the beginning of a long journey

A fire has been stoked in me.

A long term project has begun.

This post marks my third day of learning Japanese.

(inb4 filthy weaboo)

What?

Yeah! I'm learning Japanese. This all started because of a YouTube video I randomly picked to listen to while working out. The video in question was an interview where the interviewee, Matt vs Japan, gave his experience and thoughts on learning the language. The more I listened to it, the more his methods and hypothesis on language acquisition made sense. In particular, the “immersion in content in the target language” bit resonated hard with me, as that's how I learned English.

The method

So the method is outlined better over at Refold (link to website), but here's the jist of it:

  1. Work on vocab through Anki.
  2. Casually study basic grammar, enough to recognize the grammar in regular use.
  3. Rack up hours upon hours of immersion in the target language.

Where I'm at

Since it's only been day 3, I've very, very low comprehension. About 2% of stuff I can actually understand, mostly greetings, and some statements about temperature (when a character says “too warm/cold!”). My main immersion comes from rewatching Yuru Camp with Japanese subs only, with some additional immersion coming from various Japanese youtubers that I've subscribed to. I've been consistent in Anki and grammar study, and I intend to keep that consistency up for the long term.

Next time, on “gen learns Japanese”

I intend to update on the 3 month mark, roughly 2022-07-20. See you then!

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