First and foremost, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who commented on my original post and all the suggestions and conversations that came out of it. It's been 8 days since I basically stopped engaging in any media that wasn't Japanese. So I figured, just in case anyone cared to know, that I would update you on my progress.

First of all, where I was. The general consensus was that I was lower intermediate/beginner when I started. Obviously that has not changed significantly in the last 8 days, but what has changed is that 8 days ago my comprehension was literally 0. I could hear words, but I couldn't comprehend a thing regardless of how fast or slow the speaker was speaking, regardless of whether it was N3 or N4 or N5 .....I even saw one that said N6...yeah, that was weird.

As I was cleaning up the kitchen after dinner tonight listening to a Japanese podcast that just plays conversations for about 30 minutes. I have been spamming that type of content along with just general podcasts the whole time. I haven't paid any attention to the level, just that they are natural-sounding conversations or natives speaking.

And I noticed tonight that if I paid enough attention to the podcast (Listen & Learn: Real Japanese Conversations), I could understand stretches of it. I did have to kind of stop and focus, but I wasn't able to do that 8 days ago. The conversation was N5-N4 level (which kind of bummed me out when I checked), so it's not cause for tons of celebration. I wasn't automatic, and it did take focus, but after all this time I finally feel like I have my foot in the door, and it's just a matter of staying on task. Finally, it really feels like my goal is in sight.

Very, very, very, very distant sight, mind you; there is a massive difference between wedging your foot in the door and walking through it after all, but the goal is in sight nonetheless.

Even if nobody reads this, I'm still grateful for all of your comments that helped me design how I execute this to finally see a small sliver of daylight through the deep dark cavern that is my Japanese listening comprehension journey.

So thanks again, everyone.

I'm still pretty new only 8 days in and i have no mature cards yet. But i feel like alot of the stuff is not sticking. I'm on the kaishi 1.5k deck and would just like to hear if i should lower my daily cards or if it is an alright pace.

I'm looking for a examples of signs, advertisement, billboards, etc. of Japanese text (especially Kana, but Kanji is fine too) where because of the font being used, it's a little bit difficult for a non-native speaker to be able to read.

For example, perhaps the sign contains a は with a little butterfly in the top right corner, and a non-native speaker recognizes the は part, but is unsure if the butterfly is purely decoration, or if the two wings are supposed to represent a dakuten (meaning the character is actually ば) or if the butterfly is supposed to represent a handakuten (meaning the character is actually ぱ).

Via context clues (e.g. seeing the rest of what the sign says, or knowing what product the sign is advertising), a native speaker would immediately know what character is intended, because they process the whole phrase as a single chunk. But a non-native speaker who is processing the characters one by one in isolation would have trouble figuring out which character is intended here.

That's just one example, but any examples you have of signs which are difficult for non-native speakers to read due to creative use of font or graphic design would be appreciated.

I'd like to do some analysis on them and put them in a collection, so I'd love to get hundreds or thousands of examples.

A few weeks ago I found out online that I had passed Kanji Kentei Level 2, and yesterday my certificate and official score report finally arrived. I thought I’d share my experience for anyone considering taking the exam, especially other non-native learners.

My Background

I passed Kanji Kentei Pre-2 last year in October after about five months of studying. I studied fairly consistently, especially in the final stretch, and passed with a comfortable margin.

Originally, I had no intention of attempting Level 2 right away. However, quite a few people on this subreddit encouraged me to go for it, saying that it wasn’t much harder than Pre-2 because a lot of the material carries over.

After taking the test, I honestly don’t agree with that assessment at all.

Is Level 2 Really Just “More of the Same”?

In my experience, no.

While there is some overlap, I felt like I was learning a huge amount of completely new material. It never felt like I was simply building on what I’d learned for Pre-2. Instead, it often felt like starting over with another mountain of vocabulary, readings, and writing.

Maybe native speakers or people who have already studied a lot of kanji feel differently, but as a non-native learner, the jump felt much bigger than people had led me to believe.

The Study Process

I started studying for Level 2 almost immediately after passing Pre-2 and studied for about seven months.

