6 Months of Japanese Learning through Immersion. Steady progress

Hello everyone. I've now been learning Japanese through immersion every day for six months. Outside of school or work, this is the longest I've ever done anything this consistently and although this is, for the most part, a personal goal and journey, I decided to share my progress through this series of videos. This keeps myself accountable and hopefully can help push some of you just a bit further along your own journeys. Starting at month three, I've always included a small clip of myself speaking Japanese. This time as well, I speak for a little bit so stick around or skip to the end if that's what you're interested in. If you haven't watched my previous videos, I'm mostly doing the same things as I described in my four-month update. I'm learning and reviewing new vocabulary every day using Anki as well as immersing in the language by watching or reading Japanese native content. Additionally, three months ago, I started going to language exchanges to practice speaking. For vocabulary, I've been continuing Anki, focusing mostly on finishing the Core 2K 6K deck. For those that don't know, the Core 2K 6K deck is a 6,000 cards deck that are supposed to be ordered in a way that is optimal for learning Japanese. I believe that these words are based on Japanese news sources so there's a lot of words that might not necessarily be useful if you're just learning the language as a hobby. But in my experience, it's been tremendously helpful in simply feeding raw vocab to my brain. For the Core deck, I used to learn 20 new cards a day and finish the first 2,000 cards a bit before the four months mark. I've since reduced the amount of new cards to 15 to keep it a bit more manageable and I've now learned more than 3,500 cards from that deck. In addition to that, I also have my own deck that I've been building from since mining. Like before, I've been learning five new cards a day from that deck. Counting both, I've learned over 4,300 cards since I started. Without going into too much detail, I mentioned that I would change the algorithm from the default legacy one to FSRS. I definitely feel like it's a lot less of a chore. I feel like I get stuck on some words a lot less and the time I spend on Anki hasn't been going up even though it probably should with the amount of words that I've been learning. Just to be clear, Anki by itself is really powerful but I only use it as a tool to stuff my brain with new vocabulary. It's definitely not enough to comprehend Japanese. Immersion is really where the association in my brain is so solidified. I've said this before but vocabulary is so important for understanding a new language. Every day, I hear or read words that I just reviewed the same day. That being said, I'm really looking forward to finishing the court deck after which I'll go harder on sentence mining by bumping up the number of daily cards from 5 to 10 or 15 but I probably won't go back to 20 cards a day. Now for the interesting part, immersion. In my last update, I mentioned that I didn't really notice a difference in comprehension between three and four months of learning but this time I can confidently say that my comprehension is much better than it was two months ago. Starting with YouTube, it's becoming easier to watch native level content for enjoyment. These past two months, I haven't really been watching comprehensible input style videos and it isn't that I completely stopped and I still find words that I'm not too familiar with but since my comprehension is often close to 99%, it's a much better use of my time and more interesting anyways to watch native content. Actually, recently I've been really interested in learning more about photography and cameras in general and so I've been watching a lot of those types of videos. Field specific terms are still difficult of course but in a way it feels really good to be able to only struggle with those if that makes sense. I think I'm striking a good balance by focusing on learning 15 core new words a day that still leaves me with 5 new words of whatever I want. For those that watched my three months update video, I said that some of the hardest content for me was from booktubers. That's still probably the case, honestly. Let me describe it this way, at my current level it's pretty difficult to keep up with abstract concepts or to follow long trains of thoughts. I still need to fully concentrate to understand what's going on. I've almost exclusively watched YouTube for immersion these past few months so once again, anime is on the back burner. One of the reasons why is because anime is really hard, honestly. Slice of Life is fine but I'm interested in watching fantasy or just things that aren't slice of life and the language used in those, like for example danjan meshi, is completely different from what I'm used to. I definitely want to be able to watch those the same way I watch YouTube for example but for now because I have limited time for Japanese, I've been avoiding it. For reading, I managed to finish my first Japanese novel, Mata Onaji Yume wo Mite Ita. It was difficult at first but the second half of the book felt a lot easier. There were some passages that I definitely didn't fully understand but overall I was able to follow until the end and retain a lot of the details from the story. Although the book is pretty short, it took me around 37 hours to read or around 3,310 characters per hour. It was definitely straining mentally to read at first but one day something clicked and I found myself caught up in the story. I'm the type of person to read before bed and so I'm now able to really relax when reading Japanese even though it's not always easy. That being said, I think that my reading ability is probably a lot worse than my listening. Although I mentioned multiple times that I would like to read more, I ended up spending a lot more time on other things such as listening and outputting. I did start a second novel called Karaforu which I find a lot more difficult personally. Even with 4,000 words, there's a lot of words that have to look up and the story is definitely harder to understand. I'm around 3 chapters in and had to re-read chapter 1 to really understand what was going on and probably will have to do so again with other chapters. Being able to read difficult books is definitely a long-term goal of mine but currently there's still a lot of work needed to get there. Around month number 4, I started outputting by going to language exchanges and meeting with native speakers and language learners. Compared to comprehension, it definitely feels like improvement is much more difficult to attain. I often feel discouraged when I'm not able to express what I wish to convey. English is sometimes a crutch during conversations and I'm really aware of that. A lot of the