u/not_a_nazi_actually

The video is 33 HOURS long.

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[youtube] EwRH15lTNgE: Downloading android vr player API JSON

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I assume the issue is the video length, but just in case there is a work around, what can I do?

Edit: actually only the first 3 hours are a video, the next 30 hours are just a still image lol

Part 1.

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With my endurance built up, and more and more of the speaking process being handled by my unconscious mind, as well as not having to focus on what percent of the call time was English vs Japanese, I did kind of try to consciously focus on how much of the conversation I am talking. I often noticed that I was doing less than half of the talking, and often responding with something short like そっか, and thereby robbing myself of some valuable opportunities for me to practice speaking. At this point I have no ingenious method to improve answer length and complexity or improve storytelling, nor do I have any intentions of developing this to a point where I would monopolize the conversation by monologuing, nor am I interested in training for public speech, but for the moment I'm just trying to be aware of not speaking too simply, while also letting simple things come out when appropriate.

Also, I haven't encountered any more of those nasty haters of my Japanese (yet). This is great, becuase these rare events really affected me negatively. It might still happen, but if it had continued to occur at the rate it was occurring, then I would have encounter another 3-6 of these 'nasty haters' over this period. Not encountering them is probably due to a combination of my spoken Japanese actually being better, and me spending more time with people I already know are friendly instead of trying to talk with as many different people as possible.

Not trying to say my speaking is good, it's actually super trash. Through my back-and-forths with ChatGPT I realized that I have a poor understanding of particles. Yep, the things you see and hear all the time. は　が　に, you name it, I'm messing it up. I'm also not using crazy advanced grammar. I'm just trying to make compound sentences with te form and connect things with から and のに, and trying to get my verb conjugations correct. After a lengthy session with ChatGPT I asked about were it though my grammar level was and it said N3. Thinking back I'm not even sure if that meant It thought I could handle N3 grammar or if it thinks I struggle with N3 grammar, but anyway really basic stuff. But again I have to emphasize how much better it is to get feedback even from ChatGPT than getting no feedback from a native speaker (pretty standard).

In addition to the journal method taking a lot of time, it also effectively restricted my phone calls to one a day. Previously (before the journal method) I might get on Hellotalk and spend the whole morning trying to line up phone calls back to back. If I was successful, I might have even gotten to talk with three different people in one morning. But with no corrections and no reflection, what I gained from these phone calls was just a fraction of what I could gain from one phone call + journaling.

What I mean by no keigo. I used no desu/masu. No da at the end of sentences (not keigo, but I still didn't use it). Probably after addressing them 2-3 times with -san suffix, I go straight to yobisute-ing them. I don't even ask for permission (what a rebel). I've been told this is risky, but I've experienced only positive things from this, so it's what I plan to continue to do, and my recommendation for if you're trying to make friends.

I also used this opportunity to get recommendations for non-anime Japanese TV from Japanese people. And the weight of the recommendation of a friend is just so strong, I almost always end up checking it out at least (even if I otherwise wouldn't have), finishing dramas I otherwise would have dropped, and in a couple of cases, really, really enjoying the content (where previously I couldn't finish a single J-drama).

I also got some more-than-politeness-would-demand praise during this output glowup. A girl said she thought I could definitely pass N1. Again, this is meaningless because there is no output section of N1 and I assume she was also unfamiliar with the N1 test entirely, so I will assume she meant she knew someone who told her they past N1 and my speaking was roughly equal to that person's. I was only passing N2 tests at the time and if you remember I was told by another guy before this output arc that he thought I was about N4-N3, so this was lovely to hear. Another person thought I had the skills to be a translator (not true even if AI wasn't better and cheaper). I had transcended nihong jouzuu! Well, not really, I still get nihong jozuu'd after saying just 'konichiha' pretty regularly. but those compliments felt more genuine.