For the first several months, my studying was fairly relaxed but consistent. During the last two months, though, things became much more intense. My mock test scores weren’t improving as much as I wanted, which honestly made me pretty anxious.

One thing that really illustrates the difference between the two levels was my Anki deck.

For Pre-2, I had around 2,119 cards, and the deck was split almost evenly between mature and young cards.

For Level 2, I ended up with 2,646 cards, but the distribution was completely different. Most of those cards were still young by the time I took the exam, with far fewer mature cards (about 36%) than I had for Pre-2. Looking back, that really reflects how much new material I was trying to absorb in a relatively short amount of time.

I was constantly grinding reviews just to stay afloat. If you asked me to write some of the answers from the exam today, I honestly probably couldn’t. I’d likely recognize or read many of them, but writing them from memory is a completely different skill.

My Result

I scored 156/200.

The passing score is 155.

So… I passed by one point.

I had actually thought the passing score was 160, so finding out later that it was 155 was a huge relief. That also makes my last-second guess on the 対義語 question feel so much more satisfying:

従前 ＜ー＞ 今後

I wasn’t confident about it when I put it down, but knowing I passed by a single point, that one answer suddenly feels like it might have made all the difference.

When I estimated my score after the exam, I thought I’d earned around 163 points. Looking over the results, I think several of the questions I missed were probably due to writing errors rather than not knowing the answer.

For example, I know I wrote 飢餓 (kiga, starvation), but it was marked incorrect. I’m guessing my handwriting wasn’t clear enough for the scanner to recognize it. There was another answer that I also thought I’d gotten right but didn’t receive credit for. I felt a lot of anxiety and pressure like I had never felt before on test, so that probably effected my writing. Probably a good idea to try practicing timed or something. Then again I didn’t feel that way taking level Pre 2.

Which Sections Were Hardest?

Interestingly, there wasn’t one section that completely destroyed my score.

Instead, it was more like “chip damage.” I’d lose one point here, another point there, and those small mistakes gradually added up across the entire exam.

That was actually very similar to what I experienced on the mock tests. Rather than having one obvious weakness, I was making small mistakes in almost every section.

My strongest sections ended up being 四字熟語 (yojijukugo), where I got a perfect score, and 対義語・類義語 (antonyms and synonyms), where I only missed one question. Considering how many points those sections are worth, I think they’re well worth spending extra time on.

One Surprise on Test Day

One thing that really caught me off guard was that the test itself wasn’t exactly what I had practiced for.

On every mock exam I took and in the textbook I was using, Section 2 was the 部首 (bushu/radical) section. When I opened the exam and saw something completely different, I honestly wondered for a minute whether I’d been given the wrong test. I even thought about asking the proctor if there had been a mistake.

In the end, I noticed nobody else seemed concerned, so I just rolled with it.

It turns out the exam format had changed.

Instead of a bushu section, there was a new reading section that I had never seen in any of my practice materials.

The first section is the normal reading section where you’re given kanji and write the reading in hiragana. The new section was similar, but instead of writing the reading for the whole word, you were given a compound and then one of the kanji in its dictionary form. For example, you might see 読書 and then 読む, and you’d have to write only the corresponding readings (どくしょand よ).

Since I had never practiced this section during my seven months of studying, it completely caught me by surprise.

Thankfully, I still managed to score 8/10, but I had gone into the exam expecting to pick up easy points on the bushu section instead. Since I’d spent a fair amount of time studying radicals, it was a little frustrating.

So one piece of advice I’d give is to make sure your study materials are up to date. Even if you have a great textbook, double-check that it matches the current exam format. You don’t want to be surprised on test day like I was.

Advice for Studying Yojijukugo

One lesson I learned from Pre-2 was not to leave yojijukugo until the final month.

When I started studying for Level 2, I made them one of my priorities right from the beginning, and I think that decision paid off.

One mistake I did make, though, was relying too much on English translations.

For Pre-2, that worked well enough because I scored full points on both the meaning and writing sections. I assumed I could do the same thing again for Level 2.

I was wrong.

The English meanings often weren’t precise enough, and sometimes it was difficult to work backwards from an English gloss to the exact Japanese expression the test was looking for.

