ようこそ。
2026-03-27 1493 ¶
A new approach to tracking hours
Trying to keep track of exact hours spent reading books, listening to podcasts, and watching anime was turning into a real pain. What I'm doing instead now is keeping a checklist of each input stream with an average amount of time for each "unit", and then just periodically updating how many units I've completed. For example, reading one volume of よつばと！ takes about 2 hours, so one "unit" (volume) is 120 minutes. An episode of anime is 20 minutes after removing opening and closing music, so that gets 20 minutes per unit (episode). I go by audiobook length for book times, since I'm mostly not reading without audio right now. The ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂 series takes 58.7 hours to get through all 20 recorded volumes on Audible, so it's 176 minutes per unit. For podcast runtime I use a simple python script to tally up the runtime of all episodes, and then just take the average.
Every few days, I just update a few fields in a spreadsheet with the number of completed units in each "thing" I'm doing and get an updated total hour count automatically. It's working pretty well so far, but I think it still needs a bit of polish, so no examples just yet.
2026-03-07 ~1400 ¶
Halfway there (-ish)
Let's get this out of the way: I am not fluent in Japanese yet. I can hold a conversation, and I'm confident getting my point across with someone patient, but it will require effort on their part. Here's an example of something I can speak or write with no external assistance and effectively zero thought:
はじめまして、ロバートです。妻と僕はアメリカのボストンに住んでいます。なぜ日本 語を勉強しているかというと、漫画やアニメが大好きだからです。そして、いつか日本 に行ったときにば会話ができるようになりたいからです。よろしくお願いします。
A little clunky (probably), but I've done this self-introduction a hundred times now. Every week I have one-hour lessons on iTalki entirely in Japanese in which I make many, many grammatical mistakes and require circumlocution to get my point across in most topics. I imagine this puts me right in the middle of the "intermediate" stage. But output (speaking, writing) is not, and likely never will be, my main goal for Japanese.
I'm reading manga I enjoy, like 『とんがり帽子のアトリエ』and『xxxHOLiC』, and easier books like 『ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂』. I can watch anime at around level 23 on learnnatively, so all in all I've got to where I want to be with the language, and I'm ready to put it on the hamster wheel of simply continuing to consume content and not worry too much about doing active study or tracking comprehensible input hours for it. I'll keep using learnnatively to keep track of books and anime I want to watch though, so that if I need to pick between things I can try to tune it to my current level.
So what's next? Chinese, of course! Unlike with Japanese, I have countless native speakers in my immediate circle, and my main goal is to get conversationally fluent. I don't know much about native Chinese media the same way I did with Japanese before learning the language, so we'll have to see what kind of content I become interested in as I learn more Chinese.
I've lost track of how many hours I've put into Japanese, but it's probably around the 1400 mark (2.5 hr/day * 567 days), not counting the 221 hours in Anki. Based on the descriptions in the DS roadmap (page 2), I'm slightly ahead of the description of level 5; certainly not level 6 yet. To me that means their estimate of required hours is pretty accurate when multiplied by 2 for distant languages. So it seems like as good a time as ever to reflect on the journey with Japanese so far, and plan what's going to change as I start Chinese.
What went well
Daily routine
Every single day, I woke up and listened to Japanese. While doing chores, cooking, walking around town, I always had YUYU, Teppei, or Bite Size Japanese in my ear. Once we're out of the visuals-required phase of Chinese, I plan to keep this habit up.
Tolerating ambiguity
I think I had a pretty good attitude towards simply not understanding things and being okay with it. Over time this developed into "delayed understanding," where maybe I didn't understand something within a second or two, but it came to me automatically later. Sometimes even 20-30 seconds later. It feels a bit like when your friend says something to you, you pause and go "...what?", then before they respond whatever they said to you becomes clear in your head and you can respond.
What we're going to change
No bilingual word lookups, grammar explanations, or textbook exercises
I'm going pure ALG and see what happens. Since my goal is conversation, I'd like to build the best foundation I can for it, and I'm confident that the ALG approach is the right one. Everything I learned through cijapanese.com without study is effortless to recall, even things that I found out later are considered "advanced" grammar or vocab.
Anki
I used Anki extensively for Japanese. I had audio sentence cards, audio word cards, grammar cloze cards, and kanji reading cards. I believed that by studying a word through Anki, it would prime me for acquisition of that word later during immersion. What actually wound up happening was that I became unable to distinguish words I had acquired naturally and ones that I had simply tied (inaccurately) to English words through Anki. As a result, when I write Japanese there are many word choices that cause my teacher to look and go 「ちょっと英語っぽいかなあ」. Despite the fact that cards in my deck were only words I had mined in context, my association from reading an English definition over and over seems to have actually interfered with acquisition, rather than augmenting it.
There is no way to get around the fact that learning Chinese characters will require rote memorization. When I'm ready to start reading, Anki will play a crucial role in getting to that ~4,000 character mark. Before then, I will only use the context I saw or heard the word in as the answer to the card. I still need to think about exactly what kind of cards will work well at the beginner stage for this; maybe there aren't any. One option might be having an audio word or phrase on the front, and a screenshot or longer audio clip on the back.
Not making time for music and games
I love video games and music. I need to find a way to work these back into the routine while still hitting the daily hours goal.