soul rumblings

the year is, like, 2012? i know my kana and a hundred or so common kanji, and i’ve absorbed the entirety of “Tae Kim’s Japanese Grammar Guide”. nonetheless i have spent a long while essentially treading water: i’m not really using my (extremely limited) japanese to do anything, which means i’m not learning anything. this situation probably sounds very familiar to a lot of the people reading this post.

however, here in the year 2012, i have what will turn out to be an ace up my sleeve. that’s right: i have recently gotten really, really into yuri.

no, listen to me. don’t close the tab. remain seated!!!

i have recently gotten really into yuri. i’m also very partial to visual novels as a format, on account of i got my brain rewired playing kōtarō uchikoshi’s “Ever17” in middle school. now, this is 2012: the jp→en fan translation scene is thriving, but is in many ways still in its infancy. only the very most popular visual novels are getting any translations at all, let alone competent ones. and yuri is still a niche genre, so there aren’t that many yuri VNs to begin with.

yet i have a craving in my soul. it gnaws at me. i spectate the VNDB pages for a few particular yuri VNs like a ghostly widow eternally scanning the horizon for the ship that will bring her husband home. a world of girls romantically kissing each other on the mouth exists just beyond my outstretched fingertips. if only i really knew japanese!

eventually, i crack.

i need this visual novel.

so i download it.

the first of a thousand text boxes appears on my screen.

it is full of japanese, because the game is in japanese.

japanese is a language in the japonic language family. it is an agglutinative, left-branching topic-comment language with a subject-object-verb syntactic alignment. it is written in a hybrid logographic-syllabic writing system consisting of several thousands of unique characters.

i spend a solid ten or twenty minutes scrutinizing this single text box. i alt-tab between the game screen and Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC at least a dozen times.

eventually i more or less piece together what i am looking at, and i click through, and a second text box appears on my screen.

the cycle repeats.

it repeats over and over again.

i persevere, because i know that if i can just push through it, then eventually a girl is going to tell another girl that she like-likes her, and they are going to have cute sex about it while a sentimental music box chimes royalty-freely in the background.

well, okay: around text box №20, i start getting a little lazy. i stop looking up every word i don’t know. this is a story, right? events follow one another in sequence: things cause other things. in other words, text boxes don’t exist in a vacuum. i can use the context of the story so far to make educated guesses about what is being said.

sometimes my guess is wrong, and everything gets confusing for a while. slowly i develop an intuition about which things i need to look up and which i don’t. and if something seems particularly emotionally loaded, i make sure to check all of it, because i need the vitamins and minerals.

the primary reason i’m not looking up every word every time is because it is annoying to do. you might be familiar with browser extensions like Rikaichan that allow you to hover your mouse over a Japanese word and instantly get a definition. this is not possible in the context of non-browser-based PC game such as the one i am playing in 2012. in fact, under normal circumstances, you cannot even select the text in the dialogue boxes to copy. i’m getting around this by using a “text hooker”, which is a separate program that intercepts the API calls made by the visual novel, extracting the text that is being printed to the screen in order that it may be copied by me and pasted into Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC Japanese dictionary.

so the process looks something like this:

i see a word i do not know, and judge that it is critical to my understanding of what’s happening in the story.

i alt-tab to the text hooker interface, locate the word in the game’s raw text stream, and copy it.

i paste the word into WWWJDIC, wait for the page to load, and eventually get my definition.

i tab back to the game.

after a while i have gotten pretty fast at this, but it still constitutes a round-trip detour of at least twenty seconds. that’s twenty seconds i am not spending reading about girls making furtive glances at one another from across the track field. so my hunger gets the better of me, and i get selective about what i look up and what i allow to remain obscure.

what i don’t realize at the time, but will come to learn over several months of doing this sort of thing, is that i have accidentally created kind of a perfect language-learning environment.

