Japanese is one of the more popular choices that people settle on when wanting to learn a new language. One could discern this just from the sheer number of members in online learning communities like r/learnjapanese, compared to those for other languages. It’s a language that is highly available to people, through popular media like anime, manga, and video games.
It's also high-resource. A single search will bring up tens of thousands of blog posts and YouTube videos from people promoting the ultimate resource list for self-learners, how to get fluent ‘so fast it feels illegal’; and since there’s a high overlap between tech nerds and otaku subcultures, it seems like every other day there’s some new website or app being released that claims to be all you will ever need to study. Outside of interest in Japanese media and culture, some learn for career and business opportunities, or to connect with a spouse or friend. Some hope to travel to Japan, or live there permanently someday.
When I started to learn Japanese, it wasn’t for any of the above reasons. I was twelve years old, so I admittedly don’t remember my own motivations very well. I think part of me was just bored and wanted something to study on my own time, beyond the French classes I took in school, and part of me was enticed by the logographic writing system. The idea of learning to think and read in such a different way than the alphabets and abjads I had been exposed to up to that point, and to be able to gain an intuition for guessing at the semantics and phonetics of a character I’d never seen before just by recognizing its radicals, was incredibly appealing.
The way I started out was clunky and inefficient. It was my first time teaching myself a language that didn’t use the Latin alphabet, and I learned hiragana and katakana relatively quickly by writing them over and over on a whiteboard. But kanji was a different beast that I wasn’t sure how to tackle. Rote memorization was mind numbing, and I didn't feel like I was gaining any real understanding other than trying to match characters with their sounds in a contextless vacuum.
This is the point at which I stumbled upon SRS, or Spaced Repetition System, as a study technique. I think this is well-known memory trick now, but back then, it felt like recondite information. Essentially, you should review a topic (in this case, a kanji) at increasing time intervals as you’re about to forget it in order to cement it in your long-term memory. Further, there was a website, called Wanikani, that claimed to use this strategy to teach you all the jōyō kanji常用漢字, the list of 2 136 regular-use characters that are taught in Japanese schools, in just over a year.
It’s an intriguing promise. You wonder if there’s a catch. Wanikani splits these couple thousand kanji into 60 levels, and going at top speed, you could complete each level by learning its kanji, as well as the few dozen accompanying vocabulary, in about a week, meaning you would finish the program in just over a year. I was determined to go through it all at top speed, because being an unemployed middle schooler meant I had blown all my saved money on a year’s subscription that I really didn’t want to renew.
It turned out that the catch would be the sheer number of hours you had to dedicate to reviewing. In this case, being unemployed is actually a tremendous help. The fact that once you learnt a character or word, it would come back for review multiple times in a staggered fashion, meant that as time went on, the number of reviews I had to do per day grew staggeringly. There’s a nice userscript that generates a heatmap of how many reviews and lessons you did per day (based off the Github heatmap), and I’m sure I was clocking over three hundred per day on average, spaced throughout the day. In order to maintain the fastest speed of progression, I had to do lessons the moment they become available for me, which meant waking up at 3 AM, and opening my Chromebook at noon while I was in class. Most of my teachers knew what I was up to, and were fine to let me review in class once I finished my other work.
As I reached higher levels, my English vocabulary also expanded, with words I had never encountered like atoll環礁 and filial piety孝行. However, all this time dedicated to even getting the script down wasn’t leaving much time for other essential skills in the language, like grammar, listening, and speaking. I ordered Genki I and II, often touted as the essential textbooks for Japanese learners. I quickly grew impatient with children’s stories and readers, and jumped straight into novels where I only understood every other word. A lot of the time, my vocabulary having so outstripped my grammar skills allowed me to understand the gist of a paragraph just by stringing the nouns together.
I did end up completing Wanikani at the pace I was hoping for. I believe my exact time was a bit over 400 days, closer to fourteen months than twelve, but still respectable. I remember hitting level 60 just a few weeks after my grade eight graduation, and being relieved, because soon, December registration for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) would open.
