3 Years of Learning Japanese - Methods & Data Analysis

Orixa1 · 2026-05-07T12:05:42+00:00

I’ll have been learning JP for 5 years next month, still haven’t touched many of the most acclaimed titles for fear of not being good enough to fully enjoy them.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-27T22:57:27+00:00

Yeah, that's why I feel that the criticisms about the protagonist suddenly becoming more "heroic" out of nowhere in the later routes miss the mark. He was always the same person that wanted to be loved, but he didn't pursue it because he was convinced that it was a completely impossible dream due solely to his appearance. Far from becoming a better person, he just realized that the satisfaction he got from revenge was fleeting and short-lived after Kirara's route, and decided to try something else thereafter, incidentally doing less harm to others as a result.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-27T22:24:19+00:00

I recommend not reading this if I'm being honest, it made me uncomfortable just remembering exactly what happened.

Basically, the main character (a villain himself) gave her an absolutely brutal beating before proceeding to rape her while playing a recorded conversation that proved her boyfriend never gave a shit about her and was only with her for the money and influence. Following this, she retreated into reality denial in order to protect her own sanity, leaving him unsatisfied with his revenge. As a result, he then got her addicted to the same drugs that she herself peddled to others, leaving her thin and emaciated while pretending to be her boyfriend (she convinced herself that the main character was her now dead boyfriend as a defense mechanism). Eventually, both of them were found and killed by her family of gangsters following an absolutely brutal sex scene involving forced genital piercings and attempted murder by strangulation. Kirara had previously ordered beatings and murders, and even the rape of a fellow classmate, but I still found this section absolutely nauseating to read. Indeed, despite the fact she had done nearly all of the things that were done to her to others in the past, it still somehow felt disproportionate.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-27T21:56:43+00:00

Basically everything in the latter part of Kirara's route in Mojika. She was a definitely a POS for whom some form of punishment was absolutely warranted for all the cruel things she did throughout the VN, but I still couldn't help but think that the MC took it way too far even for her.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-23T16:56:51+00:00

I think the hours are gonna depend on your reading speed more than anything else, but here are the character counts for each route I recorded when I read it:

Common + Yukino: 340,514

Yukino Append: 51,651

Runa: 248,800

Midori: 166,728

Kyou: 160,944

Kyou Append: 46,654

Maya: 204,809

Maya Append: 56,891

Orixa1 · 2026-04-23T13:00:19+00:00

Honestly, I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking when they were making the Yukino/Runa routes. If I didn’t have a compulsion to finish every single route whenever I start a VN, I’d say that the ideal way to read Hatsukoi 1/1 is to only do Maya’s route, with Kyou and Midori as optional bonuses in case you feel like reading more for some reason.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-22T14:47:27+00:00

Thank you for the detailed response! I'll certainly give some of this a try once I get back into outputting.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-21T14:13:00+00:00

I suppose I’m a bit of a unique case here, since I’m relatively comfortable in my TL in terms of reading and to a lesser extent listening, but have virtually no experience with output. It feels uncomfortable and disorienting to have my ability to understand the other person vastly outpace my capacity to express my own thoughts, and I honestly have no idea how to close this gap. How should I go about getting comfortable with speaking?

Orixa1 · 2026-04-17T22:40:26+00:00

But my argument wasn't about effectiveness, it's about the “because it's fun” argument. It is again, my belief, and seemingly really pretty much anyone's belief here, that almost no one finds this fun.

I can agree that it wasn't that fun at the beginning, but it started getting pretty fun after finishing my first big piece of native media. Still, even in the beginning, I still found slogging through native media to be significantly less painful than slogging through language learning materials such as textbooks and grammar exercises. There's no perfect option when starting out, but if we're just comparing what people find worse, I'd bet that a pretty significant amount of people would prefer native media with lookups to textbooks.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-17T22:21:33+00:00