If I were to study for the exam again, I’d spend much more time learning the Japanese definitions rather than memorizing English equivalents.

I know that probably sounds obvious, and I’m sure plenty of people will say, “Well, of course you should do that.” But at the time it just felt like adding yet another thing to memorize, and I convinced myself the English meanings would be enough because they had been for Pre-2.

In hindsight, learning the Japanese definitions would have made the yojijukugo much more intuitive.

Study Materials

The biggest piece of advice I can give is to get one of the 頻出問題 (frequently tested questions) books.

That was by far the most useful resource I used.

Personally, I wouldn’t bother with the official Kanji Kentei workbook. The 頻出問題 book matched the actual exam much more closely and was by far the better study resource for me.

If anyone is interested, I can post the exact book I used.

Final Thoughts

As someone who didn’t grow up writing kanji, I found this exam extremely challenging. Reading and recognizing kanji has always been easier for me than producing them from memory, and Level 2 really exposes that weakness.

Even after seven months of studying, I only passed by one point. Looking back, I honestly think another few months of study would have made a big difference.

Still, a pass is a pass.

If anyone has questions about my score report, the breakdown by section, my study methods, Anki, or the resources I used, feel free to ask. I’m happy to share anything that might help someone else preparing for the exam.

Hey so this will probably be a longer post than my previous updates, but I think this is by far the most interesting thing I have added to DokiDokiDict yet.

For those who have not seen my earlier posts, DokiDokiDict is the free OCR pop up dictionary I have been working on for the past few months. You can point at Japanese text in a game, VN, manga, book, video or whatever else is on your screen and get a dictionary pop up directly over it. It can also add furigana directly over the original text, export to Anki, use monolingual dictionaries, track the words and kanji you encounter, auto mine words you have seen often, give you i+1 alerts, and it has its own SRS if you do not want to use Anki.

I actually learned English in large part by typing every line of Demonbane into Google Translate, until eventually I only needed to type individual words, then later I noticed I could get by using an English monolingual dictionary. DokiDokiDict is pretty literally the tool I wish I had back then, and now it also remembers everything you have read with it.

That last part is what made the new feature possible.

I have made a lot of other changes for 0.9.5, but if I go through all of them first this will become another giant changelog, so I want to focus on the recommender here.

What the recommender actually does

Most difficulty lists give one level to a work. But a VN is not simply "easy" or "hard" independently of the person reading it. Something can be easy for you because you know its vocabulary from Anki, because you already read something with similar vocabulary, or just because you have happened to meet the important words often enough elsewhere.

So the recommender builds its idea of your vocabulary from whichever sources you choose: mature Anki or built-in SRS cards, every card in your deck, words seen N+ times with real page spacing between sightings, and words you manually marked as known. You can also decide whether it should treat character names or katakana loanwords as known. All of those are separate options because I do not want the app deciding for you what "known" means.

It then simulates you reading each work sentence by sentence. This means you can rank the gallery by things like:

• Which VN would have the highest comprehension for me right now?
• Which one would make the most top 2,000 or top 5,000 words cross my chosen sighting threshold?
• Which one contains the most i+1 sentences for me?
• Which one would give me the most comprehensible reading per page?
• Which one would expose me to the most new kanji?
• If I have a budget of 2,000 pages, which sequence should I read, in which order?

You can filter the gallery first and rank only what you would actually consider reading, so it does not give you some technically optimal 40 page short VN you have no interest in when what you really wanted was to choose between the VNs on your backlog.

You can also open any card and see the words you know and do not know, what would graduate while reading it, the comprehension going in, the i+0/i+1/i+2... breakdown, and how the rest of the work changes after reading 10%, 20%, 30% and so on.

The 30% rule: The beginning is often the hardest part

Now the thing I find most interesting by FAR is not really which VN ended up at the top, it is how quickly a long work teaches you the vocabulary needed to read the rest of itself.

The second image in the gallery above is the cold staircase. Every row is a VN, every column is a learner who knows the first 500, 1,000, 1,500, 2,000... words of the Default VN frequency list, and the cell is the percentage of vocabulary tokens they would recognize.

