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

This is the (totally unrequested) sequel to this post. In true Japanese progress update fashion, this post will be exhaustively verbose. Because of it's length (about 14k words) I invite the less interested reader to read only the bolded parts, which detail the most useful exercises and epiphanies.

So picking up where I left off, I had just failed another mock N1 at the end of 4 years, and not so much due to study burnout (although I was quite down in the dumps after not JUST failing my mock N1 but also showing now improvement at all), but I was living in a new city and after being cooped inside during a cold winter, I was very eager to get out and enjoy the spring weather and see my new city, which I absolutely did. It was wonderful and I noticed that I still had time to do my Anki, some reading, and some anime almost every day. This was without doubt exactly how I should have spent my time. And that leads me to begin this post with perhaps the most hard hitting question you should be asking yourself when studying Japanese and that is 'how much is this benefiting me vs costing me'. It's seems to present day me that I very much underestimated the cost and overestimated the rewards at the beginning. I would have very much regretted if I hadn't left my house that spring to do those things, but I don't regret the reduced time spent studying Japanese that spring at all, so I'm truly glad I got out.

When I started to get back into studying more seriously, I decided I needed to address my greatest weakness: speaking. It wasn't very good (and I had been told so by 3 natives in a very nasty way (a tiny minority of all the people I interacted with, I mostly just got jouzu'd)). I had done lots of shadowing before, and I found that it basically did nothing at all to improve my ability to personally create sentences, so I knew I needed to try something else.

I also noticed something by joining Hellotalk voicerooms. Other non-Japanese with Japanese speaking skills much better than mine weren't using any complicated grammar or rare words. Everything they said I could comprehend, and I 'knew'. I had all the knowledge to get to that level, I just needed to activate it.

Also through these voicerooms I discovered something very curious: the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese are one of the largest immigrant groups in Japan, and I'd often find a Vietnamese person in these voicerooms that lived and worked in Japan. They would chat away without pausing, but their accent can be quite strong. So strong that I was often just didn't understand what they were saying. But they were still conversing with Japanese people, and seemingly even more fluently than me. Not just that, native Japanese seemed to have little difficulty understanding them, even despite the strong accent. At the time, I thought this was for sure due to their ability to produce grammatically correct sentences. As a result, I determined I needed to nail down my grammatical accuracy and sentences structures as a top priority (and by this i mean higher priority than accent training). Present day me now wonders if grammatical correctness wasn't what made these Vietnamese successful communicators, but perhaps a different reason, such as Japanese people having encountered the Vietnamese accent occasionally in real life (and thus are already accustomed to it), or even if it could be that Vietnamese master pitch accent more quickly (Vietnamese being a tonal language itself) and that producing the correct pitch accent made them more easily understood by Japanese people.

I also realized that no matter how much I immersed (especially if that immersion was anime), I would never encounter someone saying the exact things I want to say, talking in the exact manner I would want to talk in. This not only has to do with my life and my immersion material being different, but also my life and experiences being unique, not just unique to anime, but also unique if were to compare it with the average Japanese life. So I needed to deal with these problems. I needed to learn to make my own sentences separately from immersion.

