Category - Blog Extras

The pace of my Japanese reviews has picked up exponentially over the past few days, and while I’m so glad to have Japanese back in my daily life again, I’m already struggling to keep up.

I squeeze in review time when I can throughout the day— when drinking my morning tea, or while eating lunch, but the core of my study time is early morning if I happen to wake up before my alarm, or very late at night after my family is asleep.

I’ve been struggling to keep my eyes open while working through reviews and it’s giving me flashbacks to my university days of falling asleep on my Japanese homework at 3am (& the reason why I failed out… I was taking too many classes and literally did not have enough time in the day!)

As for the study itself: I had been working through N4 grammar on Bunpro, but then I had the brilliant idea of grinding out all of Bunpro’s N5 grammar course in a day for a quick refresher… this was not a good idea, I’m now absolutely flooded with reviews.

But, I will say that I do feel very accomplished! I genuinely don’t remember many of these grammar points aside from the basics, although somehow I was able to cram them all into a day, so the knowledge must be there somewhere hibernating in a fog in my brain.

Kanji practice has been through WaniKani and, unlike grammar, the early levels of kanji have come back to me quickly. I’ve spent many, many hours on reviews & have reached the end of the free trial levels but I haven’t learned anything new yet (｡-ω-)ｳﾜ

I’m undecided if I want to continue with WaniKani because while I do like the system, and it definitely would help with the later levels, 1) I don’t have much free time to study and it’s taking hours upon hours to reach anything new and 2) a lot of the same content is repeated in the Anki Core 2K deck.

As much as I couldn’t stand using Anki in the past, I finally see the value in it and I feel like the majority of my learning lately is coming from the Core 2k deck I’ve been reviewing.

I don’t have the perfect system in place yet, but I’m definitely learning, and I’ll keep on going bit by bit ✩

Roughly a week into my journey of Japanese study and my motivation keeps growing~

It takes something like three months for a behavior to be considered a proper habit, so I still have a long ways to go with keeping up on daily study, but I’m off to a good start.

I hoped that the partial fluency I had acquired in the past would start coming back to me, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, I’m finding myself truly back to beginner level— especially when it comes to grammar.

My study methods so far have been:
⊹ Wanikani for kanji
⊹ Core 2k Anki deck for vocabulary
⊹ Bunpro for grammar

Not much to report yet, but I’ll keep checking back in to keep myself consistent ✩

I’ve been burnt out on playing video games lately, so I decided to pick up Japanese study as a hobby again.

I don’t know how often I’ll be writing about language study, or if it’ll become a core part of this hobby space, but for now I’m really enjoying it and so I want to write about it~

A brief history of my previous experience learning Japanese: over a decade ago, I took Japanese 101 in university, and then failed out of Japanese 102. Not wanting to give up, after graduation, I moved to Japan to teach English & fully immerse myself in Japanese.

However, I fell chronically ill while overseas, and had to quit my job after just a year. I tried to work freelance as long as possible, but eventually moved back to my home country for healthcare and recovery.

Unfortunately, my illness drastically affected my memory & learning ability. I’ve tried to pick up studying Japanese again occasionally over the years, but touching the language was too painful of a reminder of the life I had and then lost. I eventually came to accept that chapter of my life was over and subsequently shelved the idea of ever trying to learn Japanese again.

But over ten years later, the desire has been creeping back in, and so here I am, starting back at zero. Instead of being embarrassed of how much I’ve lost, I’m going to be proud of myself for getting back up and trying again ✩