Learning Japanese 2 year update - I hit a wall.

It's been 2 years since I started learning Japanese, albeit at a slow pace. In those 2 years we have been raising our Daughter, both working full time and planning a move to a different country.

We now live in Japan, and although I'm not out there having to interact with Japanese people all the time, we are living with my in-laws for a few months and that is providing a lot more exposure than I had previously, both in terms of listening and speaking practice. This gives me both a gauge of my progress and opportunities to practice. On the flip side, I have to speak English exclusively with our 2 year old - so I don't have someone to practice with as she grows and learns Japanese too.

So how does my my Japanese hold up?

Poorly if I'm being honest.

Reasons for failure

2 years and I've really just gone over N5 level stuff. I stopped pushing into new material almost a year ago because I felt like I just wasn't retaining anything at all. I'm not entirely sure why, whether it is because I wasn't using any of it outside of the app or perhaps because I was curbing my daily workload so messing with what SRS thinks is most effective?  I want to know something properly before I move on, which isn't the recommended way, and that mindset has cost me a little I think.

There's also the aspect of the complexity when learning a language. With Japanese it's not just Kana, Kanji and Vocabulary and away you go. The Grammar isn't too bad, it just needs repetition to learn the patterns and to try stringing sentences together yourself. No, there is one real kicker for me so far that always has me in knots and that is conjugations - changing the structure of the last word of a sentence to set the entire meaning of the sentence. So often I can conjure up a long sentence correctly and then fall short at that most important part, that one part which changes everything that you just said beforehand.

Simple, polite, present, and past conjugations are no problem, it's the rest that are difficult, and then to make matters worse, Renshuu throws in all the casual versions at the same time, essentially doubling up on a lot of them and making it even more confusing. This affects your vocabulary and listening too as on many occasions, a conjugated verb can be truncated to the point that in isolation you would have no idea what the dictionary form of the word is. I could go on for days about this, and really I'm not sure what to do about it other than keep going and hope things click. Eventually.

At least i've maintained consistency

The Plan

Around 3 months before moving to Japan I reset everything in the app and started from scratch. I felt like if I could absolutely nail all the N5 level stuff, particularly grammar and stringing sentences together then I could actually say a decent amount so long as I had the vocabulary. Going over old ground again is akin to a colour printer that does multiple passes, with each pass adding another layer until the picture is complete. In theory. 

I took some SRS shortcuts though, where I customised all of the Mastery Level repeat periods to 7 days or less unless it's maxed out, this way it just keeps hammering me with the stuff over and over through the course of just a few months until complete - this works because most of the stuff I know quite well already but I would not recommend doing this with new material - stick to the default spacing.

At the time of writing I am indeed still going over this basic stuff again until all my current Renshuu schedules are 100%. This is all the Japanese Basic and N5 schedules including a verb conjugations schedule to help with that problem (it's not helping)

Then I plan to do nothing but the hundreds of sentences in the various sentence schedules - N5 Grammar examples and the core 300/500 sentence packs. Doing these via the word-order type questions is similar to the grammar quizzes but has a one-up on those due to the sheer number of questions and how random they are. Then, reading each sentence out aloud before and after submitting the answer helps too. I'm very self conscious doing the reading aloud thing now in a house full of Japanese, because I don't really want anyone to hear how bad I am - or good for that matter, I would rather my abilities be underestimated than overestimated.

Once I've spent a month or two with those sentence packs I have all the Renshuu N4 schedules lined up, and I will complete them exactly as intended, which is that it introduces grammar and vocabulary in tandem like a guided tour. I'm actually a bit excited to get onto new materials and try learning the default way to see if I can make good progress, rather than thinking I know best. 

My current Renshuu Mastery Schedules

Goals

Have my goals changed? No, not really. I knew this would be very difficult and the actual difficulty has surpassed even those expectations. I still want to be able to speak freely and confidently even if it's nowhere near a native level. In terms of JLPT as a yard stick, I think I would be happy if I studied until I was a solid N3, as N3 is seen as the minimum level for day-to-day life and I would expect it would open more doors for organic learning - naturally picking up vocabulary and being able to improve more by reading and watching media.

There is also talk of linking language ability to Permanent Residency, so perhaps having an N3 certificate within 2 years could be a tangible goal, as I can imagine any government requirement would not be too far from that level.

NHK 'News Web Easy' site

Alternative Learning

I looked at other resources for learning too, in the case that it was Renshuu that was holding me back (spoiler, it's not).

I listened to a tonne of podcasts to see if that would be an effective supplement and found it didn't work for me - idly listening to something whilst doing something else, well you just aren't listening are you? Just completely focussing on listening to a podcast doesn't work for me either. I tried Anki as it seems to be the one everyone uses, probably because it's free. I downloaded a few popular decks but didn't get on well with it. It lacks the depth of Renshuu as well as the polish. It's quite rudimentary and primitive really. For example, with Anki, you are restricted to the information on the card. With Renshuu, everything links and you can look up everything in an instant - click on the Kanji in a word and it will bring up the Kanji library page for that character with all its information. 

I looked at potential reading resources too and came up relatively empty handed because N5 is just too low and basic, so I'll stick with reading within Renshuu for now. However, once I level up somewhat there are some good resources out there. One of those I found was 'NHK News Web Easy' which is their news page but simplified down to around N4. I know this because Renshuu Has a little known tool called the 'text analyser', and what that does is tell you the vocab and grammar level of any blockS of text you copy and paste into it. This makes it a powerful tool for checking whether you should attempt to read something to know if you should be able to read something. I'll probably have a look at Satori reader when I level up too as that looks to be a promising learning platform based on reading and listening materials.

Screenshots from Renshuu's Text analyzer

Renshuu still the one

Yep, I think so. It's constantly under development and recently they added their own N3 courses which means there is a structured pathway upwards. The lessons in the library are pretty solid too and always available to go back to when you need to understand a grammar point. I think it is the most complete system out there. The one thing it needs though is to be available offline, as when you have a connection but a poor one, it gets really quite laggy. Not a deal breaker but a definitely nice to have. 

In Closing

Not much of an update I know. Not everyone can learn a language easily, so if there is anything you can take away from this post it is that - if you are always struggling with it whilst everyone online seems to be amazing you are absolutely not alone and most likely actually in the majority. Survivorship bias is prevalent with language learning - you'll most often only hear from the people who were successful, not the many many more that were not, So keep an eye on your goals and keep going.