Japanese
updated April 18, 2025
Something that forms the biggest part of my identity is the fact that I can understand Japanese. It's arguably the most significant thing that makes me who I am. So how did it all begin?
I started in May of 2022. Before that, I spent a bunch of time trying random stuff that didn't just work properly; I was also pretty inconsistent before this.
The main principle behind how I learn Japanese is usually referred to as immersion. I think it's gotten pretty popular over the years, but is definitely still niche as a method.
The main idea is that you, well, immerse yourself in Japanese media. It's not exactly rocket science, but I suppose that's also the reason it's hard to convince people it works.
The very first piece of media that I took in raw was Pokémon Journeys. I distinctly remember how the only stuff I understood were the Pokémon cries. Fun times.
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But this brings me to one of the, if not the most important thing when it comes to
approaching language acquisition like this: the ability to feel stupid tolerate
ambiguity.
The main idea is that it's highly unrealistic to expect to understand everything when you're reading or listening. Even if you've been doing this for years, you're bound to encounter at least one word in a novel that you haven't seen before. Sure enough, I was reading a volume of Kuma4 recently (which is known to be on the "easy" side of light novels) and still came across some words I hadn't seen before.
I'm not sure if this computer science analogy works (and please ignore it if it doesn't click), but essentially your goal is to make your mind process the target language like a hash function, not like a bijection. Don't be too ambitious, I guess?
Anyways, Pokémon Journeys. Another important thing I started doing (consistently!) in May of 2022 was flashcards. Flashcards are essentially the answer to developing your long-term memory well, and in the context of learning Japanese, there are many tools people use as their flashcard system, like Anki. I used jpdb, and it's still my main flashcard system for Japanese to this day.
Speaking of flashcard systems, there are a couple of additional principles that I feel the need to introduce when I'm talking about them: being consistent and being balanced.