Before Now

28 Nov, 2024

Some things about me and my experience with learning Japanese before I started this blog:

• In college I tried learning kana on my own like many a western nerd and failed horribly. I think I used some Windows Phone game application to do this.
• I signed up for a Japanese year- long class to satisfy a general education requirement and went from nothing to staunch Beginner. Ten years later, I basically still thank this class for any Japanese knowledge that remains.
• Over the next ten years (until November of 2024) I try off and on to maintain my crumbs of knowledge through things like
  • Increasingly larger pre-made Anki¹ decks
  • Alternative SRS applications like Mochi² and JPDB³
  • Multitude of Duolingo-style⁴ all-in-one applications
  • Physical textbooks (Genki⁵, Minna no Nihongo⁶)
  • Digital textbooks and guides
  • Fun YouTube videos about grammar
  • Maybe like one hour of actual honest-to-god immersion via Shirokuma⁷, or trying to read a manga for five minutes and giving up after three pages
• I’ve been to Japan a dozen times throughout my life, but in reality only the Kansai and Narita airports as layovers on the way to Thailand (I am half-Thai)
• In February of 2024 I went to Japan for real for the first time with a group of friends. Of the five of us, one person had lived in Japan for a year and had conversational skills. Another person was an avid reader and could comprehend Japanese but not really speak it. Two of us (including me) had learned “about” Japanese but not really internalized it as a language that could be understood. The last guy was just there for fun (he had fun) (we all had fun) (I have some photos of that here)

Now

It’s currently Autumn in Seattle, which means The Great Dark has come back to claim us once again. I’ve been looking for things to do now that I’m inside once again. I’ve already forgotten why this came up, but I’ve decided to try learning Japanese again. Maybe because I remained subscribed to /r/learnjapanese⁸ and a post broke through? We’ll see how much progress I make this time.

This time around I’m following the Refold⁹ method, which I had heard of in the past (especially its precursors AJATT¹⁰ and MIA¹¹) but didn’t really invest in because

• Immersion as a complete beginner seemed extremely overwhelming and of dubious benefit
• I had previously thought that beginner immersion content was boring
• The time investment seemed high

The last point finally snapped though--I’ve realized that literally everything worth doing takes absolutely forever to get anywhere, so not doing something because it would take too long means you’ll never do anything and then you’ll die.

I’m about two weeks in, currently trudging through Kaishi 1.5k¹² (happily suspending way more cards than I expected) and watching random YouTube Let’s Plays, re-watching Recovery of an MMO Junkie¹³ (great) as freeform immersion and first-time watching Komi-san¹⁴ (we’ll see) as intensive immersion. The Komi-san experience is an interesting one, watching ten minutes more like thirty, especially since the first episode famously has a lot of written dialogue as opposed to spoken. It is strangely fun trying to parse together these sentences into meaning though, and it’s very kind to myself how much I’m able to remember from my last decade of attempts (let’s be clear, it’s like remembering 10% instead of 0%).

It’s fun so far, hope it remains this way. I’ll try to keep up this blog with progress updates, as the Refold folks also suggest doing so can help with maintenance.