How I Learned Japanese From Scratch: My Full Timeline (Year 2)
This is a continuation of part 1, where I share everything I learned during my first year as a complete beginner. If you’re learning a language and wondering what the journey is like, I hope my story will help you!
Fall 2011 (September to December)
Just one year ago, I was a nervous but excited kid stepping into my first class of Japanese 101. Now it was time for Japanese 201, and things felt a bit different.
I had significantly fewer classmates than I did a year ago. Things were starting to get more intense — grammar points and sentence structures were complex and had more nuances to watch out for. Kanji was getting bigger and more scary-looking.
Thankfully, none of this fazed me. I knew I was in the language-learning game for the long run, and everything I learned in this class would pay off later on.
Like in the previous semesters, I attended every class, did every homework assignment, and studied for every test. But I started to realize that it wasn’t enough.
One of my classmates introduced me to my college’s Japanese Conversation Club (JCC). I joined one of their meetings and found myself surrounded by students who had been studying for way longer than me, and a couple of native-speaking members too.
I attempted to have some conversation practice with them, and immediately noticed a huge problem.
I sucked at speaking.
Speaking in class wasn’t this hard at all. Whenever I answered my teacher’s questions, I had some time to think and rehearse the answers in my head. When I did speaking exercises with classmates, there was always a script to follow that made it easy.
I didn’t struggle much with writing either. Given enough time to think, I had no problems writing reasonably long and thoughtful answers on my homework and tests.
But when having an actual conversation? It was like all the Japanese I had ever learned flew out the window. This is when I realized that speaking in real time was an entirely different game, and it was something I couldn’t practice in class. I had to find my own way.
Other than this eye-opening experience, the next few months went by without any issues. By the end of the semester, I could do the following:
- Communicate more complex ideas like “Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of the Pokémon series, grew up in a town called Machida. Although he often skipped classes, he learned how to program and started a game company.”
- Read and write around 500 kanji.
Spring 2012 (January to May)
New semester, new class. It was time for Japanese 202.
I had been warned by some of my seniors in JCC that 202 was significantly harder than the previous levels. I went in prepared for the worst, and found out what the culprit was:
Honorific speech used in Japanese to show respect to others. In oversimplified terms, we learned two of the main ways to use keigo:
- When the speaker “lowers” their own position by using humble language.
- When the speaker “raises” the position of whoever they’re speaking to by using honorific language.
I understood why most students found these lessons difficult. It wasn’t necessarily the language itself that was confusing — it was the cultural aspects. In American English, honorific speech is a concept that hardly exists in day-to-day life, and certainly isn’t something people consciously think about. Even if we memorized every keigo-related word and grammar pattern, knowing when to actually use it was an entirely different challenge.
It took me some time to wrap my head around this, but I personally found the keigo lessons both enjoyable and fascinating. We were really diving deep into both the language and culture, and we were all a bit relieved when our teacher mentioned that even native Japanese speakers get confused by keigo from time to time.
That was the main curveball that Japanese 202 threw at us. Other than that, we continued learning more grammar, vocabulary, and crazy-looking kanji like 痛 and 違. Difficult, but nothing life-changing.
The actual life-changing thing that happened was outside the classroom, and it was none other than making friends.
My school has a partnership with Ritsumeikan University, a school in Kyoto — the same city I’d end up calling home more than a decade later, though I had no way of knowing that at the time. Every spring, a group of around ten students from Ritsumeikan would visit my school for a short-term, one-month study abroad program.
This year, I was super lucky because I had the chance to meet and get to know them. As an (unofficial) host, I had the chance to show them around campus, take them to a few different classes and club activities, and invite them to my apartment to eat pizza and play video games in true American fashion.
They spoke English a little bit, and I spoke Japanese a little bit. Our conversations were a completely improvised mix of whatever language was easier to use at the moment. It was weird, it was sloppy, and it was insanely fun.
I embarrassed myself and said things that made no sense, more times than I could count. But I got used to the feeling, and thanks to that I’m pretty sure I learned more Japanese in that one month than I did during an entire semester in a classroom.
A month flew by in an instant, and it was time for my new friends to go home. We met up one last time on the morning of their flight, just before they started boarding the bus to the airport. We tearfully exchanged goodbyes, I promised I would visit them in Japan, and I waved until their bus was out of sight.
That day, I decided I would study abroad in Japan.
Summer 2012 (June to August)
My plan was to go to Japan in spring 2013 and stay there for a full semester. This meant I had a little less than a year to get ready.
Now that I had the goal of actually going to Japan — a real, specific, dated goal, not just a vague wish — I was in hardcore study mode. In order to immerse myself in the language as much as possible, I went as far as to stop consuming English media and replaced it with as much Japanese media as I could. This meant:
- Only watching Japanese TV shows
- Only listening to Japanese music
- Only listening to Japanese radio and podcasts
- Only playing video games in Japanese
To anyone else, I was probably completely nuts. But I figured that this level of dedication would be needed to meet my extreme goal of learning a language in a short amount of time.
Another very lucky thing happened this summer: I got to visit Japan for the first time.
Like last summer, I took a trip to Taiwan and visited my relatives there. This time, on the way back home I was supposed to have a layover in Osaka. I thought to myself: if I’m going to be in Japan, wouldn’t it be great if I could stay there for a bit? Even just for a day or two?
I negotiated with my parents (more like begged and pleaded), who had booked the flight for me, and they were kind enough to let me do it! Thanks to them, I’d be able to stay in Osaka for two nights. A short stay, but an incredibly valuable experience for me.
And so I went to Japan for the very first time in my life. It took around 20 years but it finally happened.
To make a long story short, the trip was absolutely blissful. I could talk for hours about everything that happened in those two days, but the biggest highlight was that my Japanese worked.
I didn’t have a smartphone back then, so I couldn’t rely on translation apps to help me converse, or Google Maps to help me get around. And being in an unfamiliar country for the first time, I had lots of questions and got lost plenty of times. So I had to do things the old-fashioned way and go around asking people for help.
I was incredibly, indescribably happy when people understood what I was saying, and when I could understand their answers. I vividly remember thinking to myself, “All the time I spent studying paid off! It’s actually working!”
This was particularly mind-bending as someone who never enjoyed studying and spent most of his school days thinking “I’m never going to use this in real life.”
I also got to visit Kyoto and briefly reunite with the friends I had met in the spring. Once again I promised I’d come back next year, and this time we said our goodbyes over smiles instead of tears.
Wrap-Up of the Second Year
Without exaggerating, I can say that my second year of learning Japanese was one of the most important years of my life.
I had progressed to an intermediate level where I could realistically use what I learned in real situations. I made actual friends from Japan who I wanted to keep in touch with. I decided I would study abroad and that I would either get fluent in Japanese or die trying.
I stopped keeping track of things like how many vocabulary words and kanji I had memorized because I realized it didn’t really matter. I focused instead on simply immersing myself in Japanese during my free time and absorbing as much as I could.
Before I knew it, Fall 2012 was at my doorstep. It was time for the final stretch!
Please feel free to check out part 3 if you’re interested.