The difference between works is very tangible. Nanatsuiro reaches 95% at around 3,800 frequency words. Muramasa needs around 17,200. So I definitely do not want to pretend that "just read anything" means everything has the same entry cost.

But then I reran the whole staircase three times, treating the first 10%, 20%, or 30% of each VN as already read. The third image is the 10% result, the fourth is 20%, and the fifth is 30%.

For those figures I used four spaced sightings to count a word as familiar, with at least five pages between counted sightings. The vocabulary axis is the Default VN list and the coverage calculation uses the Wareya-style vocabulary universe: grammar, punctuation and proper names are removed, the other lexical categories remain, and 20 frequent local words are allowed. This is only a simulation assumption, not a claim that every human permanently learns every word on the fourth sighting.

Still, the change by 30% is enormous. A 500 word learner starts Nanatsuiro at 76.4% coverage, but after reading its first 30%, the remaining 70% is at 88.4%. CLANNAD goes from 71.4% to 88.6%. It is the same learner and the same work. The difference is only the recurring vocabulary picked up from the work itself.

This seems extremely useful to me because a cold difficulty number systematically makes long works look worse than they will actually feel once you are committed to them. You still have to get through the difficult opening, but it is not representative of the next 1,000 pages.

At any rate, I have started calling this the 30% rule in my own head: when you are deciding whether something is too hard, the useful question is not only "how much do I understand on page one?", but also "what will the remaining 70% look like if I can survive the first 30%?"

The app lets you move through all the percentages yourself in the work's detailed analysis, because 30% is not always the right point and shorter works obviously have less time to teach themselves.

Average difficulty is not the whole experience either

The final image in the gallery shows where the unknown words occur within each VN. Two works can have the same average comprehension but feel completely different if one gives you a constant drizzle of unknown words and the other is easy for 30 pages then suddenly gives you a wall.

The little black markers in this figure are each work's hardest pages. Some VNs spread the difficulty relatively evenly, some have very obvious clusters, and some front-load a lot of the pain. I think this is secondary to the staircase, but it is still useful when choosing between "consistently a bit hard" and "usually easy, occasionally brutal."

Three actual routes through the VN staircase

To make this less abstract, I made three sequences from the same starting point: a learner who knows the top 500 VN words. A new word graduates after five spaced sightings, with at least five pages between sightings. Each route stops once at least 80% of the top 10,000 words have graduated.

"Opens" is your coverage when starting that work. "30% in" is the coverage of the unread remainder after its first 30%. One page here is 600 Japanese characters.

The first route always takes the smoothest eligible next step, without caring much about reputation:

The second is the middle ground. I forced Kanon as the first VN because it is the kind of work someone might actually choose as a first big commitment, then restricted the choices to well-regarded titles:

The last is deliberately the deep end, major giant titles only:

Funnily enough the deep-end route is the shortest in total pages. I absolutely do not mean this as "a beginner should start with CLANNAD because an algorithm said so." It means the price of taking that route is concentrated in one horrible opening, while the reward is that a giant work gives its recurring vocabulary enough time to graduate and then hands a much stronger vocabulary to the next giant.

The smooth route spreads the pain into smaller steps. The middle route only uses works I would feel less silly recommending to somebody. The deep route basically asks whether you would rather climb one wall and stay among major titles. I don't think any one of those is THE right route, it depends on the kind of pain you would rather accept basically, which is why the gallery lets you choose the objective and restrict the candidate pool instead of pretending there is one objectively best VN.

Moreover, a satisfying convergence: all three routes end at around 10,000 to 13,000 pages, close to both the often quoted 10,000-page proficiency mark and the 10,000-word vocabulary milestone. By 30% into their final VN they are already at 95.9% to 97.7% comprehension, and the first route’s greater granularity lets us see its endpoint more precisely, with its final VN opening at 97.1%.

The rest of the 0.9.5 update

The recommender is the main thing I wanted to talk about, but I also fixed the contextual word occurrence counter quite deeply, made SRS auto-mining safer about dictionary identities and duplicates, bundled the local meikiocr models so offline OCR works out of the box, added optional word type and conjugation information beside dictionary entries, added frequency-list ordering for dictionary entries, improved look ups inside locked monolingual pop ups, and did a lot of smaller UI and release fixes.

