25+y/o language enthusiast • she/her • self-studying for fun! • 🇩🇪[N]🇬🇧[C?]🇯🇵[N3]🇧🇷[A1] • one day I want to learn 🇨🇳🇰🇷🇬🇷 • side blog of @whxsperofsprxng
You won't believe it, but I actually started reading!
I set it as a goal for myself to finally read some books in Japanese starting this month, because I feel it might just be what I'm lacking to level up my fluency. No matter how many reviews you do of grammar and vocabulary, if you don't apply if, how will you ever learn to use it?
So, I picked up お探しものは図書室まで, which was just standing in my shelf waiting to be read for months now, went to a cafe, got a (way too sweet!) matcha and a water, and read. For half an hour only, then the cafe got too busy for my liking and a wasp took over my matcha, but hey. I still read. Even if just a few pages, I still felt like I got into some reading flow, and I really liked it so far (not much has happened yet, but I like the setting and the writing). It doesn't seem to hard, just a few words I don't know, most of which I can guess from context.
I am just reading, not looking anything up unless I really need to. Instead I decided to circle the words I don't know and look them up later to make flashcards.
The next few weeks I want to keep going, at least a page a day. Let's see how much reading I can get done by the end of the month! :)
Languages tend to peak at their word for butterfly. Never seen 2 that are the same, either. Papillon. Mariposa. Borboleta. Fluture. Vlinder. Schmetterling. Pillangó. Babochka. Farfalla. Sommerfugl. Perhonen. Farasha. Titali. Chōchō. Nabi. Húdié. Buom buom. Great job guys, i really mean it.
Archaeologist problems: Women (in the US at least, likely similar in many other countries) currently earning 70% of recent archaeology degrees, but still being forced to listen to some random guy's (uncited and unfounded) sea peoples theories.
I would like to start doing monthly updates of my Japanese studies to keep me accountable as I aim for the JLPT N2 next year. I'll summarize all my progress below and hope to use this as a way to see improvements over time :)
Overall, this month was super busy, as I graduated, had some personal stuff going on, moved to a new place, etc. But I found a routine I stuck to more or less every day, and it consists of the following:
Bunpro (Grammar):
This month I finished the N3 grammar (mostly a review, but since I never formally studied for the N3, it also entailed a lot of new grammar points)
On top of that, I also finally started the N2 grammar, doing around 4 new grammar points a day. It's going ok, though I can definitely feel an increase in difficulty as I tackle grammar points I haven't been exposed to much in the past. Also, if I have to study one more grammar point containing 上 that is just slightly different from the 20 other ones, I will lose it.
I'm also using Bunpro to review some older vocab (currently going through the N4 vocab, extremely slowly), but it doesn't really feel relevant for this post, so I leave it out also in the future.
Wanikani (Kanji):
Doing Wanikani from the start is definitely weird when you technically already know around 1000 kanji, I must say. Right now I am working on level 4, so... there's a long way to go. I really hope it will be enough for the N2 next year! But if I feel like it's too slow, I always have Kanji Study to fall back onto. I set it to a max of 25 new items a day, just until I hit a level where I'm actually learning new stuff...
Anki (Vocabulary):
(left: hajimete; right: sentence mining)
I have been slacking a little (a lot) with my vocabulary studies... so that's something I want to work on over the next few months. I am working my way through the はじめての日本語能力試験 vocabulary books (my Anki deck contains the vocab from the N3 level, and I am in the process of adding the N2 words as well (about 550 of them are already in the deck). It's slow, with 5 new words a day, but it's a decent pace for me, if only I stuck to it.
I also started sentence mining a little over a week ago, making my way through the Anime 君に届け, but I don't really like the act of sentence mining, so it's, again, super slow (38 cards = 19 words, lol).
The decks always contain, for each word:
japanese sentence with highlighted target word, with furigana -> German translation of target word + audio of word + audio of sentence + pitch accent of word
japanese senetence without furigana -> japanese sentence with furigana + audio of sentence
because I desperately need to work on my reading skills without relying on furigana.
Goal for next month
In August, I want to keep going with my little routine of Bunpro + WaniKani + Anki, even if just a little bit every day. I think I've set myself a reasonable pace for these theoretical bits of study, and given that I have almost a year until I plan to take the JLPT, I'm not worried about making it.