And then I found it. Mikel. His philosophy if summed up would basically be: learn lots of words quickly through mnemonic associations, then make a 'language island' sheet (in L1) of a thousand sentences that you would like to say, convert it to target language via AI translation tools, read it, use AI text-to-audio tools to make an audio file to listen to, and then commit the sentences to memory so that you can retrieve and produce them at any moment. I already knew quite a few words from 4 years of Anki (although you could say specific output based vocab training could be useful, because almost all of my Anki cards were comprehension cards, not output cards), so I focused not on his methods of acquiring vocabulary, which may have been 'a little optimistic', but on the other exercises. Writing a thousand sentences seemed quite daunting (there are only 600 in this monster post for context), but I actually quickly wrote down some 3-400 of sentence I knew I wanted to say, and it was unexpectedly quite enjoyable. I wrote down topics that I knew I would want to talk about but didn't think I could currently produce, as well as things about my life I had never run into in my immersion. I wrote about them first in English, then put them into deepl.com to get the translated version. Then I would read over the translated deepl.com version looking for mistakes. Since I could already read, this made finding mistranslations pretty easy, and I would ask chatgpt to fix the ones that were wrong until it gave me a sentence I liked. This self-edit process would have been impossible for a beginner, so that's something to keep in mind. I do want to note that I already had about 70 hours of conversation training down from Hellotalk, so I could do self introductions, talk about hobbies and other pretty generic conversation stuff (have you been to japan, have you been abroad, do you have pets/siblings, where in japan do you live, etc.), so these 3-400 sentences did NOT re-cover that stuff. In other words these 300+ sentences were sentences in addition to the most basic stuff. I then converted about 250 of those 300+ sentences into audio files, and began listening to them. That was fine for a couple of weeks, but it became boring to relisten to them all the time, and more than that I also didn't care for the AI voice much. The AI voice also mispronounced some of the kanji from my language island sheet. I corrected some of these by just feeding the text-to-speech AI kana versions of those sentences, but I quickly got tired of this too and gave up. There are some better text-to-voice AI out there, but at the point I just didn't feel like redoing the process. I would always be left with the same problem of being bored by listening to the repeated content. This took the wind out of my sails, and I did not continue with Mikel's method, but leave a mental bookmark here, because at this point I had still neglected to do the most useful part of his method, so I'll be back to this point later.

I kept my language island worksheet, and continued to add to it over the next couple of months. Sentences that I tried to say but stumbled over or couldn't, sentences I came across while reading or watching that I thought were funny and wanted to use myself later, little 2-3 sentences stories about some event in my life I knew I would want to talk about. This seemed like a good idea, but I ultimately never got around to practicing these additions, so up to now (present me in 2026) they've been a waste.

With my new 'training' under my belt I set out to see if I had improved. I also simultaneously resigned myself to texting (instead of calling) because so many people were unwilling to have a phone call, and even with those that were willing, still often couldn't, largely due to the time difference. Previously I had done primarily voice calls, trying to model a baby's acquisition (talk before write). Since I was texting, I thought I'd take advantage of ChapGPT IF I wasn't sure how to make a sentence. My rule was that I could only ask ChatGPT to examine a Japanese sentence that I had already created first. I wouldn't ask ChatGPT to translate an English sentence into a Japanese sentence. I quickly noticed that IF I thought I didn't know how to form a sentence then indeed ChatGPT almost always found the sentence grammatically wrong. So I actually expanded my ChatGPT usage to check EVERY sentence I wrote for grammatical errors (after all, if all the ones I thought might be wrong were indeed wrong, then how many of the sentences that I thought were right were actually wrong?).

Just as an aside, mattvsjapan has a video that states you really can't expect a native to correct all of your mistakes, especially if you want even the smallest of pronunciation mistakes corrected. But I think for learning Japanese the reality is that they don't just not correct ALL of your mistakes, but that they correct none of your mistakes. So as far as feedback from Hellotalk language partners goes I was getting effectively none. This video talks about this, but in short Japanese people don't give direct feedback. But for improvement you need corrections, and when I was learning Chinese I guess I was just naturally corrected enough that I never even needed to think about the topic of corrections at all, but for Japanese I was getting so few corrections that it became a massive issue in acquiring the language, a problem that I needed to think about and solve. And the answer was AI. Even if at this point I found someone willing to give feedback (I didn't find this person), I had been starved of corrections for so long that I now had more questions and needed more feedback than any person could realistically provide. While ChatGPT clearly occasionally makes errors, after asking some natives on Hellotalk if ChatGPT's Japanese was good or not ChatGPT got their blessing (although.... were they just nihongo jouzu'ing ChatGPT too?).

Unfortunately I was still wasn't enjoying my texting experiences with Japanese people (again, I'm comparing this to texting experiences I had with Americans and Chinese). My sentences were now grammatically correct (having been screened by ChatGPT prior to sending them off), and I really tried to make these conversations interesting. They just didn't seem interested in talking or interested in me. I think this has to do with the supply/demand dynamics of Hellotalk with Japanese being the most 'in demand' language on the app, along with many of the Japanese people being on there to learn English, so they probably can't be excited about getting texts in Japanese. The people MOST interested in me/talking with me might send me a morning and/or evening text and then very little else. The conversations all fizzled out frustrating quickly. I found that for quantity, I would have just been better off having a single phone call, simply because speaking is faster than typing and the person is actually focused on you during a phone call (hopefully) so I get more back and forths in a short call than versus days worth of texting. I also noticed that most of the people who previously said 'if we text first and get to know each other, then we can have a phone call' were also not interested in a phone call after texting and getting to know each other, so I no longer took that promise to mean anything.

