for Japanese 101. I can remember first cracking open the textbook and reading a sentence (ジョンさんはアメリカ人です or something) and seeing the romaji next to it and thinking “there’s a typo! That’s a “ha” hiragana but it says “wa” here!” How green I was.
For my first two years, I did the introductory classes and it went poorly. It was a bad time in my life and studying was not something I did unless you can count rolling a dooby and watching The Big Lebowski as studying. I got a D at one point in 202 I think, and it just was not clicking. The grammar piled up and I was lost in a dark woods and could not find my way out. At this point I knew probably 500 kanji and N3/N4 grammar, which was enough to read basic manga, but far from being able to tackle a novel.
2006. On a whim, and at the end of my rope both scholastically and mentally, I decided to flee the country and study in Japan. I signed up for a one-year program at a university in Tokyo and my life was changed forever. I remember coming into Narita and seeing a building out of my plane window with big bold kanji on it and thinking “shit just got real.”
Somehow I managed to take the trains from Narita to my dorm in Tokyo. When I finally set my bags down in my room after getting a quick tour of the place by the dorm parents and understanding nothing that they said, I sat on the bed and thought “what did you get yourself into?” I wept, exhausted and alone.
All thoughts of homesickness went away as soon as I explored the vast nerdy wonderland of Tokyo. And once classes started, my Japanese suddenly started to cook. 6 hours a day, all Japanese, then I’d leave the classroom only to find I’m still in Japan. I started to speak more and more, things clicked, my voice changed and kanji appeared in places where there were no kanji before! I was a man.
When I came back to America, I changed my major to Japanese and vowed to return to Japan someday. My study habits also changed. I went through Heisig’s books devouring kanji, I read manga, I did my homework for a change and I began to slowly grow. Very slowly. My speaking started to atrophy, listening was hard again, but the reading was building.
I graduated eventually and found a job teaching English with the rest of the gaijin in 2008. My return back was surreal. Speaking felt like a coma patient having to learn how to walk again. It was as if the year I had spent in Tokyo had evaporated and I was starting all over. Realizing that I didn’t want to teach kids English for the rest of my life, I started to crack down on Japanese.
Around this time, I met my girlfriend of two years now and made the biggest mistake of my Japanese career: I spoke English with her from the start. She was good at it, I’m lazy, thus it seemed like the way to go. I can always speak Japanese with her later…but as the months went on, it got more awkward not speaking it and now it’s to the point where I can’t do it, it’s too embarrassing. Let this be a lesson to everyone: do not be ashamed of your broken Japanese. Just speak it, humility be damned. It’ll get better.
Anyways, I learned about the JLPT and started studying around December of 2008, aiming to pass the 2kyuu in July of 2009. I used anki, plugging in my own vocab manually and I got the Kanzen books. I studied more and more as the test day approached (at one point 3 to 4 hours a day), but practice tests were yielding a nerve-wracking 65% average, just barely passing.
I failed. I think the total was 56%, just under the pass mark. Humbled and heartbroken, I decided to not take it in the following December, but to wait until summer of 2009. And so I studied and studied. Everyday 2 hours of anki, 1 hour of reading, 1 hour of grammar and hopefully some listening thrown in as well. I did every past JLPT from ’91 to ’06, passing all of them, then took them all again. I finished a couple of full-length novels and felt strong.
And so in 2010, in one of our most futuristic-sounding years, I took the N2. Waiting for the results took ten years off my life, but I passed and peace was once again restored.
Now for the N1. I have a steady regimen of an hour of anki, JLPT study books covering grammar, reading and vocab that I spend about an hour a day on, and core6000 for listening. Every two weeks I take one of the past 1kyuu tests to keep me in the test mode and to gauge how the retention is going. So far, I’ve passed both the ’91 and ’92 tests by the old standard of 70% needed to pass. I also read novels without the use of a dictionary and it’s going well. Words I don’t know can be figured out by the context and it’s much more comfortable to read now that I don’t need some denshi jisho nursing me every sentence.
The goal now is N1 in July of 2011. Vocab and kanji are strong, grammar is ok, reading is peaks and valleys, and listening is getting a lot better since using core6000 anki decks. Put those guys on random and train the ear to pick out key vocab without context, it works!
If you read all of that, thanks! If you skimmed to the end and are just reading this sentence, you didn’t miss much.
Everyone’s journey with the language of Japanese is different. Some pick it up fast, others struggle trying to remember the difference between the katakana for “so” and “n”. In response to ta90210’s progress threads, I figured I too would share my own experiences and what I’ve done to learn the language.
It all started in the summer of the year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand-and-Three.