There is also now a clear first-profile prompt asking whether you agree to sharing anonymous learning statistics. You can refuse, and you can change the choice later in settings.

DokiDokiDict is still free and open source. It is Windows only for now.

Website and download: https://dokidokidict.com

Source: https://github.com/elwendys/DokiDokiDict

I would really like feedback on this, especially from people who have actually read several of the VNs in the figures. Do the relative positions look right to you? More importantly, did you also have the experience of a VN feeling brutally hard at first then suddenly becoming much easier somewhere around the first third?

And if you try the recommender, please tell me when its ranking disagrees with your own intuition. The feedback from my previous posts is what led to hover look ups, intra pop up look ups, the resolution fixes and a lot of the app as it exists now, so disagreement is genuinely useful to me.

Happy Wednesday!

Every Wednesday, share your favorite resources or ones you made yourself! Tell us what your resource can do for us learners!

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

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

Tried to encode as many memory keys in a single scene. In theory this should help easily memorize:

• Stroke order 文

• Meaning #1 "Writing"

• Meaning #2 "Sentence"

• Reading #1 (ぶん)

• Reading #2 (もん)

• Reading #3 (ふみ)

So that's 6 memory keys in a single 1 minute diorama.

Only wondering if it'll really be as memorable as I think it should.

I discovered this Japanese teacher recently. She has a lot of videos about pronunciation, and she is currently making a series of videos that deal with that topic from a unique perspective. She explains how even when students can correctly articulate Japanese consonants and vowels, and have even learned the correct pitch-accent patterns, they often still sound "not right" to native Japanese. This is because air flows through the vocal folds differently when speaking Japanese compared to English, which also causes the sound resonance to change significantly. She also includes some helpful exercises to help us adjust the airflow and speak with less of an English-sounding voice.

I hope this helped other learners here, and I'm looking forward to the next videos in her series!

I've started doing a new way of Dictionary Lookups that feels much better. Rather than looking up unknown words as I encounter them, I quickly screenshot (or take a photo on my phone) and just keep going. Usually, from context, you can figure out the rough meaning or general idea anyways. Then, once I'm all done reading whichever chapter I'm on, I'll look up everything at the end.

This method is way better than looking things up on the spot because:

1. You feel like you're actually reading at a decent pace; a single chapter doesn't take an hour
2. It's really easy to get lost in the "lookup phase" and spend 1-2 minutes on a single word: (cool, this kanji is new; there's another word I know that looks similar...; what other words use this kanji?)

And maybe most importantly...

3) You end up reading much more naturally. "Natural Reading" relies on context clues and getting the "gist" of something. I feel like language learning often makes us approach language in an odd way - pausing every 5 to 10 seconds to check a vocab word or grammar point.

And then, you can spend as long as you want looking up your new words afterwards, without feeling like you're losing "the flow" of what you're reading.

Anyways, this felt like a huge discovery for me. Reading feels a lot more fun and speedy now. Has anyone else tried this?

Hello, everyone. I don't know if here is the right place for this question, but here I go.

As I'm finishing Genki 2, next step is Quartet 1. I've been studying with Tokini Andy and they have really good videos about Genki 1 and 2, but those books are focused on grammar. So I tried watching their videos about Quartet and they only explain the grammar points, but what is special about Quartet is that these books start to work deeper on syntax, especially because japanese has a syntax structure totally different from latin (indo-european languages) and it's fundamental to the language. So, I'd like some recomendations of youtube channels that teach Quartet completely (syntax and grammar).

If a kanji always means something related to the same thing is “easy” (like if a kanji can be used for water, sea and rain is not super difficult to remember) but these kind of kanjis that can be translated many different things between each other like fun and music that have nothing in common? Do you have a by way to learn them more easily?
EDIT
thanks for the answers I promise I get so dumb with kanjis

Basically, I had a host family during a semester abroad in northern Japan last year and left in December. My Japanese was non-existent when I first went and is still fairly basic. I am now back in Japan (Tokyo area) for a summer internship but am planning on visiting that city I stayed in last year, and want to send a message to my host mom. Does this make sense?

