My Japanese learning has been on and off.
I completed the Kaishi 1.5k vocab deck once, but never finished maturing all the cards. Stopped right after moving everything from learning to review. After that I stopped for four months.
So now, I’m restarting from 0 and locking in.
My current stats
- Known words: hard to estimate accurately. I’ll have a clearer idea once I work through Kaishi 1.5k again.
- Total immersion: ~10 hours (YouTube & podcasts).
My current level
On videos specifically catered to N5 learners, I can follow the overall topic and get the main point of most sentences, but I still miss some details and specific vocabulary.
The two-month plan
The goal is to quickly get back to where I was by:
- Vocabulary: Complete the Kaishi 1.5k deck, 30 new words a day.
- Immersion: 30 hours of immersion (average 30 minutes a day).
- Grammar & reading: Read through Yokubi and watch Cure Dolly’s grammar guides.
Once this two-month phase is complete, I’ll transition to maturing the Kaishi deck, sentence mining, and heavier immersion.
Thoughts
Looking at my previous attempts, the main point of failure was a lack of a clear “why.” Without a concrete reason to do daily reps, momentum eventually dropped.
This time the why is concrete: I want to live in Japan for a year or two, that’s enough to get me studying.
See you in 2 months!
— João