I will start by saying that language learning is not new for me, and will list my daily routine that overlaps with people who have learned Japanese in the same way, if you didn't have similar experience please don't reply.

I am currently 1year and 7months into studying 8+hrs a day from point zero. I do 2hrs of anki interspersed throughout the day(all self-mined), 3episodes of anime, youtube, twitch, read novels 1hr, visual novels 1hr, games. I do not have any output other than thinking in japanese, since it is not my goal, I do write down words manually from anki that I struggle with, and repeat them throughout the day.

My ultimate goal is to learn all(mostly all) encounter-able Japanese in media. Where I can play games without tools, watch anime at 1 to 1 speed,live streams, read books with very,very occasional look-ups. My goal is basically averagely educated 20years' old Japanese person's brain.

I use anki as my personal brain-map of all Japanese, and, at the point where there are no new items in my deck I will have considered myself reached that point. Currently I have 37,038 cards, adding daily on average 52⁩ cards, meaning I have not yet exhausted new material out there, my guess is it will be in the 50-60k, before repetition kicks in. I learn daily 15new cards, I only learn in anki what is useful to me, adding everything to my deck even if end up suspending it, with that many hours of immersion I learn a lot of high-frequency words there.

I ask specifically for people what have reached that point where you live in Japanese environment and you feel like you are on the same level as Japanese native. When did that happen, what were you doing, did you live in Japan, how many hours, does output help? Tell me your experience. My estimate is 7years total of my current routine and I want to compare it to others.

To reiterate please don't reply if you don't have anything helpful to say, I specifically ask people who have similar routine as me.

This update is mainly a complete overhaul on Jiwami's UI and design, but it also has major vocabulary extraction improvements, proper Settings customization, huge Manga accuracy and speed improvements, and a lot of smaller fixes and optimizations across Jiwami.

Complete UI and design overhaul

Complete overhaul to all the Screens.

Home:

Home screen

Archive:

Archive screen

Settings:

Settings

Result Screen cards show all the definitions for the overview. Recent history is now synced with Archive, and Archive entries open in the full custom screen.

Result:

Result screen

Archived:

Archived screen

Long file names now move to be readable instead of clipping.

Slide

Source rows, text sizes, spacing, icons, and metadata were cleaned up across the whole interface. Window sizes also got improvments and more flexability.

Settings presets and customization

You can now make proper Settings presets for Anime, Manga, Novels, or whatever workflow you want. Give them any name and color you want, select them later, update them, or make a new one from your current Settings. The selected one has its own animated color effect so you can tell what you are using immediately.

https://reddit.com/link/1vs2qyz/video/e2tyhc0y67kh1/player

If you change Settings without using a preset, you can just apply them normally. If you are editing a preset, you can update it. There is also a proper color picker now for presets, pitch accents, and target-word highlighting instead of being locked to a few colors.

More card control

Context furigana can now be shown on the front, back, both, or neither. The target word itself has a separate furigana setting, so you can show furigana for the whole context but hide it only for the mined word, or do the opposite.

ON

Off

Target-word highlighting can now be turned on or off, and you can choose its color. English definitions can now be turned off completely if you rather use the monolingual dictionaries only, or limited from 1 to 10 meanings if you do not want a card filled with too much English.

Vocabulary extraction improvement

Jiwami is now much better at handling dialectal, archaic, variant, and longer chain-heavy forms, with around 32% fewer measured errors.

Speed improvments are also a big part of this update. As i said before, extraction is done mainly with GPU. CPU also works, but it'll always be much slower. In my testing with a 667-line subtitle file, both the GPU and CPU gave the exact same final result: 656 Unique vocabulary.

My RTX 3060 Ti took 2 minutes, while the i5-12600 took 27 minutes, which is around 92% less time on the GPU for the same result. Of course this is one test on my own hardware, so do not take it as a universal number, and better hardware means even faster speeds.

Manga accuracy improvements

Manga text recognition now reaches 100% accuracy across 100 complex-layout Berserk pages. Berserk has very busy layouts, so this was not easy. Most of the text was already correct; the biggest improvements were punctuation and all the small details around it, bringing the number of mistakes down from 312 to 0 across these pages.

Manga speed improvements

The same 100 difficult Berserk pages used to take 28 minutes and 42 seconds. They now take 4 minutes and 48 seconds, which is around 83% less time or almost 6x faster while keeping 100% accuracy across the same pages.

Like always these numbers are from my own PC with these exact 100 pages, so they are not universal. Better hardware will be faster, but the same improvements are there for everyone.

For additional info, see the Jiwami changelog.

I know I want to learn Japanese. That part isn't in question. I'm making real progress too by learning new vocab words everyday, reviewing my flashcards, immersion most days when I feel like it.

But I keep feeling like I should be using my time better, and I want to know if this is a common thing or just a me problem.

I'm around N5/N4 in Japanese, so around A2/B1 if using CEFR metrics, so I'm in this weird spot. I want to use Japanese to learn philosophy, psychology, history, big ideas, but I don't have the language for any of that yet.

