Hello everyone! 
I post updates here and there throughout the forums, but I thought it would be nice to have a space to post updates specifically related to the studying I do to increase my level in Japanese and Korean! 
(Plus I really like to make diary-like posts to consolidate my thoughts and wanted a space to dump everything, ahem…)
About me - Japanese
I’ve been learning Japanese well over a decade and that time has included various stints of study, work, and play in Japan and Japanese. These days I hardly use Japanese in my daily life, but the learning (and fun!) never ends, so I’m still going since there is always something new to learn! Japanese is my primary language of study and hobby that I by far spend the most time.
I am pretty advanced by now, but I’ve hit a wall with learning several times when I’ve become able to more or less do the things I wanted to without issues because, believe it or not, if you keep reading or listening you will eventually end up becoming good at it. But, what comes next after that?
So many times I’ve thought, “What next? Why am I even spending so much time on this and not something more useful when I don’t even live in Japan and don’t plan to?” (sidenote: it’s debatable if spending this much effort on Japanese would even be worth it if I was in Japan lol…I am somewhat self-aware, I swear). At the end of the day though, I love learning Japanese too much to ever stop pouring my passion and energy into it completely. So, over time I’ve had to learn to shift my focus to finding new ways to level up and frame my mental approach to studying. I’ve made progress with that, but I’m still figuring out a lot of what that looks like - this language log is going to be a lot of that so I appreciate anyone reading for being along for the ride. 
More About My Level 
- I can comfortably read up to around level 40 or 41
- I can listen to nearly any audiobook comfortably unless it is non-fiction with a lot of domain specific vocabulary outside of an area I’m not well-read in (I had to quit listening to one about the Roman Empire a while ago because comprehension was getting LOW
) - I’m told my speaking is natural, but I still feel a gap between my understanding/inner Japanese world and how it sounds when it comes out of my mouth…but I have that in English too, I guess. Introverts unite?
- I don’t practice any writing in a way that would give me meaningful feedback to understand my level, so no comment about this skill.
Texting friends is no problem, though. I can type on the swipe keyboard really fast! Swipe swipe! - I consider grammar and meta-knowledge about the language it’s own thing so I’m gonna include it here too!
I’m a textbook lover. Let me just say it and get it out of the way. I have spent a lot of dedicated time to reviewing grammar and reading about the Japanese language in Japanese since I started my reading journey. I also learned Korean grammar using Japanese resources which allowed me to double-dip heavily and make some sweet sweet neural connections!
My goals 
- I’m trying to slowly edge the level of book I’m very comfortable with reading up to around level 45.
- Tied into goal 1 above, I want to read more, both comfortably and uncomfortably to start with, books from the Taisho and Meiji era. Why? Because I’m interested and because I can!
- To support goal 2 above, I also plan to learn more about Japanese history and literary history through reading books about those topics.
- I want to improve my vocabulary and knowledge of old or obscure words to be able to do the above through exposure and targeted anki usage.
- I want to hit 50 hours spent shadowing, something I’ve recently spent a lot of time on with a focus on pitch recognition/ear training, prosody, and voice control (umm like how much air I use when speaking and how…go read my updates on the listening threads where I write long rambles about air…). I don’t care about speaking so much, but shadowing is addicting and fun and helps me internalize words, so it supports goals 1, 2 and 4.
About Me - Korean
I started learning Korean a few years ago to diversify my hobbies and give me something to balance Japanese with. I also happen to love a ton of Korean things (I love spicy food 
), so it’s been a great and light-hearted journey so far. If Japanese is like my steady and faithful spouse from a longtime marriage, Korean is kinda like the younger lover that I sometimes cheat with to keep life exciting.
When I began, I used all Japanese resources and spent about 3-4 hours a day studying (hey, it was during the pandemic ok wish I could still do the same now), so was able to learn the basics pretty quickly since there are tons of similiarities. I got to a level around TOPIK 6 (JLPT N1ish) and then took a break of about a year due to life stuff, but now I finally have time for Korean again. I previously had a Korean learning log here on natively if anyone remembers, so this is going to be round 2!