It was also around this time that I ran into another 3 Japanese individuals on voice calls who told me my Japanese was terrible (fair) in rather nasty ways. I had previously encountered this. Why I encountered another 3 so close together was probably a combination of bad luck and also me trying to break out of my comfort zone and say some new sentences that I couldn't produce quickly or perfectly yet. But although these people were a tiny minority, and not representative of the majority, these encounters really affected me. The highs of my interactions with Japanese weren't high (and generally very short lived) and the lows were pretty terrible. One of my goals when I started learning Japanese was to talk in Japanese with Japanese people. Interpersonal connections were a huge part of me sticking with learning Chinese, and I knew if I was going to succeed at Japanese I was going to need those positive human connections again. Having totally failed to build these connections, I became gloomy and bitter. I decided I was going to learn to speak even without a language partner. I spoke into a camera about a random topic (I used cards from the game 'Taboo' for the topic) and relistened to the recording for my mistakes, run sentences I stumbled over by ChatGPT and then talk about the same topic again and again until I 'got it right'. This drill was useful, but also dreadfully boring, and I stopped doing it before I even had 1 full hour of recorded videos. At the start of my journey I made a five year commitment to learning Japanese, and it looked very much like I was going to reach the end of the five years without having made a single Japanese friend and I basically was mentally preparing to let my Japanese slowly atrophy after the end of the fifth year.

On a positive note, about this time a new FSRS version came out with Anki version 25. This was the first version of FSRS that I truly considered to have an accurate algorithm. Previous versions underestimate my ability to recall mature cards and over estimated my ability to recall young cards. Now I was pretty near fully satisfied with the FSRS algorithm.

I had slowly been making my way through the Japanese version of Harry Potter, occasionally reading parts of short web novels and watching Japanese subbed anime at around this time. I decided to switch things up and dabble in some J-dramas. You might hear that anime is bad for your Japanese because of whatever reason (overly dramatic, overly rude, overly stylized, etc.), but I'd like to talk about one more dimension, and that is the "written-work-to-TV" dimension. This happens in English too, where authors use rarer words in their books than you are likely to encounter in conversation, and whether this is author preference (to use rarer words) or reader preference (to read rarer words) I'm not sure, but I thought there was a name for this phenomenon but now I can't find it, so if you know it post below. Anyway, it happens for Japanese written content too. I felt that anime is often adapted faithfully from the manga (fans love that I'm sure) and it made no allowances for how much more difficult would be able to understand from listening alone vs reading and seeing the kanji, the written manga had more liberty to use rare words (because it was written and the kanji could be seen) and this was a big reason for there being an endless need to look new words during anime. At least that was my thought. To test this theory, I watched some J-dramas (especially those that weren't initially based off of a manga). I basically instantly discovered that these j-dramas were indeed far easier to understand than many popular anime, which made me more confident that my idea was right. Additionally, in J-dramas you get to see the real expressions people make with their faces (instead of the overly animated ones or sometimes the totally inexpressive blank face that anime often features), how they move their mouth when they talk, etc. Unfortunately, of the J-dramas I tested during this period, none appealed to me, and I would watch 2-6 episodes before giving them up to try another.

I also decided to start my first visual novel. The first 4 days of starting the VN I read some personal record numbers of characters per day and I though I had discovered the key that would get me to read massive numbers of characters/day. Unfortunately, the book's storyline was almost non-existent, and I quickly lost interest. I felt like the writer was trying to cram as much dialogue per still image as possible. I realized the main reason my characters per day was higher than usual was largely due to me just clicking in the hopes that the image would change, only to be disappointed again and again. When I realized it was due to me just mindlessly clicking long after I had ceased to enjoy it, I quit that visual novel.

