The Beginning
The Beginning
Welcome, everyone. I’m Chris, and I’m pretty unremarkable. Just one of the many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) that are inspired to learn Japanese. So, I’ve decided to document this journey as best as I can. Why? I have no idea why. Maybe someone could draw inspiration from it in the future. Maybe I’ll read back one day remembering being a monolingual peasant. Maybe my son will read it and glean some usefulness and sentimental value from it. Judging from the randomness of my sentences, I suppose this serves as somewhat of a public diary.
Yeah, anyway.
I don’t need to bore anyone the details of AJATT. If you’ve come across this site, you’ve probably heard of it.
The aim is to immerse as much as possible. The caveat is that I’m a Network Engineer during the day. I also have a family. Thus, I can only feasibly spend about four hours a day. I usually can get a little more than this but I expect my baseline to be about four hours. Khatzumoto and others of whom proclaim to have done 18ish hours a day (I have no reason to dispute these claims) get reasonable fluent at about the 18 month mark. In all honestly, I pretty much expect to be conversationally fluent (N2? I don’t know) at around 2.5 years to 3 years.
If I go off of the State Department’s estimate of time, it takes approximately 2200 classroom hours. Let’s use that as our baseline. 2200/4 is 550 days which is about 1.5 years. Sounds a little bit like wishful thinking. Let’s see what happens.
The Motivation
Honestly, I didn’t grow up loving anime. Never really watched it. I didn’t have some fondness of Japan. So, why now? Why Japanese?
Truthfully, I’ve always wanted to learn a language. Ask anyone that knows me. I’ve tried to learn a lot; I’ve always failed.
Nonetheless, Japanese has become fascinating to me. Kanji is beautifully written. I’m actually enjoying anime now. I really, really want to travel to Japan and have my family experience something vastly different than the United States. Also, did I mention it’s cool?
Back to the anime thing. I would always want to watch anime. I did watch Death Note in its entirety. However, that was because I traveled during a previous job and was confined to solitude in a hotel room at night. Now, when I would watch anime, I would feel unproductive and wouldn’t allow myself to do so. If I’m learning Japanese, then anime is actively helping this cause.
The Plan
Please read through AJATT’s Table of Contents. I’ll admit: I haven’t read the entire site. He has (or had) a ton of content of which can really be distilled into a few basic principles.
Here’s an image for reference. Credit to Khatzumoto.
Since you’ve done that, it’s pretty simple in practice.
At the time of this writing, I’m less than a week into my studies. The principles I learn and implement will probably change, but I’m going to try to stick to the blueprint as much as possible.
As such, I can only document the very early stages of what I’m doing. I’m a fan of keeping things as simple as possible. Khatzumoto says to go through Remembering the Kanji (RTK), immerse, do your SRS reps, and that’s it. Extremely simple.
I wake up early in the morning before anyone else wakes up. This is usually 4:15am. I’m able to do Anki reps, add some new Kanji, and get some passive listening until work at 6:30am. I take a couple of breaks during work and listen passively during my commute back home. Then, I actively immerse for about an hour or so with some more passive listening mixed in. This totals about 4-4.5 hours. Sometimes, I’ll get a little more. That’s the basis of it. Isn’t AJATT super complex and methodical?
I think the complexity lies in the details. For example, the day-to-day tasks are extremely monotonous and boring. It isn’t that fun to mine Kanji and drill them into your head. Although, I will say, it’s satisfying to see your progress. For me, I learn about 20 kanji a day. Matt vs. Japan recommends doing about 15. I want to say Khatzumoto did 25 and worked up to 50 a day at some point. I figured 20 is a good, sustainable number. Oh, and yeah, it isn’t really fun listening or watching things that you don’t understand. As you can imagine, I don’t understand a thing. It’s been five days. Of course I don’t. But, I do know that overtime, I’ll get better. I’ve heard that the intermediate phase is where things get super interesting. This is pretty inuitive. Things get more fun the more you understand them. The more you understand, the more you’re willing to keep going.
So, the goal right now is to simply not quit. Easier said than done. We’ll see how it goes. I hope to update everyone maybe quarterly? I don’t know. We’ll see.