But I had actually used ChatGPT pretty intensely to craft texts in the summer of 2025. Why did I see so much more growth this time? The answer definitely lies in the journaling, the verb conjugation drills and the language islands drills as well as getting more overall practice by persisting with phone calls instead of texting. Texting feels like you should get more practice because more people are willing to text than are will to call, but that all is made up for and more when you find one person who is willing to call you on the phone and give you their full attention.

And I'd just like to point out how much better concepts stuck with output than with just input. With input, even after reading about concepts, or listening to a Youtube video about said concepts, and Anki'ing the card 20 times, the concepts still just felt hazy and unformed, and I couldn't produce it. But after producing and getting corrected until I could basically produce something correctly, the understanding was much stronger. Obviously for output, but also for input. And when there was an Idea that I wanted to convey, and finding the grammar for that idea was x, it would increase my comprehension of that grammar now too because I could associate that idea with that feeling of the idea I wanted to express.

Some people claim that there will be strong carry over from input to output (and therefor you would only need to focus on practicing output a little or even not at all), but for me there was extremely little carry over and I needed to focus on practicing output a lot. Personally, I found the input to output relationship to be VERY weak.

Another benefit was 'thinking in Japanese'. I had often endeavored to 'think in Japanese' but really couldn't beyond using a lot of concentration to produce the most simple thought. But after increasing my talking and writing, thinking in Japanese became more effortless and the sentences I could think in were now also more complicated. I had totally confused the relation, thinking first sentences would form in my head and then I would be able to speak them, but it was actually the opposite. The truth was first I would say or write a sentence and then I would be able to think it.

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Anyway, as I mentioned, I intended to end Anki. I had enough review reps to last me until that end date, so really I think stopping mining here would have been totally reasonable too, but instead, starting in December of 2025 and ending in March of 2026 (the same time as the output practice), I began to take progressively more drastic steps to cut down on my new cards that I would mine. This ultimately cumulated in a 'flip' in how I used Anki, that was immediately useful but will also have its use for how I phase out Anki, AND this method has much further reaching applications than that.

To handle all my reviews, I cut new cards per day to just 2. I dropped to only mining the top 10k (instead of the top 12k (why 12k)), then 9k, then 6k. Funny because as I neared the end, my range got more narrow, exactly the opposite of what should have happened, which I will touch on again later on. I eventually settled on a very complicated frequency based new card introduction, with cards in the sub 6k only requiring two encounters, cards in the 6-9k requiring 3 encounters (before I would learn the new Anki card) and cards in the 9-12k freq range requiring 4 encounters). This effectively meant I wasn't learning many cards in that 9-12k range any more and it also shifted the focus of my Anki'ing away from my personal encounters and prioritized freq lists ranking more heavily. But my aggressive Anki slashing didn't stop there. I guessed if there was a type of word that would be least useful then it must surely be adverbs, and decided to stop turning those into Anki cards too. The two types of words that I mean by this specifically are onomatopoeias and xっxx words like ぴったり、キッチリ、きっかり, びっしり,etc.. These cards were especially difficult for me as Anki cards especially as word cards (because they look the same and often mean the same thing. like, how many of these guys mean 'suddenly' or 'properly'?), and I think it does you much better to see these words in context than anything else, so I cut them as Anki entries. Doesn't mean I wouldn't try to learn these words, but it did mean they weren't going to be Anki cards anymore.

I also gave myself one Easy day (Anki setting) a week, where I set my reviews for that day to 'minimum', and then endeavored by way of just 2 new cards a day to match the other 6 days to what I was doing before (effectively aiming to only doing 85% of the Anki I was doing, with all of that rest going to a single day), And after all these cuts, surely I was done, right? No, there was another cut. The daddy of all cuts.