Having not found a J-drama that I was really into, nor did I enjoy that one VN that I tried, I continued with Japanese subtitles anime. Although my real goal was no subtitles, it was just too difficult without subtitles. I tried some no-subtitiles My Little Pony (on Youtube) and found that without subtitles, that level of content was most appropriate for my listening (I was looking for something I could nearly totally follow without subtitles, and with very few look ups). MLP was honestly far more engaging than I expected, and I probably got 8-10 hours of listening immersion just from MLP alone, which means... it had actually beaten out the J-dramas I had tried in terms of engagement. Don't know if that says more about J-dramas, or more about me, or more about MLP, but a funny observation. Obviously MLP has all the same problems anime does, except instead of it being originally from a manga or book, it was originally English and thus everything is translated over, and that absolutely includes the jokes, but that just didn't seem to bother me that much.

It was also around this time where I was in a voice room in Hellotalk and without prompting a Japanese native told me he thought my spoken Japanese was about N4-N3 level. He didn't do this in a nasty way at all. Although this comment was kind of meaningless because there is no spoken portion of the JLPT, and this guy was not necessarily acquainted with the JLPT at all, I took it to mean 'I know a guy who passed the N4 or N3 and you kind of sound like them'. Although I had passed two N2 mock tests, It was kind of a super memorable 'wow, that's how much worse my speaking is' kind of moment for me.

I took another JLPT test around this time, but I supposed I would surely fail an N1, so just to feel good (to 'pass' instead of 'fail') I took an N2 and got 118/180. This was the first time I implemented a 'test taking strategy' which was simply to do the reading before the language knowledge part of the test. This was also my highest raw score ever of any mock JLPT but it was only about 10 points higher than I had gotten about 13-14 months ago on my last N2 test. The progress was so slow. But it was nice because unlike my N1 test scores, which were totally stagnant, even downward trending, my N2 test consistently trended upward, even though that slope was minor.

Life began to get really stressful at this point with work and ANOTHER move, and my study time was reduced again. I was too stressed to really sleep, so I would read some Japanese version of Harry Potter, and this calmed me down enough to sleep, thus rediscovering the relaxing benefits of reading. I really think I wouldn't have been able to sleep around this time if it weren't for reading, and I probably wouldn't have been reading if it weren't for studying Japanese at the time, so in that way learning Japanese kind of saved me. Of course, I probably would have gotten the same (or even stronger) effect from reading an English book, but like I said, I was only reading because of learning Japanese.

Post move, I cleared a pretty big Anki backlog (did something like 4-500 new cards in 3 days, which is absolutely ridiculous for me) and created the corresponding number of reviews.

I added conversation corpus word freq list to Yomitan (in addition to 3 other word freq lists I had been using this whole time). I started a second VN (Steins;gate). Again, the first couple of weeks of the VN inspired me to read more than I normally would, but this quickly faded over time. It seems to me that I could have attempted to take advantage of this "shiny new VN" phenomenon and just start a new VN every month regardless of whether or not I completed the old one. It was at first difficult to tell if the extra reading was due to more free time or the The "shiny new VN" effect, but it does seem to me that for about a month from the date I started a new VN I did read more even when controlling for extra free time. I never took advantage of this.

I also watched the Chainsaw Man movie (with Japanese Subs) about this time. This was memorable to me because I wanted to watch this in one sitting (and I did), but the amount of things I still needed to look up actually made this a very frustrating and unenjoyable experience. And that was WITH Japanese subs. Imagine if I had no-subs on, it would have been even worse. A far cry from the goal of watching anime with no subs.

Having now been immersing and mining for well over a year now, I realized I already had Anki cards for all the words that I would encounter once a year or more, assuming that I continued to spend most of my free time learning Japanese (something I didn't intend to do) and also assuming that I didn't change my content significantly (a pretty decent assumption). I now had to reconcile with the idea of learning new words in Anki might not even being worth it. Each new Anki card would likely appear once pear year or less. Wouldn't my time be better spent just looking up that word when I came to it? Unfortunately, Japanese (and anime in particular) is frustratingly full of exactly this rareness (see it once a year or less) of word. Anyway, unsure if doing new cards was even worth it at this point, and having plenty of reviews to do even with few or no new cards learned per day I set my new anki words to just 2 per day.