my yuri quest ends in spectacular success. okay, sure: my reading comprehension score for this game is probably something like 20%, if we’re being generous. most likely many jokes flew over my head and many nuances flew under my radar. frequently objects and events were discussed which exist now in my mind as misshapen cow tools-esque abstractions: there was this thing they were talking about, and they used it to do that thing, and i’m not entirely sure what the thing was, though it had certain characteristics. was it bigger than a breadbox? yes, i think so?

but it was a success. i basically understood the story. i knew who the characters were, i got their personalities, i knew how they related, and i enjoyed seeing it happen. and now i am hungry for more.

i slam another VN into μtorrent.¹

over the course of a year, i repeat this process dozens of times.

i branch out from yuri. it turns out there’s a lot more yaoi VNs than yuri ones. it goes crazy. lower lip-having men are getting right up in my headphonèd ears and whispering sweet nothings at me. in Japanese. a language i speak.

(sort of, more or less.)

after doing this on and off for about a year, i have leapfrogged from N5 to (what with hindsight i would estimate to be) about N3 level japanese.² it’s not exactly a blistering pace of progress, but it’s very sticky progress. because i learned all this stuff by encountering it in a natural context, i will not end up forgetting it even as i get fully sidetracked from my japanese quest for about the next fourteen years.

oops!!!!

part ii: in which i get hopelessly addicted to prose books for japanese teenagers

the year is 2025. i consider myself someone who “knows japanese”, though i would kind of stare at my feet and mumble it if you asked me to say it out loud: in the intervening years since my visual novel-induced growth spurt, i have once again Stagnated. where i’m at now is just a bit ahead of where i was at a decade ago.

i’m in a spot that i think will again sound familiar to a lot of people: i’m comfortable enough with the language to use it for stuff like comics or visual novels or even certain video games, but i balk at the thought of, say, reading a whole book in japanese. like, a book? i write books for a living, so i know what kind of nasty stuff writers like to put in those things. and the answer is words!!

but i’m curious. i am book-curious. i do a little digging, and i find out that the kadokawa corporation’s “bookwalker” ebook platform accepts paypal, which means i can actually buy stuff from it without having to wrangle the beast of transcontinental payment processing.

i search around. the front page of the website’s light novel section is perennially choked with stuff about guys who died and went to an RPG instead of heaven, but they also have books about normal stuff, like girls kissing. here’s a light novel with a twenty-word-long title about how this girl lost a bet and now she has to make out with the girl she hates forever even though she hates her. the cover art is cute. i check the price. since when is a novel the price of a bag of convenience store doritos?! well, i guess i have no choice...

i crack open this book on my telephone.

the letters go from top to bottom, because japanese is like that.

i learn a million tiny interesting things about japanese book typography within seconds of seeing this first page. i’m the sort of nerd who picks up on stuff like this, okay. it’s a total sensory delight to witness these words trailing down the page.

i start reading.

i run into mission-critical missing vocabulary essentially instantly. it happens at least once a sentence. i try highlighting some text. okay, so the app doesn’t like you copy-pasting from it, but it does have a “translate” button you can hit to call up a google translate widget. google translate sucks, but in the context of individual words, it generally suffices to give you a quick idea of the meaning and the pronunciation—though it can be wrong about both, as i’ll have many chances to find out.

still, it works for my purposes. indeed, the fact that it is a little annoying to do this look-up process works to my benefit. this is something i’ve come to understand over the years: it can actually be counterproductive if you make it too easy to look words up, as with rikaichan or similar browser extensions. at a certain point you’re just reading japanese through an english dictionary. on the other hand, the several seconds-long pause before i can get a definition for a word in this app is just long enough to force a moment of Reflection. if it’s a word i’ve seen before, it might be long enough to jog my memory.

in other words, under the right circumstances, a novel is kind of just one big, hyper-engaging flash card deck...? so as i make my way through these books, my vocabulary skyrockets. i permanently memorize more new and useful vocabulary from reading one novel for teenagers than i have in years of reading manga. it’s kind of crazy.

