On February 11th 2024 I started learning the Japanese language. Soon, a year will have passed since and I wanted to look back at what I’ve learned. First though, the backstory.
Motivation
Self-study
Like many of my peers I learned English to fluency naturally through interacting with the language in media: online videos, articles, films, songs, games and so on. Although I’ve gone through over a decade (and counting) of English classes in school, I’ve never attributed them to my success. Public education is known for overly focusing on teaching grammar points, forcing students to speak in a stressful environment when they aren’t yet ready anyway, not to mention constant exams and homework. Two years of taking German in primary school and I can’t construct a single sentence. Two years of Spanish in secondary school and I wouldn’t even consider myself as having reached A1 level. Clearly this is far from the best method of learning a language, so how can we do better?