The end of Anki

With the end of 5 years clearly in sight now, I used the Anki FSRS simulator and I realized I was going to have lots of reviews due for a very long time, even if I learned no cards a day and even long after I intended to quit using Anki. You see, I am planning to quit Anki some time around the middle of 2026. I decided this based on my experience learning Chinese, where flashcards increased my frustration significantly after 5 years (while simultaneously not benefiting me because I wouldn't even necessarily see that Anki card word again for a very long time). This is all to say that I was going to stop Anki and Anki reviews would be left undone somehow or another, and it was now time for me to decide how that would happen.

I took another N1 mock test in December to see where things were, 78/180. upset but becoming used to the awful scores with no improvement, the problem was I still couldn't draw an upward trend line with my N1 scores. The basically means that as far as I could tell, my N1 score did not correlate at all with my time in Anki, time spent reading, time in the language, anything. But I also noticed that if I took the highest score in grammar, reading, and listening, from among the 4 N1 mock tests I had taken so far, and piece them together Frankenstein style, I would get a passing score (104/180!). I did some lazy calculations, and calculated that I had about a 1-2% chance that fate would work with me and give me the 3 easiest sections I had ever encountered all on the same test. In that event, I would pass the N1. In all other events, I would fail. Since I was thinking I was about 98-99% percent likely to fail, I basically just said 'fuck it' and changed my study DRAMATICALLY. I also let myself chill out and play some video games, something I had banned myself from for most of this Japanese journey. Indeed, part of the reason I was learning Japanese was to spend my time in a 'more productive way' than video games. But I wasn't exactly waking up excited to do Anki reps or struggle through the Chainsawman movie, and I was feeling like studying Japanese really didn't provide enough excitement/fun to really count as a hobby anymore.

The following changes were done purely out of 'fuck it' energy, but really, if you see that what you have been doing doesn't correlate with higher scores (or however you are assessing yourself) changing your methods and routine makes a lot of sense.

Part 2, The Breakthrough Method

I had intended to write this entire post in chronological order, but so much happened in December of 2025 that I couldn't figure out how to keep it chronological and instead decided to organize this time frame by idea.

Like I said, I had mentally written off passing the N1 (even a mock one), and turned my attentions once again to output, only to accidentally discover my single biggest breakthrough yet. This was set in motion by a video by Red Pill Japanese. The gist of his content is 'friends don't use keigo with each other, if you want to make friends, don't use keigo.'. Exactly why I had been using keigo this entire time wasn't really a conscious decision, but if I had to say why, it was some combination of the following: I heard it's the safest and least likely to offend someone, many Youtubers use keigo (especially Layla who was basically my main background passive listening when I was in the kitchen), when I was making my language island page some months ago, many things were translated into keigo (totally without my prompt), and Genki 1 textbook that I had done about 9 of the first Chapters of was basically totally conducted in keigo. Further, learning to conjugate just desu and masu was easier than learning to conjugate all the casual verb endings properly. So I had just been using keigo this whole time.

Anyway,I decided to give casual speech a try, and make one last attempt at output and making Japanese friends. In order to do this, I would search for a language partner on Hellotalk that was willing to have a voice call and I did the following 3 exercises:

1. I went through my language islands, 10 lines at a time. If a line was in keigo (most were), I first converted it to tameguchi (I often used ChatGPT for this). This time I skipped the step of making an AI audio file that Mikel recommends. I would then read each of these 10 sentences OUT LOUD at exactly the volume I would If I was really talking to someone (no muttering under my breath stuff). When I completed that, I'd do it again 2 more times for a total of 3 sets of 10 reps. I would then cover up the Japanese side, and, from the English sentence prompt, recall how I said it in Japanese and say it out loud. After each line I would reveal the Japanese sentence and check If said it right. If I didn't, I would cover the Japanese and do it again (exactly like a flashcard). When I got to the end of the 10 sentences this way, if I had made any errors recalling the Japanese sentence (I usually had), I would run these 10 sentences back one more time in the same way, with the Japanese line covered. This out loud production exercise was exactly what I had skipped before, which was a shame because this exercise yielded the most results.

I could have flashcardified this process, in fact this process was begging to be Ankified, but frankly my relationship with Anki had become pretty toxic and was negatively affecting my mental, so I did this all from the excel file.

