for a little bit of context, it's something I've been working on very on-and-off since I was 13 but I've never really seriously committed to it. on the first day of the year, I decided to try out rosetta stone with a promo code from a youtuber (mother's basement, if you care) and... I hated it! and I did what I probably should have done first and looked up reviews of their japanese course which were universally pretty terrible. to the credit of their great customer service team, they gave me a full refund very quickly with no hassle. thanks rosetta stone! I'm told that you're great for other languages!
I started going through reviews of different tools and platforms and ended up with a pretty solid palette of websites that were highly recommended: wanikani for kanji and vocabulary, bunpro for grammar, and satori reader for general reading/listening/speaking/etc. it quickly became apparent that this was way too much, and I decided to go all in on wanikani since I had a decent foundation of basic grammar from high school anyway. I stayed thoroughly on top of my lessons and reviews, blasting through level after level, up until I hit 34 of 60 around september. we went out of state for about a week and I came home behind on wanikani and also pretty sick. I lost a lot of momentum at that point which has always been my big killer with learning japanese. if I let myself stop, I have such a hard time getting going again, and in this case it was especially demotivating to see my pile of reviews getting bigger and bigger every day
next thing I knew, it was december and I had 750 items to review. oh jesus. most mornings this year I would wake up and clear out my review pile, usually in one go, sometimes up to 150 at once. but you see 750 and you say "well that's not happening!" and then go do something else. I decided at that point that enough was enough, and committed to grinding that number down. yesterday I got it down to 85, as I'm typing this it's gone back up to 109 but I'll be doing more as soon as I post this
I felt pretty bad about the momentum I lost but when I look back on the year, man, fuck it, I've learned 1120 kanji! that's over half of the 2136 joyo ("regular-use") kanji! compared to maybe 15-25 that I learned in high school japanese! I'm happy with that! especially considering it's the first time I have ever managed to truly commit to entirely self-motivated learning like this. and the most important thing is I'm still going! once I've got these reviews cleared out I've got a big juicy pile of 152 new item lessons to work on. I'm aiming for level 60 in 2023 and then eventually I'll get back to bunpro and satori reader and someday get to work on the terrifying prospect of actually learning to speak japanese out loud. mark my words I WILL learn this damn language!!!
