Hi I'm Alivia and today I want to give a full breakdown minute by minute of what my
four hour plus study routine was when I first started learning Japanese. On my six month
overview video a lot of people were asking me in the comments what my study routine was, how much
time I was dedicating, how I broke it up between all the different resources. This routine was what
I was doing for my first two months of studying Japanese- when I was still working through the
Genki textbooks, and I know four hours sounds like a lot of time and that not everyone has that much
free time to dedicate to learning Japanese. But one of my main strategies to get in this much
time was trying to fit in Japanese into my daily routine. So even if you don't have as much time
as I did, you can hopefully still use some of the strategies to try and fit in some more Japanese
into your routine. And just so you know I started this routine after learning hiragana and katakana.
I only took about one or two days to initially learn about them and understand how they worked,
but after I did that I quickly dived into my routine. At first I was really slow, I didn't
have everything memorized as yet. But I just made sure that I understood how to use a kana chart
so whenever I came across a word that I couldn't remember, I could just look up on the chart to see
what it meant. And then doing this repeatedly over time really helped me with my memory- so yeah don't
feel like you have to have hiragana and katakana completely mastered before you start doing any
other learning, it's totally fine to be looking things up when you forget and doing that is
actually going to really help you remember it. Okay so going back to that idea of fitting in Japanese
into my daily routine, the first thing that I was doing every morning at the time was that I was
working out. Um... But I have not done that in a while. So what I would do while I was working out at home
is I would just watch anime while I was working out, so I was watching shows I had already seen in
English, and I was re-watching them in Japanese, without Japanese subtitles. And I just had that
going on in the background while I was working out. And what I'd be doing is I'd be watching two or
three episodes every morning- so that's 40 minutes to an hour. And this was a win-win for me because
it made working out a bit more entertaining and I was getting in a lot of time in to listening
to the language. Because at the time I could not understand anything that was being said at all-
okay this is literally week one week two of learning Japanese and I'm watching these shows
in the morning, so I could not understand anything that was being said I was completely going off of
what I already knew from watching the show before and from the visuals. And honestly it probably
took me two weeks before I could even catch when characters names were being said. Everything kind
of just blended together- I couldn't parse out all the different words yet. But I knew that I
really wanted to start listening comprehension from the very beginning, and I also knew that I
wouldn't have the discipline to sit down and watch something for a full hour that I didn't understand
at all. So I found that it really helped that I was doing it while I was doing another activity so
that the time went by faster and that I didn't get bored. So yeah, if you want to try watching anime
from the very beginning, try finding something to do while you're watching it. So it could be working
out, you could be doing a hobby, a craft- because I knew just for me personally I wouldn't be able to
put in that much time into watching something that I didn't understand yet, so I found that
multitasking really helped with that. Or of course you could watch something that's made for Japanese
children or for Japanese language learners, so that you have a chance of understanding and
you'll probably get a lot better at listening comprehension if you do that. But for whatever
reason, when I started I didn't think of that and I was just doing anime. Now the second thing that
I'd do every day while I was getting ready, making my breakfast, brushing my teeth, is that I would listen
to Japanese podcasts for at least 20 minutes. Now of course, I didn't understand anything that was
being said at the beginning and I found it a lot harder to do than watching anime because I didn't
have any visual cues and I didn't have any context for what was being said- because unless I read the
description for the podcast I wouldn't even know what the topic was. So for that reason, I was using
[The Konnichiwa] podcast when I first started because it's a bilingual podcast- so all the hosts speak both
Japanese and English and they swap between the two throughout the whole podcast. So this made it a bit
easier for me to listen to because even though I didn't understand the Japanese parts, the English
parts gave me context for what was being said. And I figured that having that context for what was
being said in Japanese would help my subconscious in making connections and recognizing patterns,
than if I was listening to a full Japanese podcast that I had literally no idea what was being said
or what even the topic was. So I started with [The Konnichiwa] podcast and then I gradually transitioned to
listening to the dialogues that are in the Genki textbooks- when they're reading those long passages
out, and then I transition to listening to full Japanese podcasts. So yeah, even though podcasts
are a lot harder to understand when you're first starting out, putting it on in the background is
a really great way to get your brain used to listening to how the language sounds. So at
this point, I haven't even started my, like, *official* studying for the day, but I already have in an hour
of studying and I didn't have to change anything about my regular daily routine to do that. But when
I was ready to sit down and do my studies for the day, I would start out with my vocabulary, my kanji,
all the like flashcard type stuff. So first up would be WaniKani, which is a website where I learn
my [kanji] and I would start by doing lessons to learn new kanji. And when I first started using
WaniKani, I was doing all the lessons as soon as they showed up and I don't recommend doing that.
