One year of learning Japanese
To be more precise, it's been exactly one year since I started the Kaishi 1.5k deck on Anki, on July 23, 2025. I remember rote-memorizing Hiragana and Katakana or so for a little over a week before that.
Here're some screenshots of my Anki Calendar statistics:
I was doing a few minutes of Anki + half an hour of reading grammar guides for the first few weeks.
The color gets lighter towards the end, since I got through every card in the deck & started word mining a few months ago.
Some reflections:
- It took a lot less work than I expected, given how hard Japanese had a reputation for being. Apart from when I had to spend extra time reading grammar guides at the beginning, a few minutes of Anki per day is all the Japanese study I've done. And now I can stumble my way through Japanese Twitter posts and the like. It's nothing stellar, but I'm making real progress in return for a piddling time investment.
- I managed to do something every single day (minus 5) for a whole year! That's honestly more than I thought myself capable of.
- Studying Japanese didn't just improve my Japanese, it taught me how to learn languages as well. I've finally attained some degree of fluency in Chinese (something I've struggled at for 10+ years), and started reading books in it for the first time because of the language-learning principles I got to know through Japanese.