Anki reviews suck

No, I don't just mean they suck to do (although I mean that too). I'm talking about Anki reviews actually being mathematically bad too. I used the Anki FSRS simulator to test this, and held true for both my personal FSRS optimizations, and the standard optimization. This might not hold true for everyone, I encourage you to play around with the FSRS simulator to find out if this is true for you too. But basically, you get much better bang for time spent when you do new cards than review old cards. You see, because of the shape of the forgetting curve, many of the words you know already know will hang around at around a 50% recall rate for a very long time, even without reviewing. As a result, in terms of words acquired (sum of all their recall probabilities)/time, you simply get better results from just doing new words. Yep, JUST. Your best bang/time comes from only learning new cards and then not reviewing those words. Even if you had more time to do Anki, or didn't mind that Anki was a significant part of your study time, you could still do more Anki, but instead of doing those reviews, just do more new cards. Put another way, there are diminishing returns on each review you do for the same card. You can still justify this if you have more time and an absolute need to learn exactly that card, but for me neither of these things are true.

I know this is crazy talk. It's actually the total opposite of the idea of Anki, with 'the idea of Anki' being that doing reviews is easier than learning or relearning, and thus doing Anki reviews is more efficient. And my actions suggest that I don't buy into team 'No Review' fully, because I still do some Anki reviews (instead of doing 0, as a true believer would). But the combination of the calculations, me being fed up with Anki, and a backlog that I could now clearly see that I wasn't going to ever clear at my rate of 2 new cards a day led me to implement this. I simply limited my reviews per day (similar to the guy in this video, who kind of inspired this). Instead of a limit of 999 reviews per day, I just set my reviews to something like 60-100 a day. I increased my new cards per day from 2 to about 20, and started doing work on my backlog. This actually went terrible within about 10 days, due to one last factor: Review sort order. I had kept it on "due date, then random" (the Anki default). This basically cause many of my reviews to be super young and super relatively overdue reviews. This made Anki difficult to do, I got lot of them wrong and it was literally exhausting (I felt drowsy after doing Anki). The solution: Review sort order: Descending retrievability. Descending retrievability shows the reviews you are most likely to recall first. It is a relatively new option to Anki, so this combination literally wouldn't have been available even 1 year ago. It instantly worked. I had a small number of easy to recall reviews each day, and I could spend that extra time on new words or more immersion.

This combination of limiting daily reviews+ descending retrievability is powerful beyond this. You can skip Anki days (nearly) penalty free, because your reviews are capped anyway (so you won't have more to do if you skip a day) and everyday more reviews become freshly due and you'll be served those first, so it won't be difficult to get back into the swing of things immediately.

This ties into another discussed topic of Anki, which is backlog. Some argue that you shouldn't have a backlog because seeing them as an Anki card soon after you encounter them in immersion helps the Anki card stick better. But this addes another reason to not hae a backlog and that is that the backlog will give you a better totall grasp of the language than your reviews, so you should always prioritize new cards. Do you new cards first in the session too.

I think this also has incredible implications for beginners. If a beginner starts out with a premade 2k deck (for example), they've got a giant backlog (new unseen Anki cards). You can see all the cards in the deck more quickly by limiting reviews+descending retrievability. It's more interesting because you get to learn lots of novel new words everyday and you finish the deck more quickly, at which point you can switch to mining yourself OR increase your review limit/day and descending retrievability makes it a totally tolerable transition. As long as you don't attempt to do all of your overdue reviews in a single day and instead slowly increase your Anki review cap, these difficult-to-retrieve cards will be slowly drip-fed back into your rotation in a nearly unnoticeable way.

There are no solutions, only trade offs. The negative is that there are now some 600ish difficult to retrieve reviews festering in my Anki bank. And honestly, let them. I can still look up those words as I immerse, building reviews through immersion instead of through Anki.

