I’ve been wanting to do one of these for a while now. So let’s see how this goes. 
As you might have guessed from the title I mainly want to use this as my means of sharing accountability to keep my learning streak going! If I somehow motivate or inspire someone else along the way it would be even better!
I will be mainly posting stats and small updates on what I’ve been doing. I’ll also post about things I want to try out in my studies and maybe cool things I’ve encountered or learned!
For the people interested in more details here’s a little background on what I’ve been doing (or actually have been evading doing a lot of the time 
) up until now and what I want to use this learning log for.
A little bit of history
I started learning Japanese back in 2020, where I only focused on consuming the language, so I have not committed to speaking or writing during this time.
This doesn’t mean I’ve spent a full five years actively learning Japanese. There were stretches where I spent quite some time with the language, but also long pauses where I did very little or nothing at all.
To give a rough idea of where I was during the height of my journey I will use the JLPT levels. I think I would have been somewhere near N2 level, which my Anki deck of 7000+ cards seems to reflect.
Since then, I’ve had more long stretches of inactivity, the longest probably being most of 2024. However, at the end of that year I finally visited Japan, which reinvigorated my eagerness to get better at the language.
But as you might expect, due to my attention shifting to other things in life I fell back into old habits again.
That is until August, when I decided to kickstart the journey again. I used that month to finally catch up on the thousands of Anki cards in my review backlog.
I also spent time reading NHK Easy articles and listening to songs to tune my ears again. I feel like this brought me back to around N3 level.
Which brings us to the present, where I finally want to commit to the climb towards ‘fluency’ while taking you all along through this study log!
So why this log?
Back when I started learning I loved reading the progress reports that frequently appeared on Reddit, and I even posted a few as well. They served as a little boost of motivation to keep going.
These boosts of motivation are quite short lived however, which means you have to fall back on consistency to keep going. Since staying consistent is often pretty difficult (as you might have read in my history) it would be great to have another tool.
That tool is accountability, and when I saw these study log threads I knew these would be the perfect vehicle for this. This way I can more easily update the world on my progress in a more frequent matter.
So basically I’m using this study log to keep accountable and maybe it will also serve as a motivation for others who may or may not have been in the same situation I have been in!
I’ve seen people update these logs on a near day to day basis. That’s a bit too frequent for what I want to achieve. I want to report more frequently to keep myself accountable for shorter periods than the (semi) yearly progress report, but I also don’t want it to be so frequent that there is barely any progress to talk about.
This is why I am currently thinking about doing bigger stats supported reports monthly with simple stat updates weekly leading up to them. Along the way I might also post about interesting things I came across or new ideas I want to try to implement into my system.
Now we’re mentioning that…
The plan
I want to create a habit of immersing in the language and learning sets of Anki cards created from that material. In order to achieve that I will spend an average minimum number of hours daily on several facets of language learning.
I will use the nice art of 改善 to start with lengths of time I feel comfortable with, which I’ll then slowly increase once the current length is ingrained into my daily life.
I’ve decided to begin with these:
- Spend 1 hour reading, adding 0.5 hour every couple of weeks once I feel like it is starting to become a habit.
- Spend 1 hour listening, adding 0.5 hour every couple of weeks once I feel like it is starting to become a habit.
- Learn 5 new Anki cards created from my immersion, increasing it by 1 card every week or so up until a max of about 20 p/d.
Like I said, these are daily averages for the week. This means that there could be days where I might do less and other days where I might do more.
This way I could catch up in the weekend if I had a busy workday or the other way around if I know I’ll be gone for the weekend. As long as the average numbers for that week are not below the required ones.
Notice that I used hours per day here instead of aiming for a specific number of books finished or something similar. This will keep me focused on being consistent and will keep me progressing through material no matter what.
This way it doesn’t matter if I have a bad day or if new material is more difficult than expected. As long as I spent the time immersing in the language I’m happy!
My plan is to mainly use books and manga for reading and anime, dramas and movies for listening. The rest of the time will be spent with news, articles, Youtube, podcasts and songs.
I have ordered the main material I’m interested in based on Natively level and will use that as a rough order to work through it.
Of course this does not mean I have to be that strict, but I do want the general trend to be following the levels so that I’ll mainly be using comprehensible input.
The future
While I don’t really have any concrete goals with set dates I do want to briefly mention some things I want to do or achieve in the near future:
- The first and main thing of course is to have a habit of daily immersion and to steadily progress my language ability.
- Start conversational practice using a tutor. I want to visit Japan again in the very near future and I want to be a better speaker than last time so that my experience will be even better this time around!
- Pass the JLPT N1. This used to be a goal during my early days. Then I kind of let it slide. Now I want to try to do the exam after all, as it might be beneficial to me if I do want to spend a year or so working the country if the opportunity arises.
- Join the mystery book club! I love mystery and detective books and there seem to be a lot of awesome ones in Japanese that never make it out of the language. However, due to their nature these are often also amongst the more difficult books language wise.
I hope that by the time that I feel comfortable joining it will be up and running again!
I started my journey again on the 1st of this month, since it was both the start of the month and a Monday. It seemed like a perfect day for the statistics to start as well!
This also means that I’ve already been putting off creating this log for a week and I’ll already be posting a small updates with some stats tomorrow. Time moves so fast!
