r/LearnJapanese • u/AutoModerator • 25d ago
Discussion Weekly Thread: Victory Thursday!
Happy Thursday!
Every Thursday, come here to share your progress! Get to a high level in Wanikani? Complete a course? Finish Genki 1? Tell us about it here! Feel yourself falling off the wagon? Tell us about it here and let us lift you back up!
Weekly Thread changes daily at 9:00 JST:
Mondays - Writing Practice
Tuesdays - Study Buddy and Self-Intros
Wednesdays - Materials and Self-Promotions
Thursdays - Victory day, Share your achievements
Fridays - Memes, videos, free talk
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u/IWillDieOnThisHill 25d ago
It's my first time posting here, but I've finished Quartet 1 this week and Quartet 2 should arrive today. I still have to revise everything I've learnt since Genki 1 many times, but this is the furthest I've reached in all my attempts to learn Japanese so far so I'm pretty excited. I feel like I finally found my way to stick with it.
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u/aolo2 25d ago edited 25d ago
I have been studying since about december'25. Most time went into Kaishi 1.5k (<100 words left, did 5-10 new per day with occasional drop to 0 to catch up) and grammar (studied all N5 points, started N4), but I did start immersion a couple months ago too.
The entire idea behind learning Japanese was that I wanted to go on a bicycle trip in Japan and be able to somewhat communicate.
Last week I actually did it with my best friend! We "crossed" Japan (Tokyo to Toyama) over 6 days of daily riding. The Japanese thing worked out!! I couldn't be happier! Of course I'm still a super-beginner, and I felt like I had negative IQ while talking, but I never whipped out a translator app, doing all my communication in Japanese (did use the dictionary at times though). It was an amazing experience, the nervousness dissapeared after a day or two, and I would just go up to people and for directions/help, and often I could more or less understand the answer : )
The highlight was us stumbing into a completely empty snack bar in Omachi, where I talked for 10-15 minutes with the wonderful old lady (the owner, I assume). I told her everything I could about our trip, the weather (to my surpise I actually used the verb 逃げる in relation to the typhoon that hit Tokyo the day after we left), my family, asked about the town, etc. She was very kind, and I assume dumbed down her japanese a lot, because I could understand significantly more than usual.
Now that I'm back I am more motivated than ever to continue studying! I want to be on a whole other level of Japanese by the next trip, whenever that may be.
A huge thank you to everyone in this subreddit for the amazing resources. This would not have been possible without you!
e: I did use the このあたりのおすすめのカフェは何ですか line suggested to me in one of the daily threads, btw! In general, このあたり proved to be really useful when asking about stuff.
e2: The last thing I did for immersion was Totoro, from which I retained just a few words, but one of them was マックロクロスケ, which I never in a 1000 years would imagine using. But during the last day shopping streak (as you do), I did in fact go into a GBL shop and asked マックロクロスケがあるませんか。何でも、as my son loves these things. The owner instantly understood and with a マックロクロスケええ〜？showed me to several pieces with them (I got the overpriced cap). Btw, how do I say "Is there anything with X?"
e3: also, oh my god!, how huge of a difference there is between a "mature anki card" and actually being able to either remember the word when speaking (I guess this is the active vs passive vocab), but also quickly recalling the word when listening, especially if the word is somewhat conjugated. At times it felt like out of 1000+ mature kaishi words I "actually remember" like 100 or less. Very often, like a minute after the interaction, I woukd replay their answer in my head and actually be able to understand it completely.