Cool, I had my Anki sorted, but what about the no-subs anime goal? I had been consuming almost all of my content with Japanese subs (except MLP), and even with subs I wasn't really understanding it as much as I'd like. But I mean, I should at least practice watching some things with no subs, right? otherwise how would I ever get to my goal? So I put on some anime with no subs. I jumped into Hunter x Hunter mid series, and I was totally disgusted. It was very difficult to understand, and again a really frustrating and unenjoyable experience. I watched about 10 episodes this way before giving up in frustration (and to be fair 10 episodes is not enough to develop this skill). Well, it had been 5 years and as far as I could tell I was miles away from the 'no subs anime' goal.

And now time for my second anime rant in the same post, cuz IT happened. Jujutsukaisen S3E3. The one where they explain the rules for the culling game. It was pretty darn near impossible for me to understand. And not just me. The fans went crazy too. There were Youtube videos by Japanese people for Japanese people about this episode explaining what happened, what they were even talking about, what was going on. Now almost every Japanese person I've spoken with thinks Jujutsukaisen is difficult to understand. And now this episode which was double difficult to understand because the language is difficult and there are lots of new rules which are by themselves difficult to understand. I can't think of the English equivalent were an episode of a popular series is made so difficult to understand by way of difficult language and by monologues. Again, I think this is due to it originally being a manga, where this type of monologue is reasonable, and just being directly transplanted onto the show (which must be popular with fans), but not really considering understandability of TV (vs book). I think you can kind of use the lovable idiot character (often the main character) like Itadori Yuji or Gon from Hunter x Hunter or Naruto to gauge if you should really be understanding things or not. I think the authors and producers realize that they are being a bit too hard to understand and use these characters as ways to explain things, but as a learner of Japanese their reaction can kind of be a sign to 'let whatever was just said go, cuz that was crazy'.

During my conversations, I ran into a native that thinks modern anime in general is difficult to understand and specifically remembers the later seasons (forgot if she said S3 or 'last season') of Attack on Titan being difficult to understand.

So anyway, all that happened, and my five year anniversary was approaching. It was time to test and I decided to take both a N2 and a N1 mock test. The N2 was so that I could see if there was any improvement at all (because I knew none would show up on the N1), and the N1 was the final boss, which I was confident that I would fail, but nonetheless had to be taken to complete the journey. For 'test prep' (the only test prep I ever did, if you discount having taken... 10 mock JLPTs of different levels) I watched this which gave pretty standard advice, but the advice at 4:20 for a particular type of question was brilliant.

Finals tests

I took the N2. I finished the reading and grammar section with an extra 90 seconds to spare (pretty good because I previously often ran out of time), and got a 121/180 which was again not only my highest N2 score ever, but also my highest raw score ever (so higher than scores I got on the mock N4 and N3). It was cool that the score had gone up 3 point IN 8 MONTHS. So my improvement speed was basically 0. Cool. And thanks to the JLPT now suggesting what CEFR score you are, I imagined that I would need at least a 140/180 on the N2 to have a chance of passing N1, and i didn't get 140/180. Welp, guess I had calculated that 98-99% chance of a fail correctly 4 months ago. I was probably going to score in the 70s or 80s on the mock N1 again and end the 5 year journey on an unsatisfactory note. such is life. Although I had resigned myself to my fate long ago, I kept studying for the last 2 weeks and took my N1 mock test 2 days behind schedule.

So now the N1 mock test. I did reading part first, but what was this? every passage I got was so easy, the easiest ever. There was only a single passage I didn't understand, and all the others I not only understood the passage, but also the questions and the answers. Had I gotten the exact Frankenstein combination of easy reading, language knowledge and listening that I needed to pass the test? No, the language knowledge part was more difficult, and I had used too much time on the reading, so ran out of time before i could start the last part of the language knowledge, just putting down random guesses. And the listening was difficult too. Well, I knew I would only pass if I got all 3 working together in perfect harmony, so I guess this would be an L too... then I graded it. I had gotten my best reading score ever, including mock n4-n2 tests. My language knowledge also wasn't terrible either. and this reading score carried me across the finish line. 102/180.

Why I don't deserve it.