i finish one book. i buy like five more immediately.

the quality of the books varies. several of them have what my adult brain recognizes as Bad Writing. and yet: i kind of can’t put them down. something is happening to me!

i’ve always liked reading, but i’ve never liked reading more than i did when i was in elementary school. time was, i would stop at the school library first thing in the morning, return yesterday’s book, and check out a new one. i would read a novel a day. i masticated the entire Animorphs series this way, over the course of about one spring.

japanese is not my first language. my japanese reading speed by this point is maybe half what it is for english, and i don’t have a lifetime of intuition built up around what constitutes good, punchy japanese prose. in other words, i am reading these books sort of the way a kid would read them. repetition does not grate on me; clichés feel brand-new; clumsy turns of phrase feel novel precisely for their clumsiness. sometimes i spot typos, and i’m so excited to have noticed a typo that i do not bother to roll my eyes about it.

i start losing sleep intermittently, because my habit of reading before bed—a thing which is famously supposed to make you sleepy—instead just keeps me awake turning pages all night long. i begin to experience stretches of many hours at a time in which not a single english word enters my brain.

eventually i have this moment, and this is going to sound like some real hokey stuff to most of you, and i think that’s fair, but i want to share it nonetheless. i want to be sincere about the awe that i felt in this moment, even though i understand rationally that what i’m describing is actually pretty mundane.

i have this moment, right, where the book i am reading stops being in japanese. i’m looking at the words on this page, and i realize that they’re in english.

i mean, obviously they’re not in english—i’m not hallucinating—but it’s as if they’re in english. or maybe it’s like they’re not in any language at all: it’s like i’m not even reading words. i’m just Getting It. the language center of my brain has cooled sufficiently to become superconducting, and the ideas are just floating down the line in perfect magnetic suspension. i am not holding a book; i am holding a window; i am looking through the window.

i turn the book ninety degrees. the illusion vanishes. the words are made of dots and sweeping lines; it’s gibberish; it’s whatever i thought japanese looked like before i knew japanese.

i turn it another ninety degrees. nothing. another. still nothing.

i complete the turn.

it’s a window again.

i spend like five minutes doing this. it never stops amazing me. i mean, if i can’t be amazed by this sort of thing, what’s even the point? like, of anything?

anyway, moments later i stumble over another kanji i can’t pronounce, unceremoniously banishing the magic window sensation.

but it comes back. or i guess i should say that, as the weeks turn into months, it just becomes normal. it’s 2026 now, about a year since i embarked on Books Quest, and i’ve read dozens more japanese novels in the past year than i’ve read in english. it continues to be my favorite downtime activity.

mission results

the result of Books Quest is that i can understand japanese pretty good. it’s kind of bananas how much better i understand japanese than i did a year ago. it happened so fast!!

out of curiosity, i checked out the practice materials for the JLPT the other day, and based on those results, it seems like i could pass N1 without too much trouble. if time permits, i’d like to try taking it this fall, just to have it on the record.

but that’s not really the point, at least for me. from the outset, the reason i wanted to learn japanese has always been the same: i just want to engage with and understand interesting untranslated art. and now i can! and i do! and it owns!!

the part where i actually give you some advice

if you take one thing away here, let it be this:

the best way to practice japanese is by using it. just use whatever japanese knowledge you have now to do whatever it was that you wanted to learn japanese to do in the first place. just do it! just do the thing! don’t sit around waiting until you’re “ready” or whatever! do it bad! just bang your head against 10,000 inscrutable text boxes until you understand 10% of them!

i warned you at the outset that it may be bad advice that i was about to give you. well, maybe now you see why. i mean, look at that paragraph i just wrote!! i’m sorry: i genuinely, truly believe every single word of it. however, i also understand that pretty much every one of those words requires more qualification than i have time to give.

