It’s been almost one year since my previous post about getting back into Japanese. I talked shortly about my Japanese journey and how I eventually burned out, though then, shortly before the blog, managed to get back to immersing in the language again.
I thought it might be interesting to write a short update on that.
The Past Year
I didn’t do as much immersion as I had wanted to in Japanese. Partly due to personal stuff, partly due to other hobbies like TTRPG, sport, friends, taking reading in German and English a bit more serious again and generally doing more stuff offline. (Yes, touching grass)
However, especially since the start of this summer I’ve managed to read a bit again in Japanese and watch more Anime and Japanese Youtube again.
Its pretty easy when you reflect just how much time you can spend here and there listening to something in Japanese. I often listen to 積読チャンネル, ゆるコンピュータ科学ラジオ and ゆる言語学ラジオ. Watching Youtube consistently is a bit difficult since I don’t find that much Japanese stuff that interesting. I usually watch Fitness, Tech and History related videos in English and German, and especially content in English is often so good everything else just feels not that good.
Just to illustrate my point, English Youtubers I don’t find equivalences to in other Languages:
- scholagladiatoria
- Bioneer
- Schwerpunkt
- SandRhoman History
- ThePrimeTime
- Task & Purpose
- Brandon Fisichella
- Dequitem
- Alex The History Guy
- Tasting History
- Premodernist
- The Historians Craft
and much more. I don’t watch Vlogs at all, cooking stuff and so on. Japanese Youtube has a lot to offer but I not that much of the stuff I like.
When I sit down and watch something on YT-JP its usually a documentary.
I did read a bit, usually online articles on history, and some (light) novels, though not in the sheer mass as I did in 2021 when I’ve read over 80 Japanese books in a year - you can check them out here.
Reflecting on Getting Back
Its been surprisingly smooth getting back into the language. I reset my Anki and started doing the reps again which was rough in the beginning but is not too bad once you get used again.
The worst part are the Kanji readings. Japanese has 3 sets of characters and one set are the Kanji - characters adopted from the Chinese language.
Kanji are pretty awesome and helpful when you encounter a new word but can be mean when it comes to how to read them. One Kanji can have multiple reading and often enough follows some internal logic but sometimes it does seem random.
When I started reading again I could read fairly comfortable (at least easier light novels) but had to look up so many readings for words I did understand, especially in the context. But I’ve got some parts of my intuition back and managed to excavate some of the knowledge pertaining to Kanji readings.
Continuing
I’ll keep reading of course - there are enough books I want to read. But since I’ve started reading a bit in Latin and have some English and German books on the stack I’ll have to see how to arbitrate my reading time to what language.
Maybe I’ll do another update some time.