I always intended to use the language islands for output, but never used it to train output until this point, which was just goofy. Having a giant excel sheet doesn't help one bit, you actually need to train the output. There is also no need to first write 1000 sentences in English , then convert to Japanese, then practice. Instead it would be much better to just do about 10 sentences at a time, train yourself to recall them, and then make the next 10 sentences. Although I had grown my language island sheet to almost 700 lines, I really only ever practiced the first 200 of those lines, but even with that, the results were phenomenal.

2. I learned how to conjugate my casual verb endings. I had of course, already read about this, and even made some Anki card about how these conjugations work (these anki cards were terrible, the front said something like how do you conjugate these verbs that end with 'gu' and the back would give the answer). Although I easily aced these Anki cards, it didn't translate to production at all.

So I made better Anki cards. Way better. I made about 14 cards. I put this link https://katsu.arthurhoek.nl/#/home on the front of the Anki card, along with a screenshot of all the toggles I wanted to practice (with different toggles for each of the 14 cards). Almost all of the cards were: Part of speech: verb, speech level: informal (colloquial), special options: leave out suru verbs (including suru verbs really diluted the practice that I actually wanted to do, so I got rid of it). Then I drilled these Anki cards until I got them right. What a brutal wake up call. On average it took me 2.75 reviews to get them right the first day that I saw them. And the verb form that killed me the most? te-form. Yep, probably the most common, most useful verb form, a verb form that you would use even if using keigo, I hadn't been able to conjugate well prior to this. Anyway, these 14 cards (I think it took me 3 days just to get through these 14 new cards) took about 40 reps of the arthurhoek test to get through (only including the first day Anki showed me the card), each test 10 questions, so I conjugated about 400 verbs (not including when they came around again as Anki reviews). It was incredibly mentally draining and quite shameful that I had made it 4+ years of studying Japanese without being able to do this fundamental aspect of the language, but as a result of this one exercise (and the Anki refreshers), I'm actually kind of decent at it now.

This exercise is one of the single most fulfilling things I have done in Japanese, and I think it's a darn shame that there are so many language learning youtube video who promote not memorizing conjugation tables (which I totally bought into out of pure laziness). Yes, it doesn't make sense to learn to conjugate verbs before you know ANY verbs. But verb endings and sentence endings are such a huge part of Japanese, it's actually something I'd now love to learn more about, not skip over. When you add that verbs regularly get multiple verb endings stacked on to them, which only increases the necessity to understand verb endings, it's amazing to me that I let this most fundamental aspect of a SINGLE verb conjugation escape my attention for so long.

3. Journaling. By hand, pencil and paper. But a special type of journaling. It was more like an entire after action process that started from the moment that I hung up the phone with my language partner. As previously mentioned, Japanese rarely, almost never correct you, so it was up to me to remember my mistakes and check them all after the call. And the journal entry was about what me and my Japanese language partner talked about. This journaling step was the most important of the three. I spent the most time on it and I attribute most of my success to it.

During the call, I would look up unfamiliar words as they came at me on an app called 'Japnaese Dictionary Takoboto' and tap on the word. The app has a history function, so I could revisit these tapped words after we hung up. Sometimes I could get my language partner to type and send me a single word that they were saying but I wasn't understanding. The moment I hung up the call, I would go through this history of looked up words on the app + any words my partner had sent me and check them against my word freq lists. If the word was frequent enough (or if I just wanted to add it) I'd add it to Anki. Immediately after that, I'd go to ChatGPT and rehash some sentences that I stumbled over, things I wanted to say but was unsure of, or just couldn't, or had gotten a confused reaction from my language partner. It was pretty hard to remember all the mistakes, so I general could only remember something like 1-5 of these grammatically dubious sentences per call. I really probably should have been keeping some basic pen and paper notes during the conversation, but I thought that would distract me too much from the conversation (and probably more than that, I just didn't want to). I would then add these ChatGPT-improved sentences (casual Japanese of course) to my language island list (unfortunately never to be reviewed. I want to, but just haven't gotten around to it yet). And I would log the time spent talking in Japanese on a spreadsheet.