Whenever seeing scores right at the cut off point, i think it's natural to ask if this was perhaps just luck. And in my case I think it certainly was. I got an incredible outlier reading score for me, and that's the only reason I passed. I didn't get lucky in that my guesses just happened to be accurate, but I DID get lucky in that the passages on the test were just super easy for me. And this didn't happen as I thought it would by getting three easy sections for each of the tested skills, but instead just one easy section and one super easy section. My trendline now finally trends upwards, but my trendline suggests I'm around a 92/180, and it could be about another year of hard study before I reach an average score of 100/180, at which point I would estimate I would have a 50% chance of passing a mock N1 exam. Now the trendline has only 5 points to work with so it's also pretty nearly useless, and I wouldn't use it to seriously predict anything. There could also be a model where I wasn't just lucky but that I actually did improve a lot during this last output phase. I think the odds of this being the accurate model are low, especially because my mock N2 test did not show significant improvement. But quite frankly I have no plans of taking another mock N1 at this time, or in the foreseeable future.

And with these last two mock JLPTs under my belt, I have been forced to confront another uncomfortable aspect of my Japanese learning, and that is that my listening has totally plateaued, maybe even declined over the last 6-800 days. This makes some since, as the last year I've gone pretty heavy on subtitles for my Japanese shows, where before I would just try to consume them raw. But when I was learning Chinese I found that subtitled audio content actually did improve my listening too (although In Chinese there's little need to every move away from subtitles because EVERYTHING always has subs baked in), so while part of my understands the stall another part is a little shocked that I'm not seeing the listening score improve. And I have to say, it's not just on the test score that I see that listening comprehension is bad. My subtitle-less anime consumption also corroborates. My listening comprehension is totally sufficient for most conversational Japanese, and I can basically fully understand Layla's Japanese even when I'm not focused on it but just listening to it in the background passively, but for anime and tests listening clearly shows up as a stalled skill.

Interestingly, despite making practically 0 attempt to study grammar, my language knowledge section has steadily and reliably increased over this time period. In fact it's the only section of the test that has done so and that's even DESPITE me now doing it after the reading section now for the last 4 mock tests (two N2 two n1). this is in keeping with other reports I've heard from people who learned through immersion and neglected focused grammar study. My grammar is still absolute trash, but the language knowledge portion of the test actually doesn't seem to be testing for that.

But the improvement during my final output phase, even if measured by mock JLPT test, was certainly no worse than it had been during my mainly reading+listening phase, and potentially it was much greater. And if we measure things not by JLPT progress, but by comfort in speaking and talking with Japanese people, as well as enjoyment, this output phase was much more productive. In fact, because my output was so bad, I often thought of myself as a beginner (because my output was beginner level and it functioned as a bottleneck in me accepting that everything else was intermediate level already), but after this output push, I have to say I now firmly identify as an intermediate language learner (be it true or not).

So what does it feel like to be a fake mock N1 passer? I think some beginners have the impression that if you get to N1, you've done it. You 'can speak Japanese'. Well, for me, I can neither watch my fav animes nor read interesting books without heavy reliance on word look ups. I make constant errors when I speak. I have more or less totally failed to internalize or output transitive/intransitive pairs, a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of the language (something I intend to refine via a presently undefined output exercise sometime in the future). Other common and fundamental grammatical aspects of the language seem to have slipped by me completely and that shows most strongly when I am outputting. Kansai dialect mostly makes my brain explode. I personally expected to be more comfortable with the language than I am now. I totally underestimated the grammatical complexity and also the number of words I would need for Japanese (thinking it would be similar to Chinese, which it wasn't AT ALL).

Closing thoughts (also not brief)

Anki thoughts

At the end of 2025 I took some Anki measurements and I had learned about 10 cards a day over the year on average. This worked out to exactly 3 minutes spent per card learned and this was the exact same as my lifetime average. Although I love FSRS, I don't really think it made me learn faster or anything like that. This could mean that FSRS just isn't better than standard Anki for learning outcomes, or it could just mean that it takes me 3 minutes to learn a new card regardless of the spacing program used (or at least that standard Anki was good enough for me to max out how fast I could learn via SRS).

