Introduction
I feel lucky that from a young age, there are a few skills that I put the up-front effort into without realizing. Failing early and often, and learning from those mistakes without so much as realizing it. This is true for my skills in cooking, baking, and coding. I'm at the point now with both of those that picking up any incremental skill is easy and requires little to no effort. Learning a new coding language isn't too hard, and as such I learned Rust efficiently in a month or two just by reading the book and writing a few small fun projects. In the same vein cooking is not difficult whatsoever anymore. Cooking any new recipe is easy and takes little effort to make it actually taste good.
I know, I know, I'm blowing a whole lot of smoke up my own ass. I'm not saying these things to make myself feel good about myself, but rather just to say that the effort for those skills are 'easy' now. At a certain point you forget that you had to consciously learn any given skill and instead you only realize the present state of said skill. To the point even where I struggle to tell people how exactly I got to that point. I just 'did.'
I've picked up a few other skills like brewing, and tried to pick up some skills like guitar. With the ones I tried I didn't put in the requisite effort and eventually gave up (for now). There's an aspect of laziness, and there's also an aspect of drive and reward. When thinking about this, I've asked myself can "I really learn something that's difficult and un-rewarding for much of the learning process?"
At the time of writing this, I started a new job about two months ago. In order to stop myself from burning out of coding I decided to pick something else to have fun with learning on the side. I was brought back to the question before of whether I could sow seeds that would not be harvested for years to come.
I've always wanted to learn Japanese. To a certain degree I'm a stupid weeb and enjoy Manga, Anime, and Japanese literature. I know a few people that speak Japanese, and I figured I'd get more use out of it than a language like Spanish (which I want to come back to some day as I love Spanish). The learning resources online are incredible now, and so far it's been a fun journey getting acquainted with the grammar rules and vocabulary. I'm making my way through the Japanese Learning Loop advised by morg at morg.systems, and I'm putting my utter faith into Krashen's input hypothesis.
Here, I'll document some of my learning milestones and random notes I have during the process. I doubt many will read this, but it's mostly here to serve as a public-facing notepad for me to engage with.
Notes / Timeline
5/23/25 ~ [Mission Start]
Somewhat unprompted, I googled 'learning japanese reddit,' and started out my journey with r/LearnJapanese. The resources there were quite good and served as a nice jumping off point to other places with good learning documentation. This is what lead me to morg's learning loop. Out of everything I had read that day, this seemed like the most sensible route. One of those trust-your-gut moments. Morg's prescriptiveness is nice for my chosen method of learning that I'm dubbing the 'faith-based approach,' because I'm putting my utter faith into them and Krashen, and believing it will turn out well in the end.
Following this approach, I immediately sunk my weekend into learning all of the kana, and by Sunday evening I had reliably memorized all the Hiragana and Katakana. From here, both Yokubi for grammar and Kaishi 1.5k for vocab were recommended. I jumped into those and started my regimented daily studying.
6/22/25 ~ [135]
A friend let me know that he's running a mutual-goal-setting club, and automatically assumed I wouldn't be interested. I said hell no, and joined in. I figured it'd be nice to have other people essentially peer-pressure me into remaining consistent with my learning.
By the time of the first meeting in June, I had learned around 300 words on Kaishi and made it about halfway through Yokubi. I could put together fairly basic sentences and conjure stupid memes into Japanese to annoy my girlfriend and friends.
どんな素晴らしいのですか？ - What kind of awesome is this?
7/6/25 ~ [Daily Pain]
I'm pretty proud of the consistency I've kept on Anki. Haven't missed a single day, and at this point hit 500 words. Yokubi is 3/4 completed, and some of the lessons in there have stuck in my brain. The て form is making a little bit of sense, and verb conjugation isn't too bad. I had also done some of the listening practice to make sure I have a handle on the pitch accent system.
7/27/2025 ~ [Half-way, graduation, and cliff jumping]
Today, I've completed Yokubi. 「おめでとう！」ってあなたは俺に言う。 Thank you, thank you. I worked hard for this (lie). Also, I hit >halfway done in Kaishi, which I'm also quite proud of. Currently, I'm sitting at 787 words and some of them are quite mature and memorized. Yay!
This is a pivotal moment, though. I've built up a base of grammar and vocab that gets me ready for the real work ahead. This was all but preparation! I started working passive and active listening into my routine with Okkei Japanese's great easy-listening podcasts, and have been able to understand some of it to the point where it's sufficiently comprehensible. In the coming week and weeks, though, I'm going to pivot almost all of the time I devoted to grammar over to reading and more active listening. There's no effective learning without input. I think I'll pick out an anime series to watch from the start and sentence mine w/ Yomitan for both grammar and vocab, and add that into my daily routine. Morg has a good list of entry level manga to read, so that may also be a good starting off point.