Trying To Study Japanese Again

Posted on Tue 18 June 2024 in Life • 2 min read

Struggle

Throughtout the years, I have made various attempts to learn the Japanese language in some capacity; I blame my introduction to anime in my teens. Pretty much all my attempts to learn Japanese in some capacity have been unsuccessful. It did not matter whether it was from self-study or from taking University courses. I could never really get to the point of forming my own sentences in Japanese. My listening comprehension has been poor; I could not even make out the Japanese that was said most of the time. I could barely read books made for young Japanese children.

Starting in January 2024, I started to do a recap of the Japanese that I had learned before. That led to going down another YouTube rabbit hole and finding new Japanese language learning channels. It started with JLPT test review material. Later, I came across various life and travel vlog channels talking about various places in Japan or just about life in general. Then I found some interesting Japanese language study channels.

Despite putting less time into studying than when I was more serious, I feel like I have been learning more and building up on what little I had learned before. Ever metric I have been using seems to have gotten slightly better. I think one big difference is that I unintentionally made having some form of immersion a bigger priority. I watch some Japanese news, listen to Japanese dialogue with Japanese subtitles to catch what I missed hearing (no English), and reading some short Japanese writing mainly in the form of advertisements (Mitsuwa grocery story primarily). Especially when I was taking courses in University, my time was spent just focusing on the course material (and other classes) and that was a giant mistake.

Conclusion

I have no ambition to use Japanese in any professional capacity anymore and I have not been a watcher of anime since around 2009. I do not even expect to obtain the otaku dream and get to the point of being able to watch anime without subtitles. There is far less motivation for me to attempt to learn Japanese now. Continuing to study the language any further seems to be my attempt to finish a task I started a long time ago. Luckily, I still have some personal interest so there is some small motivation.

To end this post, I will link to some of the content I have been consuming to learn Japanese a bit more.