Throughout the mid and later parts of my Japanese learning journey, I would do as much Anki as I could stomach each day (about 30 minutes). I would set new card per day to get my in the ballpark of that 30 minutes a day number. This resulted in some mental frailty that manifested in 2025. When chores, errands, and other aspects of my life needed to be attended to, I would think to myself "I don't have time for this! I have to do my Anki reps (+the corresponding amount of immersion to make those new Anki cards)". Basically I was already fully using my free time on learning Japanese so that there was little time left for other thing in my life, and when those other things inevitably turned up in my life, I despaired.

I think this was largely just due to me learning new cards slowly, having too many cards, and making them as difficult as possible to recall.

Firstly, I used word cards. I noticed (by way of one of the many premade decks I had downloaded) that sentence cards made the information 'too easy' to recall, often being able to recall the back of the card without my eyes even focusing on the word I was trying to learn. To combat this, I decided on word cards when I started making my own cards.

Next, my intervals grow pretty slowly. Maybe this is because I choose word cards (instead of sentence cards), maybe I simply don't learn new words very quickly.

I also downloaded too many pre-made decks, and made audio only on front flashcards (and then make them again as a kanji-on-front card as needed when I encountered them while reading) for a considerable part of my Japanese learning journey.

I truthfully had no concept of how much Anki work this would be for myself, and how I would react to it. Quiet frankly I have spent far more time in Anki than I ever would have wanted to. Looking at the Anki time approaching 1000hrs is repulsive to me.

My language learning philosophy is that you should not spend too much time on flashcards. Maybe 25-33% of your time can be spent on them in the beginning, and this percentage should decrease over time. But now I was in my forth and fifth year of learning Japanese and many days Anki was still taking 25% of my study time.

So I went about adopting a 'time saving method' which was improving my word acquired/time spent ratio by setting my desired retention to 0.70 and I used this desired retention rate for much of 2025. But with the new FSRS (released in July of 2025) now mapping my forgetting curve pretty accurately, and my retention rate actually dropping to .70 (and sometimes a little lower), I began to feel like this was too low and upped it to 0.75. It was a worse word acquired /time spent ratio, but a more comfortable retention rate.

But this wasn't enough. I had high hopes for FSRS, thinking that it would be my savior. But it super wasn't.It's only something seen in hindsight, but the only things that would have cut back my Anki down to the ideal amount would be something drastic, such as limiting total new cards learned, limiting reviews per day, or making the cards extremely easy to recall.

At this point I have seen many people describing doing Anki for Japanese learning in 'lax way', and some of these people have great success with JLPT tests with these methods. While these lax methods may not be for you, I think some of them could definitely be worth trying out. Some of these methods include: restricting reviews per day, grading cards super quickly, grading cards correct if 'the word looks familiar' but not necessarily getting the reading or meaning correct, not penalizing forgotten cards heavily (if you aren't using FSRS), making sentence cards instead of word cards (which tends to make recall the back of the cards easier), and putting more info on the front of the card, including reading, audio, or even an image. I also think I bit off more than I can chew trying to mine all words 12k and below in a 5 year period, and I think especially beginners could use word freq lists to increase what they mine in steps. Maybe dedicating your first year of mining to under 6k, then next year under 9k, then third year under 12k. etc. and really try and get the most bang for each of you Anki cards.

And you remember how I talk about frustration growing with Anki flashcards after my fifth year of Chinese? Actually I took the wrong lesson from where my frustration came from, because it wasn't actually the number of years I spent on flashcards that correlated with frustration. It was from Anki. The first 5 years I used flashcards I used an app called Pleco. It implemented a SRS (which if I recall correctly was quiet booty) but it DIDN'T give daily reviews that you HAD to clear (or felt like you had to) it was a 0 pressure environment, and I would only do the flashcards when I was waiting in line somewhere (something at the time I had to do a lot of). although I was only recalling about 50% of the flashcards, it was all good.