Japanese people I meet here are interested in learning English and so therefore have a pretty high level of English. At the same time, I'm grateful that they have the patience to deal with my broken Japanese and I'm still very glad that I started outputting early. To be honest, I didn't really feel much improvement from month 4 to 5 and even 5 and a half but just before the 6 months milestone, I did notice that it was becoming easier to express myself. I can still only have basic conversations but it feels like conversations are becoming more natural. Sometimes I won't know a word and if I can figure it out from the context, it still feels pretty natural to just ask for clarification as I would in English if I didn't know a word for example. As with anything in language learning, it will take a lot of time to really reach fluency. This is probably true for other aspects of a language but I find that for outputting especially, it can be described like this. You have your core foundation which consists of your basic vocabulary and grammar that you can use almost subconsciously and as you learn your vocabulary or grammar patterns, you might try to incorporate these into your conversations. But at first, it really has to be a conscious effort. The more you use it, the more it becomes part of you. You have this ever-growing dorodango or ball of dirt that represents your understanding of the language. As you add more mass to it, you're constantly polishing the outer layer. Following this line of thought, if you introduce bad habits and do not try to fix them as they emerge, you'll create weak spots in your own interpretation of the language. As these weak spots are buried deeper and deeper into your consciousness, it becomes harder and harder to fix. I was pretty much neglecting grammar until the last update video and so this time, I decided to spend some time learning some grammar as well. I tried multiple things but it was difficult for me to really get into it. At first, I tried reading Dakin's which used to be one of the more popular resources for grammar amongst English speakers but I find it almost impossible to mindlessly read through grammar books and retain anything. I also tried other textbooks again but that really didn't last long. In the end, and this isn't sponsored by the way, the thing that worked for me is Bunpro. If anything, I already have somewhat of an understanding to a lot of the grammar points that I've been reviewing there but the semi-interactiveness of it really helps me actually integrate these grammar points to my own conversations. Now for the time I spent learning Japanese in 6 months and these numbers are from the exact 6 months date, I have 581 hours spent learning or practicing Japanese. By the way, that's 227 hours more than at the 4 months mark which is again just above my 100 hour per month minimum goal that I'm setting for myself. Those can be broken down into 207 hours of flashcards, 238 of listening. Out of those, 175 are for active listening and 63 are for passive. I have 64 hours of reading, 48 hours of output, and 5 hours of games. I separated games into their own categories as they could be either reading, listening, or a complete waste of time but since I'd like to start playing games in Japanese at some point, I thought it might be interesting to track as well. These 5 hours have been a mix of personal 5 and visual novels as well as that kanji game that you might have seen. Again, I'm glad that I could attain my 100 hour per month goal for the past 3 months that keeps my total daily average to a bit more than 3 hours a day. All in all, I'm really glad with the progress that I was able to make. I work full time and have a social life yet was able to find time to improve my Japanese. My life was already changed so much since starting this journey. I often felt like I was getting nowhere and to be honest, I sometimes stare into the abyss and compare myself to others and I constantly doubt myself. But as I get further along the journey, I realized something. Everything is really just a matter of time and effort. Things that makes zero sense now or seem impossible will become second nature if you keep at it. This is especially true with learning languages. Us humans are wired to learn it and it doesn't matter if you're older, as long as you put in the hours, you will get there. I'm not trying to be a grind mindset guru or anything but I do think that if you really want something in life, you have to go out there and do it. No one but yourself can do that for you. It's definitely been difficult and I sometimes feel like I'm not getting anywhere or I have days that I'd really rather just not do it but I still do it. It's become part of my life, of my identity. I had really wonderful experiences and interactions and I've only just started. If you think about it, 6 months is nothing in the grand scheme of things and don't get discouraged. No matter what speed you're progressing at, the only thing that matters is that you keep at it every single day. Don't wait for a good time or the perfect opportunity. There's never going to be one. Make your own opportunities. Moving forward, I mentioned that I might try the GLPT in December. I did end up signing up for N3 but haven't been studying for GLPT specifically so I'm not really confident that I can pass. With that out of the way, I still have at least 6 months before I get to finish the Core 2k 6k deck which will be a huge milestone but before that there's the 5000 total mature cards that I should be hitting early next year and at the same time I'm aiming to move to Japan after the winter. These videos might seem simple but it'd take me a long time to make so I'm not sure how frequently I'll be able to upload videos of this format. I thought about making more vlogs but I'm not sure. Next update will be at the 9 months mark if there's anything interesting otherwise at the 12 months mark. On that note, I'll be putting a clip of me rambling in Japanese. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe if you'd like to stick around. I'm sorry for the delay in recording this video. Actually, last week, no, the week before last, I was trying to go to the gym where I'm speaking Japanese but it froze up and I didn't know what to say at all. So for the past two months, I've been attending language exchanges. It's a personal opinion but I think it's the most difficult thing to talk about. I think it's the most difficult thing to talk about because I'm not really aware of what I'm saying. But I have to say what I want to say, I have to say what I want to say, I have to say what I want to say. That's why practice is so important. So I'm really grateful to all the kind Japanese people who correct my mistakes every time. Thank you so much for watching until the end. I'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.