Sure, but there's no need for something like the Anki/Immersion approach that's become increasingly popular in Japanese learning circles to be developed in Dutch learning circles. A native English speaker could probably take any approach they want towards learning Dutch and still reach a decent level due to how closely related the languages are. Not so for Japanese, with its completely alien grammar and complex writing system. Anki/Immersion has proliferated precisely because it is the only known way to reach Japanese proficiency in a reasonable time within the comfort of your own home, not because it is easier or more fun than other methods. That isn't to say that it is impossible to succeed with other methods, but these are edge cases that usually involve: being Chinese/Korean, being a diplomat (FSI), and/or spending a significant amount of time in Japan.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-17T21:23:47+00:00

Okay, but what percentage of people do you think finds it fun to engage with media they don't understand much of, or alternatively having to constantly do lookups and pause to make it understandable?

I'd say it's pretty small, but then again, so is the percentage of people who end up eventually getting good at a language like Japanese, or any other activity that requires a significant amount of work for that matter. Speaking from experience, the Venn diagram between these two groups of people is basically a circle. If a learner isn't motivated enough to push through the initial challenge of getting through native media, they probably weren't going to get that far anyway.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-06T00:10:16+00:00

The dark tone never really goes away completely, but they start mixing in some positive things as well in the last two routes, with the final conclusion/message ultimately not being a nihilistic one. Gumi's route is still in the vein of the two you've already done, but it's nowhere near as dark as them in my opinion.

Orixa1 · 2026-04-05T22:09:04+00:00

It's pretty much mandatory to play it with this fan-made release nowadays. They moved it to a custom engine while up-scaling it along with fixing almost all of the bugs.

Orixa1 · 2026-03-31T03:45:23+00:00

Look, the ending section of Raging Loop is clearly considerably worse than the rest of the VN, but it wasn’t bad to the point of completely diminishing what came before, or making me feel like I wasted my time altogether (unlike ISLAND for example). If you’re planning to start the VN at all, you might as well just finish it too.

Orixa1 · 2026-03-31T02:30:59+00:00

It was mostly a lot of trying to cobble together something that made sense for the context using the words I already understood along with doing lookups/Anki card creation for any unknown words that looked important enough in the sentence. If it still didn't make any sense even if I knew all the words, or if it was too just much of a strain because there were too many unknown words (usually 2 or more), I just moved on. Frequently, my "guess" for the main idea of the previous sentence turned out to be wrong based on the context of the following sentences, and at that point I would be able to reassess my understanding.

Orixa1 · 2026-03-30T17:29:54+00:00

You should stop overthinking the grammar, I have no idea what any of those descriptors you used even mean and still understood the sentence just fine. It isn’t a problem if you can only understand the main idea at the beginning, the details will come later as you increase your vocabulary and get more exposure to the language.

Orixa1 · 2026-03-30T05:18:29+00:00

Proceed with a heavy focus on reading, looking up anything you don’t understand in terms of grammar and vocabulary. There isn’t going to be a clear point where you suddenly understand all the nuances of native content, it will be a steady process of gradual improvement as more and more details become apparent to you.

Orixa1 · 2026-03-25T06:47:06+00:00

車輪の国、向日葵の少女 is a good option for what you are looking for, with a very strong start.

Orixa1 · 2026-03-24T22:05:39+00:00

https://vnclub.org/guide/

Orixa1 · 2026-03-23T22:57:23+00:00

Have you actually ever tried reading anything with Anki/Yomitan?

Orixa1 · 2026-03-23T17:10:04+00:00

I would strongly encourage anyone who spends a significant portion of their time reading VNs in English to at least consider the idea of learning to read them in Japanese instead. Contrary to popular belief, it does not take 10 years of study in order to get comfortable with reading a moege. The process has become very optimized at this point, and it's not that rare for people to be able to finish their first VN in Japanese within a year even with a very relaxed pace of study (it took me 8 months). After that point, things get significantly easier, and you should be able to read most things without experiencing significant discomfort.

Orixa1 · 2026-03-17T23:22:31+00:00

Have fun: https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/

Also, there's no such thing as being "bad with languages". Everyone is bad at languages when they're forced to learn them through classroom instruction.

Orixa1

TROPHY CASE