No, keep talking!! 
I really like reading your perspective as an advanced learner, it gives me a lot to think about and to look forward to in the road ahead. I feel like I’m scrying the future 
with your posts because I can definitely see myself pushing to read harder and harder literature once regular stuff feels easy.
You know what? Just bought it! I’ll give it a try! 
No but take the keyboard away from me!!! I’m glad my rambling is helpful though! I look forward to being able to discuss some cool big brain books together one day.
January 22nd 
Dear language diary…
Korean Update
I’m getting slowly getting back into the groove of working with Korean.
I did another two sections of reading and vocabulary from 本気で学ぶ韓国語上級 this week, which means I already finished the entirety of chapter 6! I just need to go back and do listening and dictation with sections 4-6 and then I’ll move on. This chapter went much quicker than the last did, since the topics and vocab were more daily life related vs. history and geography in chapter 5, which was about the history of Jeju Island.You know what, though? All knowledge is good knowledge, I’ll take it all!
The entire chapter was about various superstitions and the last page had a list of “common superstitions” in Korea. Apparently one is “If a man eats chicken wings, he will cheat on you” - because he will get wings and fly away. 
Ladies, if your man is eating chicken wings you better be careful!
Japanese Vocabulary & Kanji 
The biggest way that I still study Japanese these days is by actively trying to expand my vocabulary. I do 2 new anki cards a day with interesting vocabulary I found in books and saved, and the Japanese translations of the Korean vocab I learn also keep me busy and engaged (sometimes I feel like I’m doing double duty because I won’t know 1/4 of the Japanese translations on a day of lessons in キクタン韓国語). But, the other day I was in a stationary store and found some pens that I used to use back during the pandemic to practice writing kanji from the 漢検 漢字学習ステップ textbooks and a wave of nostalgia washed over me. Suddenly I was enveloped in the haze of memories of never-ending lockdown…
The kanken ステップ textbooks are basically a textbook series based around the 漢字検定 levels that teach you the kanji that correspond with that level, the stroke order, the readings, and some vocabulary that correspond to each reading. I learned the material from level 9, 8, and 7 cover to cover and used an anki deck and the aforementioned super special pens to review everyday! Level 9 is pretty much early elementary school level stuff, but there were still plenty of words in there I didn’t know! Studying with genki as a foreigner is great, but you still end up with some gaps I guess - they’ll probably exist forever but native textbooks that kids use are a fun and interesting way to fill some of them.
Anyhoo, that thorough learning process took me approximately 1 year per book, which is kind of crazy. But, I believe in slow and sustained growth (and learning Korean at the same time haha) so I’m actually fine with that speed. I think it’s a nice anecdote of how long it can take to learn things when you have multiple hobbies and a job and other obligations etc. etc.
So, fast-forward back to the present day, me standing in the stationary store. I was overcome with an intrusive thought - “I could buy these pens and start studying with those 漢検ステップ books again! I do have levels 6 & 2 sitting on my shelf! I could go straight to level 2 for the real hard stuff and learn the types of words I’m trying to learn at the moment and have fun using anki to do written kanji reps again!”…As if I wasn’t just posting days ago that I’ve been in a funk and I want to embrace my limited time, energy and brainpower in the year 2025….
Anyways, long story short the intrusive thoughts won. So, I ended up starting a new little anki deck based on a single page’s worth of vocabulary in ステップ2級, and I’m planning to do one(!) new card a day and adding more when I run out. Or maybe not - kinda feeling like I’ll end up a 三日坊主 with this one but let’s see. I’m posting here so it’ll be so embarrassing if I quit, right?
If you’re wondering what type of kanji and vocabulary shows up in level 2 and why I’d want to learn it, here is a sneak peak of some of the vocabulary associated with the level 2 kanji 艶 and the English definitions from my J-E dictionary app:
艶書 - love letter
艶美 - voluptuous, seductively beautiful
妖艶 - bewitching, captivating
凄艶 - weirdly beautiful
艶消し - frosted glass, matted, disillusionment, letdown
If you can read kanji and are familiar with the kanji in the compounds above, you can get some interesting insights about 艶. My dictionary says that it means: “glossy, luster, glaze, polish, charm, colorful, captivating”, which does apply to the words above, but seeing it used in different ways gives me a deeper understanding of the meaning - it’s something charming, attracting, enchanting, fun, and maybe even a little sexy.