These days I don't spend my time waiting in lines, so Anki required a special sit down session just to get it done. Anki feels like you have to do it everyday. Many cards I felt like I could improve with an edit or two, so it made more sense to do it on the computer where editing is easier and faster, and thereby further became a thing not to be done on a handheld device. Just the quantity of time that Anki demands was what killed doing flashcards for me when I was studying Chinese NOT the duration of time.

Apps thoughts

During my last output phase, I thought I would also check out a 2 more apps and I'll leave my review of them here. One was Tandem. You have to pay to be able to use phone calls, so I quit using it after 2-3 days (because I really get so much more of the other person's focus on a phone call than vs text) and I can't recommend. Also I probably only messaged 10-20 people and I just happened to get a crazy person who was typing everything in caps and accused me of being Japanese not American (which is crazy, because I'm white).

The next was LINE. I can't leave a detailed review, because I tried to sign up and it just didn't work. LINE also has no customer support at all (there might be some available if you live in Japan, but otherwise no). I was pretty bummed about this because I was looking forward to making Japanese friends that weren't necessarily interested in learning English. But as it is I'm not even sure LINE would have worked for that because I'm not actually sure what methods of friend adding LINE has available. Final verdict: LINE needs some customer support.

Which means I begrudgingly have to recommend Hellotalk as the best place to talk with natives (that I know of so far). Although it has extremely restrictive rules on what you can talk about, and the Japanese are usually there to learn English, neither of which are particularly ideal, the many free features and ease of use just make it the best thing I've encountered.

Thoughts on the idea of living in Japan

Strangely, the more I learned about Japan as a place to live, the less I wanted to live there. Whether it's work/life balance, salary/cost of living balance, their national average age and an economy built to support the elderly, loveless couples, holding people at a distance and often struggling to make friends post-school graduation, size of housing, etc., the more I learned, the lower became the percieved quality of life of living in Japan. This puts me in a bit of an awkward situation as the time I've put into acquiring the skill doesn't really translate into any quality of life improvements, especially with the percent of the surrounding population that is Japanese being effectively 0%. Even anime wasn't better now that I can understand it (with subs and infinity dictionary look ups). Although I've recently made an important leap forward in my conversational ability, it still doesn't feel like I've made friends because at most they may proactively greet me like once a month (and usually not at all). I've also never seen those Hellotalk 'friends' in real life and only encountered Japanese people twice IRL (and neither of the conversations went well. first time because I couldn't say anything, the second time because the Japanese person refused to speak Japanese). This leaves a very strong 'now what?' question in my mind, that I think almost everyone in the community will eventually face (especially if you don't live in japan).

Thoughts on habit/motivation

On Youtube we have lots of guys who will say "habits beat motivation". To begin with, I don't think these things are opposites so there's no need to choose between them in the first place. But for me I will say that anything I didn't really want to do never became a habit, and one of my longest running habits (Anki) actually really started to affect me negatively. By which I mean to stubbornly argue the opposite, that motivation beats habit and only through motivation can habits be born and maintained.

Thoughts on content

Firstly, I thought watching anime in Japanese would be better than watching it with English subs. It wasn't. The translators of anime (to English) generally do a very good job.

When immersing, I often asked myself if the content was engaging and level appropriate. Lots of the time it wasn't, which would set off another hunt for content. This is why Harry Potter was so good. I knew I enjoyed the content, so I didn't have to question that. I started reading it in Japanese because I realized that I had forgotten most of the 7th book, so I had my reason to read it. And it's long, so I wouldn't be faced with the question 'what next' for a very long time, letting me pour all the time into just reading it. If there's anything you are positive you will enjoy and is long, I think that makes for really good learning content because the only thing left at that point is the language. Getting recommendations from natives that I spoke with personally and regularly almost elevated that recommendation to the 'I'm positive I will enjoy this' category and at the same time also gave me the motivation to watch it (now I will be able to talk about it with my language partner).

