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It's that time of the week. How are you doing?

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[-] pianoplant@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I basically have a couple things I'm doing right now:

  • Once/week I take a lesson from a private tutor.
    • Each lesson we spend time talking about how our weeks went in Japanese. After that we do grammar points from Genki I & II. The "今週はどうでしたか" (How was your week?) section keeps gradually getting longer and longer as I can hold more of a conversation. This week we spent basically all the lesson just talking (in Japanese!) about my recent trip to Japan. I still fee like it's baby-level Japanese but it's exciting nonetheless
  • I made a friend in Japan last year and he and I speak on zoom once a week for language exchange
    • His English is significantly better than my Japanese so it's been a lot of English, which is good for him and I enjoy but we discussed starting to enforce japanese only for the first 20 minutes. We should start that next week
  • I'm reading manga in Japanese
    • Currently working through the first book of Sakamoto Days. It's slow going but I'm finding it engaging enough that I'm having fun reading. I brought a few more volumes with me from a bookstore in Kochi City I went to.
    • One interesting observation: Now that I know a reasonable amount of Kanji I sometimes wish the furigana wasn't there for the ones I already know. I comprehend the sentences faster if I just look at the kanji but I reflexively look at the furigana anyway...
  • Anki vocabulary
    • I started with the genki vocab deck but made some improvements
    • I added a kanji -> kana + english card
    • I'm adding sounds for every word as I learn it (mostly from https://nadeshiko.co/) and pictures when appropriate
  • Youtube podcast immersion

Language learning is such an emotional roller-coaster. You go from feeling great about your progress one minute to feeling dumb and terrible the next. It's nice to be able to look back and remind myself that last year I could barely order coffee in Japanese, but now I'm actually communicating.

this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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