It’s not super likely that I’ll use those words in a conversation or hear them ever, but I may read them in a book. In fact, this week while reading the level 27 book I just finished I came across the phrase that someone was wearing an expression without つや on their face - so they were maybe not amused, but understanding what つや is let me understand more deeply how they were not amused and how they felt about the situation they were in, and knowledge like that allows me to read literature (well, all books really!) with better comprehension and get more out of it.
So, let’s see if I can keep up that new little addition to my routine and see what other gains I can get from it!
Oh no…I think you may have sold me (a textbook hater) on these kanji books 
I mean, you could also just learn a singular new word per day over the course of a year or something!
February 3rd
Dear language diary…
Hello hello! Did you miss me? I certainly missed you!
Life Updates
Lately I haven’t been the most diligent student of Korean. It is just not giving me the energy and enjoyment I need in my life right now, so I’ve decided to set it down for a month or so and purely focus on Japanese, which is giving me that sweet energy and enjoyment, instead. I’ll re-evaluate in a month or so and go from there. Until then I will be giving my undivided attention and freetime to Japanese media!
While enjoying said Japanese fun time the last few days, I’ve also done a lot of listening, lip watching, and making weird experimental sounds with my mouth as I practiced, you guessed it, shadowing! It’s been a while since I’ve written about this topic in my study log, but it felt like a good topic to dive back into as I look back on my progress and review the realizations I’ve had lately.
Japanese Shadowing Update
I set a goal of hitting 50 hours of shadowing back when I started this study log (I think…? Hahaha), so where am I now? Let’s check in!
As of today, I’ve done a cumulative total of 22.6 hours since I started keeping track in September. That means I’m almost halfway! 
Now you may be thinking, only 22.6 hours?! If you did 1 hour a day for less than a month you’d end up doing more than that! How has bungakushoujo only done 22 hours since September?!
Well, have you ever tried shadowing!? Your throat gets all dry and feels weird! Your mouth and tongue start hurting! You feel like a weirdo and its actually kinda psychologically difficult to try and speak in a different way! Not to mention the fact that it’s very tiring and sometimes you just want to relax and not do the hard study things sometimes (a lot of the times).
I am sure none of you were actually wondering why I’ve only done 22.6 hours. I just wrote all the complaints above to share some of the challenges I’ve experienced since I started dabbling in all of this. It is physically involved and uncomfortable in a way that reading is not, and that’s been a really cool thing to tap into and add to my Japanese life - in small doses.
Good news, though! Just because the dose is small doesn’t mean it’s ineffective! I’ve noticed big changes in the way I speak Japanese just from the amount of time I’ve put in so far and I’m not even halfway to my goal! I mean, I guess I don’t actually have any proof because I didn’t record myself when I started this (note to self, maybe I should record myself now so I have some kind of benchmark for when I hit 50/50 hours), but speaking just feels different.
I’m much more aware of and in control of the airflow in my mouth/nose in general when shadowing now, have an easier time pronouncing things that tripped me up before, and I can hear and control the pitch of my voice better than before (honestly before I was just praying and hoping it was all correct but could not really hear myself - that feels different now).
Interestingly, I did not shadow in Japanese for pretty much all of December and January, but I didn’t feel like I regressed that much either. It seems I built up some good muscle memory and I guess what I would call “sound muscle” connection, or how it “feels” physically to shape my mouth and tongue to produce a certain sound, back from the months I was shadowing more. This is a really encouraging sign to me and gives me hope I won’t need to spend the rest of my life talking to myself forever every day to maintain whatever growth I achieve (ugh I hate things that require a lot of maintenance).
Tongue Position and Face
I’ve written about it before, but there have always been a few words that have always sounded off to me while speaking. One of them is actually the word 「です」, which, yes, I know. So basic!! So basic!!! It’s one of the first 10 words you learn in Japanese and is basically just one syllable. But, I’m telling you, it always felt off when I said it.
I ended up doing a lot of experimenting with it and found success when I had my tongue further back in my mouth and generated the sound/air flow out of my mouth from further back, which got me wondering, where should my tongue really be? I turned to google to see if I could find one of those nifty images linguists use with the head cut in half to show the tongue position specifically for 「で」.
I did not specifically find what I was looking for, but I did find a fascinating random blog post by a Japanese person about English pronunciation from the year 2017 that contained info and diagrams about the contrasts between English and Japanese tongue position and face muscles and 
! Several things I’ve experimented with and noticed about how native speakers talk suddenly became clear to me and I’d like to share them here for self improvement science.