Gauging engagement by drowsiness. I often got drowsy studying Japanese in year 2 and 3, and it came back a bit in year 5. I think that if not confused for natural sleepiness, drowsiness can be useful as a sign that the content isn't interesting or is too difficult.

So what IS next?

As far as output time, I've only got about a quarter to a half of what I would want in total, so I'd like to speak more with Japanese people, which I've been enjoying a lot recently. I have an idea of an exercise I could do while acquiring these output hours which basically would require me to actually Ankify many of the sentences from my language islands page (now something I'm willing to consider since my Anki reviews are throttled), and who knows, I might actually do it one day. I'd also still like to get to the point where anime is watchable without subtitles (even Japanese subtitles) although frankly, I think I realize it never will get there. The constant use of rare words kind of guarantees that dictionary look ups will always be necessary (the only question is whether I will be doing those look ups by ear or by subtitle). Also with the confidence that the English translations are often very accurate, I'm now questioning the expected marginal benefit of this goal.

Beyond that, time spent on Japanese must be reduced. Firstly, I need to focus on my career more than before and even time spent on studying foreign languages I'd now like to split between Japanese and Chinese, as I have neglected Chinese (my second language) pretty hard in order to make more time to study Japanese.

Why did I write this?

Because I have some useful exercises that I'm quite proud of. Given that it's a minority of the community that's talking about them (if anyone), me writing it may be the only place you'll ever see them.

Further, this journey was hard. It was full of negative emotions. It IS full of negative emotions. I had several advantages since I had already learned Chinese. Because of that I roughly understood the process of learning a second language and that second language had been Chinese, so Kanji bonus. I had no wife, no life (mostly). I alternately had a job or school, so I didn't devote all of my life to learning Japanese so this wasn't AJATT by any means, but Japanese took up most of my free time. But despite that, it was a struggle.

You're often sold stories of how fast or how effortless the journey will be (and hey maybe YOUR journey will be fast and effortless). Heck, even me passing a mock JLPT N1 in 5 years might even be contributing to that, because it might just take you longer. But the truth is, my journey was neither fast nor effortless, and I don't think you should expect yours to be either.

In the same way that your journey may be more or less fast or more or less effortless than other people's, the methods that work best for you and the methods that you will require will be different from other people's too.

If you have an idea for how to improve your Japanese, I implore you to try it out immediately and see if it works for you. Whether that's an idea from this post, something you thought of yourself, something that some else said that you think could help your specific bottlenecks, try it. Some of these ideas just won't work for you, and some will be shockingly good, but you'll never know if you don't try.

Hours (estimated)

Duolingo: 111

Anki: 886

Reading (estimated): 540

Listening (estimated): 1900

Speaking: 150+

Journaling (estimated): 70 hrs

Total (estimated): 3650

*These estimations should only be used as very rough ball parks. I didn't actually time many of the things I did, so they are probably inaccurate due to poor estimation methods. They also don't include things I forgot I did. They also don't account for 'real time hours'. For example Anki doesn't account for the times spent editing the cards or time spent oogling my Anki stats. Hellotalk time doesn't include time in voicerooms, time spent looking for someone to call, or time spent talking to that person in English. And they also don't represent that most of my mental energy was going to Japanese during this time, or the time spent researching or thinking about how to improve my methods, time spent looking for new content, etc.

1 TV recommendation ホットスポット

1 movie recommendation あの花が咲く丘で、君とまた出会えたら　

To anybody who did get to the point where you could understand anime without subtitles, what exercises did you think helped the most in getting you there?

TL;DR use tameguchi when trying to make friends