so, rather than telling you that this is what you should be doing, i would like to just affirm for you—in the strongest terms possible—that this is something you could be doing. you absolutely, positively, 100% can acquire japanese this way. it’s not even hard! for someone like me, this is in fact the easiest possible way to do it.

when i say that it’s not hard, understand that i’m drawing a fine distinction. hard, to me, implies frustration. but i never felt frustrated at any point in this process, not even at the very beginning. sure, i’ve failed more times at more individual challenges along the way than i could ever possibly count. i just cracked open a book and failed to remember how to pronounce 核融合. but this does not bother me. i don’t chafe at this kind of thing, because the thrill of understanding anything at all in another language keeps me feeling weightless. this is the mindset you have to have; you have to be like unto a baby; this advice is for babies only.

anyway, thanks for coming to my post!

faq

What about output? it can come later, once you’re already fairly comfortable with japanese. getting your mouth to form the sounds correctly is a skill that has to be practiced on its own, but you can develop a pretty thorough intuition for how things are supposed to sound just by listening a lot. i (mostly) learned pitch accent without paying the subject any conscious attention.

What about kanji? aside from those first hundred or so kanji i memorized years ago, i’ve never done any dedicated kanji study. i learn kanji by learning words with kanji in them, and i learn words by seeing them in context and looking them up if i’m unsure of the pronunciation.

Should I be using Anki or whatever? sure! if you do, my advice is to mine vocabulary from the stuff you’re already reading. i’ve dabbled in anki on and off, but in practice i’m usually so absorbed in reading that i don’t find the time to make cards. when and whether you’ll feel the need to make cards will depend on your goals and your tolerance for rote memorization, i think.

So I can use anime with subtitles to study? look at me. look me in the eye right now. you know you can’t just watch anime with english subtitles and think that counts as immersion, right? you know this. we will not pretend that you don’t know this. find japanese subtitles or turn the subs off altogether.

Duolingo? duolingo is a free-to-play puzzle game that employs the aesthetics of language learning to dress up its rudimentary pattern-matching gameplay. in other words, duolingo will teach you japanese about as well as Candy Crush will satisfy your craving for sweets. the highest-level course material on duolingo would not prepare you for the level of japanese you would encounter in a book for literal elementary schoolers, and that’s not because it’s hard to read a book for elementary schoolers, it’s because if you could read japanese then you would stop giving the bird your money.

Okay, but what do I do when I really just don’t understand something? you gotta learn to let ambiguity go. this is the thing that makes or breaks your ability to cope with immersion. you’ll pick up on usage patterns subconsciously as you encounter them in more contexts, so don’t get hung up on it each time you run into a turn of phrase you don’t get.

footnotes

¹: don’t use μtorrent. i’ve heard it’s straight up a bitcoin miner now, or something? hie thee hence to qbittorrent. that’s the one you want. qbittorrent. got it?

²: i’ve never actually taken the JLPT, so after writing this sentence i went ahead and took all of the official sample tests, from N1 down to N5. i would say: yeah, i was probably a mid-tier N3 at this point in time. 2026 me would probably pass N1, assuming my score on these samplers is representative.

having said that, there’s a caveat to both of these suppositions that’s worth getting into. i think there are probably a lot of people who could pass N3 way more comfortably than my 2012 self could have, and yet would struggle with reading the sorts of prose i was reading on the regular. this isn’t because i’m some sort of genius, but rather because prosaic and colloquial japanese of all flavors is mostly just absent from the testing material? even at the N1 testing level, the most adventurous reading material i encountered was some newspaper editorial-type stuff and a fun little pop sci article about how crows are smart.

in fact, let’s drive the point home: one of the final reading comprehension passages in the N1 sampler involved a pair of opinion pieces about new words that had just been added to the dictionary. both writers threw up the word “逆ギレ” as an example of the newfangled slang the kids are whipping around nowadays.

i know this word. it’s a fun word! it’s a single verb that means “to get pissed at someone for getting pissed at you even though they’re literally right”. it’s in at least a half dozen of the books i’ve read this year.