All credit to the original poster of the blog for sharing these online!
First, this diagram about the resting position of your tongue in each language.
This sounds funny, but if you are a native English speaker (or even if not, try this with your native language) and you force your tongue into the Japanese resting position and then try and talk, does it sound different? Can you feel the difference in the sensation of speaking and how the words sound off compared to normal? Now keep that position and try to say a sentence in Japanese? How does it sound and feel now? I’d be interested to hear!
For me, I found that actually visualizing and then holding a much higher tongue position with the blade of my tongue curved down when shadowing immediately made a huge difference. Like, I knew the tongue is on other parts of the hard and soft palates when speaking Japanese and the sounds were coming from further back, but there were sounds that I still wasn’t able to transition cleanly into because I didn’t have the whole picture of what “neutral” was in my mind, so my tongue would drop back down on sounds I didn’t have the exact phonological placement of internalized 100%. I think that is basically what led to my です always sounding funny - because I basically had my tongue in the neutral resting position for English as shown on the right: really low in my mouth and with the tongue blade curled upwards, instead of slightly down/flattish and tapping behind my alveolar ridge.
Now, this image of the facial muscles used for English and Japanese.
Do you ever watch jdramas or youtube videos and notice the difference in the way native speakers move and hold their mouth and lips? Next time you watch something, try and see what you can notice?
This was another thing I had subconsciously noticed and also applied to my speech because I found it gave me more natural results, but I didn’t really realize what was going on or how it affected how I sounded. Now that I am consciously aware of it, I have been able to better control my muscle movements and improve my results when shadowing.
If you want to test this one out too like the tongue position one above, you can put your hands on the side of your cheeks where the muscle circled in blue is, and say a sentence in English, noticing how the muscle feels and moves. Then, say a sentence in Japanese, trying not to use those muscles. How does it sound? If you say the same sentence in Japanese again using the check muscles, are you able to hear the difference? How about English without the cheek muscles? This is a small and easy thing to implement that could improve how your speech sounds, so experiment with it and see if you can make it yours!
Conclusion
I don’t know if anyone else have ever looked, but it’s hard to find good info online about Japanese pronunciation that doesn’t look like the Japanese phonology wikipedia page. I am interested in linguistics (of course I am, I am a language nerd), but the format is not meant for an audience of people like me who are self-learning a language and want to memorize how to make the sounds or find tips that make the phonology more intuitive. As it would seem though, there is a whole bunch of info online from Japanese native speakers trying to learn English that DOES present English pronunciation in that way. I’m not trying to learn English ( ), but it still seems like there is some good knowledge to harvest there by working backwards from EN → JP, so I’ll try to keep exploring resources like the one I referenced today and sharing here, of course, if relevant.
So, apparently Japanese and German have the same tongue resting position and muscle use. (or it’s just me… I can’t speak for all German speakers). Which would fit my feeling that I have to use more muscles when I speak English (properly). 
(which I often am too lazy to do because it’s actually tiring… accent > sore face muscles )
There’s a French accent tutor that I stumbled into online and this is her whole thing. You have to cultivate the resting position because else your speech will always be anglified. I hadn’t ever really hoped of finding this information for Japanese, BUT YOU FOUND IT FOR ME!! I’m so excited!!
I have always noticed in especially men there’s so much more … duck lip action? I don’t know why I notice it more in men, but maybe it’s partly bc I notice it the most when people are emoting and men tend to emote more? Or maybe I’m just watching the hot guys’ mouths in jdramas more closely. I actually used to have a crush on a Japanese American friend of mine in highschool, and I thought it was super hot when he would talk in Japanese and looking back it was the duck lip thing . Ahem.
Please do!!!
Edit: I just spent a few minutes talking to myself with the Japanese tongue resting position and you know what I can pronounce now? りゃ/りゅ/りょ! I had gotten passable at it over the years, but it’s just *easy* with the right tongue position!!
It has been quite some time since I have really engaged with German phonology, but it would make sense that German and Japanese would be closer in my anecdotal world because German has clearer vowels and no schwa sounds that need your tongue to be lower!
Yay!!! I’m glad to be able to share the love!I wouldn’t keep such good info secret!
Not the duck lips hahaha I do know exactly what you mean, though. Interestingly I have been watching a lot of older movies lately and noticed less pursed lips, but modern jdramas are full of them. When did the duck lip shift start happening?!