And here I would take an optional break, because the next part of the process took some serious time. I think it's best to do this next part as soon as possible, but I had just organized a phone call, been on said phone call for 30-60 minutes and finished the above post-call steps, so a break of some kind was in order. Also, living in America, generally the only time I could get a phone call with a Japanese would be their evening time, so I had to do the call in the morning, and the needs of the day would interfere with the next step. Often I had to do the phone call before even breakfast, and would be starving by the end of it. And I'm not a morning person. I've often bitterly thought that I'm the one waking up to do this early and not my language partner, but hey, that's just one way it shows I want it more than them.

Anyway, as soon as possible after that (which might have been end of that day honestly), I'd start the pencil and paper journal. Sometimes, just to get the ideas down fast (before I forgot), I might first quickly recap the interesting points we talked about (3-9 of them, usually 5), by jotting them down on a word doc in English. Then I would make the Japanese sentence in my head (in tameguchi), type it out to ChatGPT and see what it thought. And I do mean every sentence went through ChatGPT in this way. Unless I had already written the exact same thing out 5+ times and was confident it was right, I was going to ask ChatGPT about if it thought my sentence was grammatically correct or not. Sometimes this takes a little back and forth with ChatGPT to get the sentence right. Often it needed a prompt to make it not keigo, and once I was happy, I'd then write the correct sentence down with pencil on paper. I did this by hand to take advantage of an increasingly clear connection that physical media trumps digital media when it comes to learning, but I instantly loved it. The trade off is that it was very slow going. Repeat until finished. In addition to the general things we talked about, I'd also write down details about the person like "if this person were to become my friend, what details would they be likely to want me to remember about them?", I'd also try and use the new words that I encountered on the phone call, and I'd also rewrite the sentences that I had botched during the convo, but fix with ChatGPT post-convo. Finally, I'd write down roughly what percent of the call time had been in Japanese.

This journaling process was very time consuming, and there were many days where the call+journaling+anki was the bulk of my study time.

And now the journal was also useful beyond the practice it provided while being written. I could re-read my entries and if there was something I was interested in talking more about with that person, I could reach out to them again for another phone call to discuss it. Directly before phone calls, I could review our conversations so as not to repeat things old topics and not to seem like I had totally forgotten them (which I totally had). I could see which phone calls had been mainly Japanese, and prioritizing reaching out to these people again. Due to the abundance of people on Hellotalk, and the extreme come-and-go nature of many of the accounts, this actually really helped to re-humanize people, helping me to remember them and our conversations, where otherwise my brain would have just said 'never talking to that person again anyway (because they would likely disappear), so just forget about them'. I wouldn't always get a second call with people I wanted to talk to, but when I did, I was more engaged and present.

Learning Japanese has been a very slow process for me, but switching to tameguchi as well as these exercises was basically like flipping a light switch. The difference was instantly night and day. I started having the conversations I wanted more. The phone calls were longer. The call back rate was higher. People shared more and by that became even more interesting to me. The keigo to casual transition also occurred simultaneously with my spoken Japanese eclipsing the average Japanese Hellotalk user's spoken English. Whereas before I would request that the conversation time be split 50/50, this skill difference led to conversations to naturally being more than 50% Japanese, which set off a fantastic positive feedback loop. I could now access English learners with elementary English, confident that my Japanese could now bridge the gap. I was so shocked, I initially actually didn't realize that it was because I had improved so much so fast. I thought it was simply due to new years vacation occurring at the same time and Japanese people just having more free time to use Hellotalk. and then the new year past and I was still having all the great conversations I wanted. And I realized I kind of actually did it. I could kind of speak.

Then one day, it happened. A 2 hour long call. All in Japanese. I did it. I could talk forever in Japanese. I didn't even want to talk for 2 hours, that was uncomfortably long. My Japanese ability had exceed my patience. Then It happen a second time. Then a 3 hour phone call, all in Japanese. I was grumpy at myself for having let the call go on that long. But I was simultaneously elated with my improvement. And endurance is another indispensable part of the positive feedback loop. You see, it's work to find someone who can and is willing to talk on the phone. If you can keep the same person (who is willing and able to call) on the phone for longer, you can further improve the ratio of time spent speaking/time spent looking for someone to speak with.

Part 2.

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