I started learning Japanese (again) 225 days ago on February 10, 2013 and I haven’t missed a day yet.  At the very least, even if I didn’t add any new cards,  I think I have gotten through most of my reviews every day.

I was not starting from zero, since I had taken classes and studied a bit on my own.  I estimate that when I started this time, my vocabulary was about 350 words, I could haltingly read kana, and understand very basic sentence structure.

2/3 of a year later, the biggest improvement is in my kana reading.  Since I have been studying vocabulary using kana, I can read hiragana very easily and naturally.  Even in brush scripts and stylized fonts, I can read probably about as fast as I can read roman letters.  This isn’t to say that I can read as fast as english because I don’t know the words, but it’s like sounding out words in Spanish I guess.  Katakana has seen less improvement, since most of the vocab is Japanese origin so it’s written in hiragana.

I can recognize a few words if I watch Japanese TV but it’s not really helpful to understanding what’s going on.  I can probably understand  5-10% of the words being said and that might be generous.  I was hoping that by 1600 vocab words, I would be able to recognize more words in Japanese television and music, and get a general sense about what people are saying but that is not the case.  It’s a little bit discouraging to be honest, but I have no intention of slowing down or stopping.  Note that when I say 1600 vocab, that there are probably a lot of duplicate words in there, as I started out with a different deck, so there is some overlap.  That also means that I’m only around 600 in the core deck since the other deck has >1000 cards.

I’ve been listening to the audio for the first 500 core sentences in the car and I can understand about 30-40% of what’s being said.  This is also a bit of a disappointment, but a little more understandable.  They speak full speed Japanese, so if it’s a long sentence, it’s hard to process any of it.  If I heard the sentence over a few times, I would be able to understand maybe 50%.   The audio that I have isn’t in the same order as my learning deck, so there are some sentence that I know I haven’t learned yet, so it’s understandable that I wouldn’t know those.  But it’s driving home the fact that knowing vocab isn’t the same as understanding full speed Japanese.

I intended to learn kanji alongside the vocabulary and add in the sentences.  When I know all the vocab, I can fly through the sentences.  Basically I’m just training on the grammar.  But it gets frustrating when there is a word that I don’t know.  At first, I was looking up the words that I don’t know but it seemed inefficient, so I stopped.  I also stopped adding kanji, so now I’m 100% focusing on vocabulary.  For now, that seems the quickest route to where I want to be.  Since my focus is on conversation, learning kanji is of secondary importance although I will probably filter a few kanji in a little later.

There are 100 days left in 2013, and my learn rate has been 7 fresh vocab/day.  So, my goal is to get 700 more vocab or 2334 total by the end of the year.  That might be kind of difficult since the holidays always put extra demands on my time, so I’ve been doing 90 minute days lately to get a few extras in the bank before the holiday rush.  I also hope to filter my decks of all duplicates, so my count is more accurate and study is  more efficient.