Oh my, that is awesome!!! Amazing how such a small thing has such a big impact instantly, right?
I don’t know but someone needs to research this now. For science! 
February 28th
Dear language diary…
It has been a while! Other areas of my life have demanded more attention the past weeks so I haven’t been following any kind of study routine of note or actively working towards any of my goals. As a result, I wasn’t feeling like I had so much to post about. However, after giving it more thought, I realized that that wasn’t necessarily true. Even when things are busy and I’m in “low energy” mode, there is still progress happening if I stop and reflect on it. So that’s what today’s post is – a reflection on incremental progress in all kinds of areas.
Korean Update
First, a Korean update. The update is “I got no update”! I’m still not feeling like I have the interest or space to shift back to Korean at the moment since I am having a lot more fun reading in Japanese these days. One of the downsides of juggling both is that Korean needs more time and undivided attention still since my level is so much lower. That means Japanese always gets put on the backburner and I only have whatever time is leftover at the end of the day to read (or do anything else). In general I am fine with this, but when I am lower touch with Japanese I notice more strain when reading and my overall reading speed drops. I wish you could push pause on your abilities and hit start when you’re ready to pick up at the same place! It unfortunately doesn’t work like that, but things always come back quickly with some practice. I’m applying that mindset to Korean right now and giving myself some grace, knowing that I’ll get back into the swing of things when I dive back in at some point.
Japanese Shadowing Update
I am now at 26 hours complete out of my total overall goal of doing 50 hours of shadowing! Never having done shadowing in any language before, I guess I could say that it has been an incredibly fresh experience that has forced me to learn and engage with a lot of features of the language I just glossed over before (and like…even physical things like my face muscles, tongue, breath control, throat that didn’t come naturally to me).
I’d say that it’s almost like I have a different set of ears now when I listen to Japanese and can notice things I didn’t even perceive before! This is potentially a dramatic statement, but I would even say the way I speak has changed drastically to the way I speak just from those 26 hours (Note: I am hesitant to say “improved”, so I shall say “changed” because having an accent in and of itself is not a bad thing and I am not out to erase mine, I’m just a language オタク with nothing better to do).
Especially after shadowing sessions where I really focused on holding my tongue and mouth a certain way, I’ve experienced muscle soreness that has lasted days in weird places like the jaw muscles around my chin! Just like with exercise, I’m taking that as a sign I’ve worked and built up muscles I wasn’t using before.
As a fun note in hindsight, the focused listening I did in some of the monthly listening challenges last fall as well as the posts I made analyzing or noting new things I noticed was also really helpful in training my ears to notice things different.
Looking Forward with Shadowing
I’m curious what discoveries and progress the next 24 hours will bring. Right now I think I can get into a flow well mimic a lot of words well after shadowing for 10 minutes or so, but I still feel like I sound off when I first start and am not into it yet. I am wondering if that will improve?
I will also mix in some other sources of shadowing material, such as natural conversations between multiple people, where the speaking speed is much faster and the phrases are less clear and more fragmented. I am hoping that can help me train my listening ear for unclear speech in addition to letting me increase my speed and learn more of the pronounciation “shortcuts” I am make to certain sounds when speaking irl to sound natural.
Eventually I would also like to dabble with tutoring, too. Let’s see where things go!
Learning About Things I Don’t Know About…but in Japanese
So, a completely different topic but I decided to read マネーロンダリング入門 国際金融詐欺からテロ資金まで | L34?? for the bingo square “new to me topic”. I figured the point of that prompt was (maybe) to try and learn new things, but in Japanese? Was I the only one who understood it that way?
Either way, I took it as the opportunity to learn something new and finally read this book about money laundering that I bought in a bookwalker sale a while back. To be honest, I kind of have this faint 憧れ towards being a person who understands how Swiss banking works or what people are talking about when they say “marketable securities”. So, more than learning how money laundering works (lol), I was interested in learning about the world large international financial transactions in general and this book seemed like a good fit.
But predictably, reading about something in Japanese I’m not familiar with in general is pretty hard and requires a lot of engagement on my part, just like actual learning does. I’ve been keeping a notebook with me when reading so I can jot down financial terms I encounter and some bullets of what they are and how they work. I’ve also asked chatgpt a few times to explain how a specific financial transaction involving something like discount bonds might work using simple numbers.