I do want to be more active in my application of the language, however. I have all these manga and books in Japanese, but I just don't read them. So for August, I plan to start reading お探し物は図書室まで, even just a page a day. That is my main goal. Use the language, especially read the language, and sentence mine from it, even if I hate it.
do any other Japanese learners ever feel like they can read the same kanji perfectly well in two different contexts, but don't necessarily consciously connect that it's the same kanji?
examples, for me:
丁寧語、丁目
I can read 丁 in both, but it didn't dawn on me for a very long time that this is the same kanji.
Another one is 息子、息抜き
欲しい, 食欲
Does anyone else know what i'm talking about, or is this maybe just because so much of my Japanese studies have been self-taught?
what a day full of admin and headaches 🥲 at least I got do to the little bit of studying I had time / energy for outside, listening to the birds' songs and the rustle of the leaves, enjoying the sun and warmth and a cup of iced Matcha (of course!)
progress is slow, but how does the saying go? slow and steady wind the race!
I can't believe I moved! Finally I'm living together with my partner (◍•ᴗ•◍)
I'm still waiting for my own desk, so whenever I can I use my partner's desk (they were at their office today), or I have to work at the dinner table or on the balcony.
Can't wait for my desk to arrive so I can set everything up & work more efficiently! I haven't really gotten much done besides the reviews piling up, so nothing much to share, but I just wanted to update.
I had a very busy day yesterday, so today I had to catch up on a lot of reviews on bunpro. Combined with 4 new N2 grammar points:
に相違ない
万が一
様がない
に他ならない
it was a lot of studying. Still have to do my vocab reviews! But I'm enjoying it, and the fact that I can sit outside to study is such a nice change of pace. Hopefully the weather stays like this, I can't do another heat wave 😖
Also, I finally leveled up on Wanikani - I'm now on level 4. At this pace, I wonder if I'll have enough kanji knowledge by the N2 next year in July haha. But I'm motivated!
after finally completing N3 grammar on Bunpro two days ago, I am now starting to tackle N2 grammar, and it's such a weird feeling! I can really tell how much more obscure the grammar points are getting now...
I also started Wanikani a few weeks ago and it's very strange to go through all the early Kanji again. Sometimes I get so bored with the reviews, I mess up really easy kanji, like mixing up 少 and 小. It's just hard to focus when I know all of these things by heart already! But after searching for a way to really learn Kanji and stick with it, I already feel like Wanikani will be a great tool that I might actually use for more than just one month.
Vocab is going well, I'm steadily making my way through the はじめての日本語能力試験N2単語 book and enjoying it a lot! I also started sentence mining (shame on me for waiting this long), which will hopefully fill any gaps I still have in my vocab from more fundamental levels. One thing I need to work on is my inherent shame for now knowing supposedly "easy" words, to the point where I won't even make flashcards! I don't even know who I'd have embarrassed with, because no one even sees the flashcards but me!
hello language learners of tumblr! I can't believe I'm making a new account on this website in the year 2026, but recently I've realized how much I need a language learning community around me & how much this is lacking in the real world for me! So I thought I'd join here, as tumblr seems to be the least hellish website out of all the other options (I tried making a tiktok and it was very scary).
I'm Lena, from Germany, and a recent graduate of Natural Language Processing, where I specifically researched a low-resource dialect for my final thesis. NLP may be drifting towards AI in recent years, but there's still many of us who oppose this development and are just interested in working with language technologies that actually benefit humanity, like language documentation and preservation, or sustainable technologies like Ecosia. So don't hate me, I'm not an AI bro.
For the past decade or so, I've been learning Japanese on and off. As a recent graduate who has a part-time job coming up in a few months (so I'm not even really job hunting), I have a lot of free time and really wanted to use it to study Japanese more seriously. At the end of this year / start of next year, I am planning on going to Japan for around 4 months for a short working holiday, so I have serious motivation to improve my Japanese skills! Right now I am at around an N3 level, though I haven't taken classes in a long time and my self studying has been all over the place - so who really knows.
While I'm in Japan, I also want to work with language preservation (especially of Ainu) if I can find an opportunity, so I've been spending some time researching the Ainu language of the indigenous people of Japan. Maybe I even want to learn some of the language, if I can find the time and resources!
Besides Japanese, I speak English (as you can tell), and am also self-studying Brazilian Portuguese as it's my partner's native language. Though I haven't really been doing that after completing a B1 class last year, so I need to get back into it...
I really hope to find some like-minded people on here, who self-study languages (especially Japanese), so please interact with that & I'll drop a follow (main blog: @whxsperofsprxng) - can't wait to meet you all (◍•ᴗ•◍)
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