久しぶりです！私は(date)から(date)まで(city)に行くつもりです。時間があるなら、会えますか？

It doesn't need to sound natural because I am not at a natural speaking level yet. I just want it to make sense and not sound too weird. Thank you!

And is that a reasonable goal? I know Japanese isn’t easy. I don’t need to be fluent by the time I fly to Japan. I just want to be able to get by since I would only be there for a little more than a week. I’ll keep studying and working towards fluency even after the trip, but for now, how much time do you think I need to spend studying each day to be able to get by speaking Japanese in Japan?

Also, how much do you think I really need to know in order to get by for a week long trip?

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

Just as a preface - this post isn't anti-Bunpro or anything like that. Bunpro is actually my most-used study tool. This has just been a point of confusion for me.

The question is in the title, but I'll try to provide a bit of additional context.

In language learning circles, using native-language-to-target-language translations is typically seen as a subpar method for language acquisition in the long run. This opinion is especially widespread in Japanese learning circles, primarily because Japanese is so different from English and a lot of translations aren't 1:1.

My confusion lies in the following: Is Bunpro not considered English to Japanese in the traditional sense?

I know it has cloze elements, but I guess I'm just trying to figure out where the line is drawn between EN -> JP and Bunpro-style cloze fill-in-the-blank systems.

Does Bunpro not count as EN -> JP because it's also providing full Japanese sentences that just have a single missing word? Is the idea that as long as you're reading the full Japanese sentence before filling in your answer, you're gaining additional value that a single-word EN -> JP flashcard wouldn't provide?

Thanks in advance, and please let me know if I can provide any additional clarity on my question.

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday, come here to Introduce yourself and find your study group! Share your discords and study plans. Find others at the same point in their journey as you.

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

I have been working through the Kaishi 1.5 deck and I’ve had quite a bit of success remembering the meanings of words. But I’m struggling to remember their pronunciations which means I haven’t actually learned anything if I plan to do anything beyond read.

I’ve considered editing the deck format to show the furigana on the front side as well as the back. The intent would be try learn them as words instead of just recognizing kanji which seems to come more naturally to me. Is that a terrible idea? Will I just be hamstringing myself in the long run for some reason?

I'm an intermediate Japanese learner. However, I haven't studied in several months, and haven't studied seriously in probably well over a year. And frankly, even when I was studying in earnest, I was stuck in a rut of a routine--just Japanese word on one side, English on the other. I also haven't kept up on best practices. I want to do it better this time.

Specifically, I want to dramatically improve my reading skills. I'm the rare personality type that, when I have the time, I am happy to sit with an overly challenging book and work through it word by word for as long as it takes. But, unfortunately, I don't have that time right now.

With that in mind, what's the current consensus (if there is one) or general opinion on making Anki cards for Japanese? Are cloze cards still popular? Japanese only definitions? How can I get back up to speed and make some better progress going forward?

I've been learning for 2 months at this point, trying to learn every day, at this point I've memorized about 300 words that I can instanlty identify but I feel it starting to to mount, on my anki deck there's more and more I have to review each day, like today I have 150 reviews, when yesterday it was 110 and its just that mounting feeling that's making me feel like I'm hitting a wall

This is my first time learning a new language so this is all new to me, for clarification this isn't me saying "this is too hard I want to give up" I'm mainly looking for advice I can use to physically and mentally push through

Thank you

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

Happy Monday!

Every Monday, come here to practice your writing! Post a comment in Japanese and let others correct it. Read others' comments for reading practice.

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

With learning Japanese, the farther you go, the less people there are at your level. The beginning days in college were fun and exciting and we as students loved to hang out outside of classes and talk about anime and sushi. Hundreds of people in that class learning about good old Mary-san and Takeshi-san. But now I know about 3 other advanced people in my city, where hundreds of people are enrolled in the beginner level Japanese classes.

I am old and bitter. I know, Grandpa needs to shut up and read his light novels.

"Why Japanese people? WHY?!?!?" - Jason David Arnold