My Japanese Journey
In the summer of 2019, I started learning Japanese with the specific goal of reading the Boogiepop series. Without going into detail, this book series is a mix of urban fantasy and mystery with an incredibly interesting writing style: stories are told from many different perspectives, and the chronology is often mixed up. The first six books had been translated into English and published by Seven Seas Entertainment in two omnibus volumes.
After reading through this series, I wanted more, but since there were no updates on translation efforts for the other books, I had only one option: learn Japanese and read the originals.
Naive as I was, I found digital copies of Genki, a popular Japanese textbook, and some Anki decks for Genki. I started learning the Kana in a weekend and continued with the textbook for some time. However, I realized that I couldn’t even read Yotsuba, an incredibly easy manga that even children can read. Granted, I started reading this series after finishing the first Genki book, but still, reading and understanding manga after just two months felt nice.
So, I looked online for what I could do and found Matt vs Japan, a YouTuber who had learned Japanese to a high level using what he called the Mass Immersion Approach, based on Steven Krashen’s Immersion Learning. While he is controversial nowadays, I think his older videos, like The Dilemma of Theory vs Practice, are pretty good for immersion learning beginners to watch. Essentially, the approach boils down to: “Don’t study the language, immerse yourself in content in that language and let your brain figure it out.” This was also based on the Natural Method that Mr. Krashen had looked into.
So, I started to ditch the textbook and simply forced Japanese into my brain by reading Yotsuba, then Dragon Ball, some easy blogs, and news websites online until I could start reading novels like GJ-Bu and Kino no Tabi, both of which are fairly easy. I also created my own Anki cards based on sentences I found during my immersion. (It still took me multiple attempts to get through the first paragraph of GJ-Bu.)
Fast forward two years (including multiple COVID-19 lockdowns), and I could comfortably read most novels, though I still had to look up some words. And yes, I eventually read Boogiepop; it’s one of the easiest book series I’ve read.
Everything opened up again, and I had to invest more time into university and work, which led to burnout with Japanese. The result: I didn’t do anything for two years.
Rediscovering
This summer, I started reading some Boogiepop books again, finished the last Owarimonogatari novel I had been reading for two years, and managed to rekindle my interest in Japanese. I don’t do it as intensively as before (maybe reading for one hour in the evening at best), and I don’t watch much YouTube or anime anymore, though that is partly because I’ve been busy.
The Awakening
Getting back into reading was rough – I had forgotten quite a lot of the Kanji I knew before, even when I knew the words. My vocabulary had decreased, and I had to restart my Anki deck. But despite this, it’s surprising how much I still understand. Boogiepop was almost no problem, with some unknown words here and there (a forever-problem for most language learners) and maybe some awkward sentences that I couldn’t understand intuitively anymore. However, reading wasn’t a huge problem for the most part.
Currently, I’m reading Ranpo Edogawa’s 陰獣 and 芋虫 (he is something like Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe), and considering the books are quite old, though the text has been updated to modern Kanji, I can read them comfortably with a dictionary lookup every couple of sentences or pages.
Overall, I can read comfortably, I do my Anki reps every day, and listening to some podcasts and watching YouTube is generally no problem. Some anime are quite challenging, but manageable.
Conclusion
I had feared getting back into Japanese, realizing how much worse I had become was quite frightening, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had thought it would be. I’m taking a Russian course (offered by my university) and I’m intrigued to see how well using immersion to supplement the course will work, starting from zero in this language. So far, the writing system is straightforward, but the phonetics in Russian are way more difficult compared to Japanese.
Maybe I can write an update on my Russian progress in some weeks or months.