More About My Level
- I’ve read around 10,000 pages so far. Things up to level 30ish are fairly comfortable. Non-fiction that involves a lot of hanja words is very comfortable since I can cheat and use my Japanese to decipher what they mean.
- I can understand and follow the main ideas from podcasts or dramas, but news is really hard. I can eavesdrop on everyday conversations and understand faily well. I can’t pick out sounds from words I don’t know yet with very much precision and have a hard time transcribing.
- I have only ever spoken a few times in my life during the last trip I took to Seoul, so I’ll just put my level at N/A or 0. Absolutely low priority for me.
- I practiced writing for the TOPIK, so I know that I have the ability to write with many mistakes. However, this is a fairly low priority skill for me at the moment.
- A lot of the meta-knowledge I have about Korean comes from my hanja/kanji knowledge and Japanese books I’ve read about the Korean language and culture so I’d like to do more here in Korean in the future. Additionally, some of my grammar knowledge has faded during the break I took this year, so I think I’m due for a wave of reviews to shore things up.
My goals
My Korean is still at the level where I can learn from anything I do or consume, so planning is pretty easy still. 
Here are some things I want to do in the short to mid-term future that seem fun and like they will help me improve some week spots.
- Read another 10,000 pages of lowbrow content (trashy webnovels, romance, BL and some webtoons for good measure). I also want to take the time to re-read translations of Japanese books I enjoyed around a similar level in Japanese.
- Listen to every episode of the Didi의 한국문화 Podcast. It’s a nice podcast with comprehensible input that I can understand really well at my current listening level!
- Hit 500 hours of listening. I’m currently at 350, so I feel like I could get to this by end of Q1 next year?
- Finish the two textbooks I have: One is with transcription exercises and the other is 本気で学ぶ韓国語上級, a Japanese resource for advanced learners.
- Hit 50 hours of shadowing. I am less focused on exact phonetic precision at the moment and more focused on internalizing prosody and pitch and all those patchim sound changes. My hope is that doing this + the transcription exercises will let me develop an ear to precisely hear Korean sounds faster than I would by just doing hundreds of hours of free listening!
Improving my listening through transcribing and shadowing will be the most experimental part of my Korean learning. I have improving reading down to a science from my Japanese experience, but I never really dedicated much time to improving my listening well in Japanese, so I am curious what I will be able to do this time around with Korean (and I just love turning myself into a science experiment 
).
Logging start! 
That’s it for now! Thanks for reading and look out for more brain dump posts and rambling as I navigate how to improve my skills in my hobbies while avoiding burnout and having fun! 
German on the other hand…
never heard of him
for free!
).
) felt like an obvious place to start.
and have thousands of them…it’s usually faster just to type single words and hit enter when I need to make a bunch at once)
It’s called leveraging language transfer…
I find the friction from writing down words first and then seeing them again a few days later when I add them to anki lets me get in a few “reviews” before I even get to them in the app. It also lets me practice my Korean and Japanese handwriting since I only do KR → JP.
The more vocabulary you learn, the less opportunities you have to encounter a whole bundle of it tied up in a pretty bow with accompanying comprehensive input, explanations, a translation, and clear audio materials like this, so I am going to enjoy it while it lasts! I know a lot of others don’t like learning words from textbooks, but I get so excited opening a book to a fresh chapter, not understanding or knowing anything, and then beginning the process to start converting that into my own knowledge. Get in my brain, words! 
it’s true - every new word learned is like a sweet drop of knowledge and one more thing that I can now understand in my target languages than I did yesterday), the fact that this textbook has so many words also poses a challenge for anki if I want to keep my reps low. If I only do 5 words a day, it’ll take ages to get through the backlog and cards will be very old by the time I get to them, meaning I don’t remember learning them as well anymore. But, if I do more, anki will take more time since reps will pile up.