An avid nerd, I was a regular importer of Japanese games, so one thing I always encountered was the Japanese language. I thought that these strange hieroglyphics were impossible to understand, but the katakana titles to the games were pretty doable.
Starting in September of that year, and in my second year of college, I thought I would take advantage of the services available and sign up for Japanese 101. I can remember first cracking open the textbook and reading a sentence (ジョンさんはアメリカ人です or something) and seeing the romaji next to it and thinking “there’s a typo! That’s a “ha” hiragana but it says “wa” here!” How green I was.
For my first two years, I did the introductory classes and it went poorly. It was a bad time in my life and studying was not something I did unless you can count rolling a dooby and watching The Big Lebowski as studying. I got a D at one point in 202 I think, and it just was not clicking. The grammar piled up and I was lost in a dark woods and could not find my way out. At this point I knew probably 500 kanji and N3/N4 grammar, which was enough to read basic manga, but far from being able to tackle a novel.
2006. On a whim, and at the end of my rope both scholastically and mentally, I decided to flee the country and study in Japan. I signed up for a one-year program at a university in Tokyo and my life was changed forever. I remember coming into Narita and seeing a building out of my plane window with big bold kanji on it and thinking “shit just got real.”
Somehow I managed to take the trains from Narita to my dorm in Tokyo. When I finally set my bags down in my room after getting a quick tour of the place by the dorm parents and understanding nothing that they said, I sat on the bed and thought “what did you get yourself into?” I wept, exhausted and alone.
All thoughts of homesickness went away as soon as I explored the vast nerdy wonderland of Tokyo. And once classes started, my Japanese suddenly started to cook. 6 hours a day, all Japanese, then I’d leave the classroom only to find I’m still in Japan. I started to speak more and more, things clicked, my voice changed and kanji appeared in places where there were no kanji before! I was a man.
When I came back to America, I changed my major to Japanese and vowed to return to Japan someday. My study habits also changed. I went through Heisig’s books devouring kanji, I read manga, I did my homework for a change and I began to slowly grow. Very slowly. My speaking started to atrophy, listening was hard again, but the reading was building.
I graduated eventually and found a job teaching English with the rest of the gaijin in 2008. My return back was surreal. Speaking felt like a coma patient having to learn how to walk again. It was as if the year I had spent in Tokyo had evaporated and I was starting all over. Realizing that I didn’t want to teach kids English for the rest of my life, I started to crack down on Japanese.
Around this time, I met my girlfriend of two years now and made the biggest mistake of my Japanese career: I spoke English with her from the start. She was good at it, I’m lazy, thus it seemed like the way to go. I can always speak Japanese with her later…but as the months went on, it got more awkward not speaking it and now it’s to the point where I can’t do it, it’s too embarrassing. Let this be a lesson to everyone: do not be ashamed of your broken Japanese. Just speak it, humility be damned. It’ll get better.
Anyways, I learned about the JLPT and started studying around December of 2008, aiming to pass the 2kyuu in July of 2009. I used anki, plugging in my own vocab manually and I got the Kanzen books. I studied more and more as the test day approached (at one point 3 to 4 hours a day), but practice tests were yielding a nerve-wracking 65% average, just barely passing.
I failed. I think the total was 56%, just under the pass mark. Humbled and heartbroken, I decided to not take it in the following December, but to wait until summer of 2009. And so I studied and studied. Everyday 2 hours of anki, 1 hour of reading, 1 hour of grammar and hopefully some listening thrown in as well. I did every past JLPT from ’91 to ’06, passing all of them, then took them all again. I finished a couple of full-length novels and felt strong.
And so in 2010, in one of our most futuristic-sounding years, I took the N2. Waiting for the results took ten years off my life, but I passed and peace was once again restored.
Now for the N1. I have a steady regimen of an hour of anki, JLPT study books covering grammar, reading and vocab that I spend about an hour a day on, and core6000 for listening. Every two weeks I take one of the past 1kyuu tests to keep me in the test mode and to gauge how the retention is going. So far, I’ve passed both the ’91 and ’92 tests by the old standard of 70% needed to pass. I also read novels without the use of a dictionary and it’s going well. Words I don’t know can be figured out by the context and it’s much more comfortable to read now that I don’t need some denshi jisho nursing me every sentence.
The goal now is N1 in July of 2011. Vocab and kanji are strong, grammar is ok, reading is peaks and valleys, and listening is getting a lot better since using core6000 anki decks. Put those guys on random and train the ear to pick out key vocab without context, it works!
If you read all of that, thanks! If you skimmed to the end and are just reading this sentence, you didn’t miss much.
