Language Learning

English

I’m consider myself pretty much fluent in english, I can understand 99.9% of everything I listen or read without much effort.

I never explicitly studied english, it’s just so widespread that I ended up learning it while just using the internet.

English still uses the latin alphabet and a lot of the sounds are similar-ish to my native language, so that helped a lot, the hardest part is acquiring all the vocabulary needed to understand 99.9% of everything.

Japanese

Even though I’m half japanese I didn’t know a lot about the language, only some bits and pieces, but I decided to put an end to that and finally commit myself to the language.

Japanese uses three writing systems, hiragana, katakana, and kanji:

• Hiragana is the water katakana and kanji swim on, it’s used for words, verb conjugations, etc.

• Katakana is mainly used to write loan-words, words that came from outside Japan but are now part of their vocabulary.

• Kanji is used to represent ideas, a lot of nouns are writting using kanji.

The sounds japanese use are very similar to my native language, so that’s nice, though having three different writing systems is not as easy as using the same alphabet.

How

I’m doing immersion, listening and reading as much as possible on japanese, and alongside that I’m using Anki to review vocabulary and grammar.

Doing immersion can be quite tricky, but the key is finding something that grabs your attention, something that you would watch regardless of the language it’s in, something that just happens to be in japanese.

Progress

At the time of writing I’m only studying for a month, I know about 400 words and can understand maybe 2% of spoken japanese.

That may not sound as spectacular as youtube videos claiming to become fluent in japanese in only 6 months but I’m very happy with my results!