I can only mainly comprehend gaming videos and cartoons work because there's so much context to lean on. Anything more abstract like watching someone talk and I'm lost. I know this is just what being a beginner looks like, but knowing that doesn't make me feel less anxious in the moment.

I'm also a college student who genuinely cares about self-study and becoming well-rounded. So when I spend an hour watching a Japanese gaming video, part of me calls it immersion and real progress. Another part asks if I could've used that hour on something that felt more substantial. That gap creates a guilt that doesn't really go away just because what I did was legitimate.

I think this is the same all-or-nothing pattern I have with productivity in general, the one that makes me freeze between two assignments because working on the smaller one feels like betraying the bigger one and not spending my time on the most productive task. Here, any hour of Japanese gets measured against some imaginary better hour.

But I've started to notice that comparison is kind of a trick I'm playing on myself. I'm not actually weighing Japanese against something I do. I'm weighing it against a fantasy version of me who reads psychology and economics every spare hour, a person I wasn't even before Japanese came into my life. So while studying an hour of Japanese, I just begin thinking about doing something more productive because I'm already doing something more productive. But if I were to doomscroll... I just call it rest....

It seems like right now, maybe I haven't accepted that I can have hobbies to put a lot of consistent effort in that don't necessarily give the greatest returns because I've never had a hobby I was consistent with and long-term like I am with Japanese

Underneath all of it, I'm stuck between two different ideas of what it means to use my time well. Get good at Japanese because I love it. Or use my free time to build knowledge and become well-rounded. Pick Japanese, and I worry I'm wasting time on easy content instead of things that actually matter. Pick the books, and I worry I'm delaying the fluency I could've had if I'd just let myself enjoy the process.

Has anyone else dealt with this? How did you make peace with immersion time that isn't intellectually "worth it" yet, especially as a beginner? Did it get easier once your level went up, or did you have to change how you thought about it before that happened?

Maybe this thing is not specific to language-learning but something related to my views on productivity that I need to change. I'd love to hear your experiences!

I've been looking at the method and it appears very interesting, as it pretty much aligns with how I learned English growing up (I'm Brazilian). Although learning Japanese one day might be cool, I want to focus on learning Spanish beforehand.

Anyone have any experience or tips using the method to learn other languages, or is following the guide enough to get going? I ask because a lot of the instructions and resources (specially Anki setups) seem very focused on Japanese

Hey everyone, I've wanted to learn Japanese for a few years now. I'd study for two weeks and then just... stop. So this summer break, I decided to give it another real shot, and this time actually stick with it to hopefully reach a solid level someday.

My goal is at least 15 minutes a day, and ideally a full 1-hour session when I can. I'm aiming for roughly one Genki lesson per week, though that pace isn't always realistic — I managed it for one week but I'm adjusting as I go.

Here's my method so far:

- I'm using Genki I (textbook + workbook) for structure, grammar, and something close to an actual course. I read the PDF on ReadEra and listen to the lesson audio through OTO Navi

- For each lesson I keep a physical notebook (dialogue reference, vocab, grammar points explained in my own words + examples, exercises)

- I use two Anki decks — Kaishi 1.5k and a Genki-aligned deck — to review vocab and short example sentences

- Jisho is my go-to dictionary app for lookups on the go

I try reading short, simple N5-level texts in kana and listening to Japanese audio

- I watch anime and try to pick out words and sentence patterns to improve, and I'm also watching some YouTube content for beginners as immersion

I don't expect to reach N5 level by the end of the summer, but the plan is to keep building toward it steadily afterward.

That's it! Hoping it works out — I'm pretty motivated this time. After reading all this, do you have any recommendations based on your own journey, or any critiques? I'm all ears!

Hey guys, I already made a post a few days ago about my study method, and a lot of people told me to do more immersion and check out TMW and Kaeri’s guides.

So I want to do more immersion. I’ve started watching anime in Japanese with Japanese subtitles on Bettemelon, but I also want to start reading manga.

Out of all the resources recommended in these guides, which ones have you personally tried and enjoyed? I’m looking for something practical, ideally with a Yomitan-like system or something that works with Yomitan, where I can easily find lots of manga scans, novels, etc.

And if you have any additional immersion sources that aren’t mentioned in TMW, I’d definitely appreciate those too!

(All of this is assuming 1. non intensive immersion and 2. listening only, not reading)

Pretty much just the title. I'm N5 level right now and I'm wondering if it's worth listening to content that is more comprehensible if it's sort of unnatural and less native-like speech. And as the other option, I'm not talking about completely incomprehensible content, just...mostly incomprehensible. 10-25% (comprehensibility)? That guess feels pretty random, but yeah.

Hi everyone! I've been studying classically till I reached N4, and I want to include AJAAT in my routine.

I am currently struggling to find content that is not too hard for me to enjoy. So far I could watch 彼女、お借りしますwith a lot of looking up, but not too much to stop enjoying. I also played TheNOexistanceNofyouANDme and apart from philosophizing, I can read with joy. キノの旅 is rather on hard side, but doable.

Do you have some suggestions I could try?