Find your why

Everyone starts out excited. The first few weeks are great: kana clicks, your first hundred words stick, and you feel yourself getting better almost every day. Then, somewhere in the intermediate stage, the progress gets slow enough that you can’t see it anymore. You open Anki and feel nothing. That’s where most people quit. It’s where I quit, more than once. So before we get to tools and decks, I want to talk about the thing that decides whether you stick with this. Your reason.

Mine

I started Japanese for anime. I stayed because of a host family in Morioka.

1. High school, TexasI signed up for Japanese on a whim, did Genki 1 and 2, and placed top three at a competition called the Japan Bowl. The prize was a trip to Japan.
2. My first homestay, MoriokaUp in Tohoku, out in the countryside. My host family didn’t speak English and I didn’t really speak Japanese. They’d planned all these fun outings, and all I could say, over and over, was “this is a pen” and “where’s the toilet.” We both had so much we wanted to say. Neither of us could.
3. CollegeI came home and hit the books, then the videos, then the novels. I tried AJATT for the first time, did twelve hours a day, and burned out. Took Tobira in a college class. Worked at a Japanese grocery store, where I finally got to use Japanese with real coworkers.
4. Two years laterI saved up and flew back to see the same family, on my own, outside of any program. I wasn’t fluent, but I could hold an everyday conversation, and we talked. I still think about the smiles on their faces.
5. Since thenMore trips, more friends. Driving a rental car around Hokkaido, chatting with strangers, drinking with salarymen at bars, getting stopped for a street interview. I haven’t quit since that second visit.

◎ Photo neededA photo from Morioka or the trip back to see the host family (faces blurred if you prefer)images/guide/host-family.jpg

Why a reason beats motivation

Motivation comes and goes. A reason sticks around for the days it’s gone. And funny enough, my problem as a beginner was too much motivation. I’d sit down, grind for five or six hours, and then not touch Japanese for weeks. Even now, when I can enjoy most native stuff, I couldn’t do that every day. So if you’re fired up today, great. Spend some of it. Save the rest for tomorrow.

What kept me going in the end was pretty simple: real people on the other side of it, shows and games I wanted to understand, and other learners going through the same thing.

Pin yours

Write down why you’re learning Japanese. Be specific. “To be fluent” is a goal. “To understand my favorite streamer without subtitles” is a reason. So is “to talk to my partner’s grandma,” or “to read the manga that never got translated.”

Whatever you write shows up on the front page of the guide every time you come back. On a bad day, read it. Then do ten minutes of something you like in Japanese. That counts.

About the word “fluent”

People talk about “fluent” like it’s a finish line. It isn’t. My parents hear me talk and think I’m basically native. A Japanese person would say I’m a foreigner with pretty good Japanese. And by my own perfectionist standards? I’m terrible. You can’t win.

So make your goal the thing your reason is about. Watching the show. Talking to the family. Reading the book. You get to start doing those things way earlier than you think, badly at first, and doing them badly is a lot more fun than it sounds. (If you want a definition anyway, when I say fluent in this guide I mean roughly CEFR B2: you can follow most native content and hold your own in a normal conversation.)