I had been considering for a while what I could do with my newfound Japanese skills, and what better avenue than a standardized exam to put them to the test. The format of the JLPT only consists of three sections: language knowledge (vocabulary/grammar), reading, and listening, which means it can’t assess how well you’re able to speak. There are five levels, with N5 being the easiest and N1 the hardest. I chose to take the N3, which correlates roughly to B1 in CEFR levels for the skills that are tested. For the N3, you only need to know about 650 kanji and 3700 vocabulary, which I had no worries about thanks to the past year of drilling. In the months leading up to the exam, I focused more heavily on grammar, specifically the points that I knew showed up on the N3 exam from previous years, and listened to sample test audio on YouTube.
The exam itself isn’t extremely memorable. My dad drove me to York University on a Sunday morning. It was snowing and still dark out, and we couldn’t figure out where to park because neither of us had visited campus before. The test is administered once a year by the university’s Japanese Section. Upon arrival, they had all test takers sitting in the same room before being siphoned off into the exam halls by level, and there were students and businessmen, and small Japanese children chattering to their parents in the language at a mile a minute. I brought with me five pencils and misplaced one before even entering the exam room.
The rules were rather strict. We were to shut down our phones and leave them at the back of the room, because if one rang during the exam, the owner would be removed from the room and not be permitted to finish writing. The duration was close to three hours, with a short break before the listening section. I was so mentally tired by the end of that section that I didn’t bother to try and understand the audio from the grainy tape at the end of the hall and just circled some multiple choice options at random.
The following months, I waited anxiously for results to be released. I didn’t need to pass for a work permit or study abroad opportunity. Really, the only material thing at stake was the hundred dollars I paid to register. But I still wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I found out that I had passed in late January. Barely passed – as expected, I did extremely well in the reading section and barely scraped by in grammar – but still with a score in the 75th percentile.
I wish I could say that after passing the N3, I resumed my Japanese studies with a renewed vigour, and later tested for the N1, as was my initial plan. But what really happened was a couple months later, the pandemic officially ‘began’ with my school being shut down, and the next three years of my high school experience are something of a mushy haze. It wasn’t a totally fruitless time period, language-wise. I got my B2 in French, and picked up the basics of an array of other languages that interested me. But studying engineering in university doesn’t leave much spare time for the kind of preparation that language exams require, either.
I haven’t given up on Japanese, even though I’m not actively studying it at the moment. I prefer to think of it as being in maintenance mode. I volunteer as a Japanese translator at a non-profit, so I’m still being exposed to the language often, and try to read a news article in Japanese every few days. But there’s definitely a lot of knowledge that I’ve lost since I wrote the N3. I hope that I’ll experience what they say about forgotten information coming back twice as fast as the first time you learnt it.
Sometimes, if people find out I ‘speak,’ or rather ‘know’ Japanese to some extent, they admit that they’ve also wanted to start learning, but have no idea how. I think most people tend to overcomplicate language learning. I often have to stop myself from clicking on those clickbait videos like I mentioned at the beginning of the post. I don’t enjoy engaging with those polyglot or language learning content creators, because they won’t tell you anything you don’t already know, and watching those kinds of videos is just putting off what you really need to do, which is start learning. Sit down with a textbook, or a children’s story with simple language, or listen to a beginner’s podcast and try shadowing (speaking along with the audio and trying to match their pronunciation). It’s not super glamorous, oftentimes dull, and there isn’t really a ‘hack.’ You’re not going to reach the same level of proficiency as a Japanese twelve-year-old who has been hearing and speaking the language their whole life until you put in similar effort and time investment. Anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.
But I suppose that’s sort of disappointing advice. What I can say is that this experience taught me a lot about learning how to learn. It’s helped me in starting to learn other languages, how to not repeat the mistakes I made when I first started Japanese, helped me in my engineering courses, even with learning how to box. It taught me to internalize one basic fact that applies to any skill I’ve tried to pick up: if you want to learn something, you need to make consistent efforts everyday. Not for a week, or a month, or even two years, but the rest of your life.