To make matters worse, the entire book is full of enormous currency amounts like 3000万ドル、5000億円. Does anyone else just black out when they see large numbers like that in Japanese? 
Reading about them and converting them in my head is certainly good reinforcement in remember what is what. I think that unless I live in Japan for a significant amount of time earning a salary and making big purchases, big numbers will unfortunately still require some conscience effort for me to convert but I’m ok with that.
Another challenge with this book is the actual content. The author takes several language money laundering incidents that are famous in Japan, and walks through what happens in chronological order in a journalistic style which is not bad alone…except it turns out that money laundering can be done by breaking large sums of money up many many times and transferring them around between various banks and entities, possibly very frequently! So, the retellings of what happened are like “then X person transferred large sum of money to long katakana name of bank in England, then they transferred large other sum of money to entity in katakana name of small country I’m not familiar with the following day!”
I mean, here is picture I took of my kindle showing one of the diagrams explaining one of the incidents:
It’s now dawning on me that I forgot to mention there are so many katakana bank names as well, but there you have it. Getting to learn some new things and words, practice big numbers and unfamiliar katakana word sight reading all for the bingo square.
“Fun” Reading
Besides the money laundering book, I’ve spent a lot of the past month just reading some modern books in the lower level 30 range for fun. I feel like I spent a lot of 2024 reading older and/or harder books that I had sitting on my TBR list and didn’t read many fiction books released in Japan in the last few years. There are a lot of books I’ve seen around on social media or in bookstores the past few years that I’ve been curious about, but didn’t buy because I am stingy when it comes to investing (yes it is an investment!!) in 単行本. However, I think it’s finally time. The urge to catch up on all the hot releases from 2020-2024 (lol what a large range) has come over me and I think I’ll be reading my way through some for the next few months!
At this point in my reading journey, modern adult fiction at that level is extremely comfortable for me and feels nearly almost as easy as reading in English (the only difference is speed and the occasional stray word that I don’t know), so it’s been nice and healing to indulge in that these past few weeks when I’ve been tired in the evening.
It’s almost too easy to the point where I sometimes feel like, “Hm, am I making progress in my reading abilities with these types of books?!” Of course, constant progress is not the be all and end all, but I’m a language オタク with a study log where I write about progress and goals and stuff so forgive me for not ever being satisfied.
Giving it more thought, though, besides the obvious benefit of gaining a new vocabulary word here or there, reading comfortable stuff I’m interested in has two benefits for me:
I’m reading things that don’t require much strain and that I picked because I’m interested in, so I read with ease and stay engaged, building more reading momentum! There’s nothing worse than struggling through a hard or boring book and then falling into a slump. This is something that fosters progress for sure.
I’m improving my reading speed. When I can read with ease and am familiar with all the words, my brain can start chunking faster and faster the further into the book I get. When I start a new book with similar difficulty right away afterwards, I notice that that effect keeps going since my brain has gotten used to it.
There we go! One whole month’s worth of updates from my language learning world!
I’ve on and off had an idea of making anki cards for both large numbers and for ballpark currency amounts. I’m watching a drama right now where one of the characters owes 500万円 and I’m like, is that ~$50k? ~$500k? Based on context clues like how rich the person she owes it to seems I determined it had to be the former, but it would be nice to know without thinking about it…
If it’s 500万円 then it’s about $5 million ￥5 million or $34K, which makes me wonder what on earth this character did to get into debt?? But yes, big numbers are hard and I struggle to automatically process them too haha
edit: I fixed it @mic
It’s ¥5 million, not $5 million.
This is precisely why we all need the deck
The show is 婚姻届に判を捺しただけですが S1 | L28 btw, and she borrowed the money to save her grandmother’s shop.
Love how the comments here perfectly acted out the challenge with understanding large currency amounts it could not have been better!
Someone once gave me the tip to not just translate amounts but rather associate them with things you can buy, like buy a snack, a meal, rent a flat, buy a house, revenue of a known company, debt of a country etc.
Unfortunately I lost that list so I’m joining in the clueless club
That’s a pretty good idea… I’m definitely ok with amounts that I’ve dealt with before 10円-1万円, but anything above that is lost on me.
Maybe I’ll add that to the anki deck that I’m unlikely to actually make 
What to even associate with 300 million dollars… 
I think part of the problem is large sums of money start to become abstract after a certain point of time in general. That is a good tip though, I’ll have to get creative!