It gets very overwhelming, I was doing 40 to 50 lessons every couple of days- as soon as they
became unlocked- and at first it was fine. I had the time to do it, I didn't really see a problem with it
But months later it really caught up with me and all of my reviews kind of compiled and just
became too much and I actually had to completely stop doing new lessons and only doing my reviews
for a long time until it became more manageable for me. So don't do all the new lessons as soon
as you level up, spread it out over multiple days, it'll be fine and it will be better for you in
the long term. If you try doing what I did it will likely catch up with you and become overwhelming
and you're gonna get burnt out. So don't do what I did, spread your lessons out over multiple days
and if you ever feel overwhelmed or feeling a bit burnt out just stop doing the new lessons and just
work on getting that review down. And after I've done my lessons, I would do my reviews for the
day and that morning routine for WaniKani would take me 30 minutes on average- but like I said I
was doing my lessons really sporadically so some days it would only take me like 15 minutes to do
my whole WaniKani routine, other days it could take up to an hour, but usually it was in the 30 minute
range. But WaniKani is a spaced repetition system, so it will have reviews showing up throughout
the day. So I would usually do 30 minutes in the morning and then I would do a review at lunch
that would usually only take like five minutes- it wouldn't be very long- and then another review
at night that would take, like, 10 minutes. And then the next thing I'd do was do my vocabulary study. So
I started out by learning the vocabulary from the Genki textbooks using Memrise and I really liked
it when I started out. It's pretty straightforward to use, it's pretty fun, it's very game-like, but
months later I transitioned to using Anki, which I think is a lot better of a tool to use long term.
and again I was going way too fast with the vocabulary. I was sitting down and learning the
entire chapter's worth of vocabulary in one sitting and I'd do that every few days and by the time I
got to Genki 2 it was very overwhelming and my retention rate was really bad. I was forgetting
a lot of the words from Genki 1. So don't dump a ton of vocabulary to do in one sitting.
Instead chunk it out and do a little bit each day. You could do 5 words, 10 words, 20 words,
something in that range. But I unfortunately was not doing that, so I was probably spending about
45 minutes on Memrise every day, but because I was learning kanji with WaniKani, I was skipping
the kanji words in the Genki textbooks. So if I came across a word that used kanji, I was only
learning the hiragana version of the word using Memorize. And then again with Memrise I would
sometimes do another review at lunch time, but more often I would do a nighttime review
that would take like 10 to 20 minutes. And then the last thing that I was doing every day during
my first two months of learning Japanese, is that I was going through the Genki textbooks. So I was
studying my textbooks for about two hours every day and I was going at a pace at about one chapter
every two to three days, so I was able to finish both books in two months and if you want to know
more about that, you can check out this video *point to Cards* but basically, my aim of using the textbooks was to
build a general understanding of the language, and get some general familiarity with the grammar
structures. I was very selective in the exercises that I was doing. I would only do exercises if I
thought that they would be beneficial to me or if I was interested in doing them, but if it was an
exercise that I just didn't want to do, I just skipped it. The main types of questions that I
would do were ones that were based on listening comprehension or reading comprehension. I didn't
obsess over completely understanding every single grammar point. As long as I generally
understood what was happening I'd move on and I just trusted that I would eventually gain that
deeper understanding through seeing it a lot in context. And another thing that I do sometimes
when I was studying the textbook- to make it a bit more enjoyable- is I listened to Japanese music. I'd
never listened to Japanese music before so it was really cool to explore all the different genres
and see if I could understand any of the lyrics. So yeah, that was just like a fun motivational thing
and if you also have never listened to Japanese music before and don't know where to find it I'll
link a Spotify playlist that you can check out that I was listening to that has a pretty broad
range of different types of music. So yeah, that was the routine that I used until I finished both the
Genki textbooks- two months into my studies- but one thing I really want to say if you're watching this
and you've been studying Japanese for a while is to not compare yourself to other language learners.
I think it's really easy to be watching these types of videos looking for motivation and ideas
how to fit it into your own study routine, but it can kind of spiral into feeling like you're not
doing enough, or you're not going as fast enough, or that you wish that you're farther along on
your journey than you are. And most people do not have four hours of spare time to study Japanese every
day and that is totally okay. So I definitely want to make videos about studying when you have less
free time because I'm sure that's a lot more universally useful to all of you. It's very easy
to watch these kind of videos and compare yourself to whoever's talking about their routine and feel
like you're not doing enough or you're not going fast enough or you're not putting as much time in
and like that's something that I really dealt with too [and still do!] at the end of the summer. I really felt upset
because even though I had done a lot of studying in Japanese, I felt like I could have done more
and that I'd never have that much free time to dedicate to it again and then I wasted it.
Learning's really a process, it's gonna be messy. Even if you feel like you're learning really
slowly, you know, learning one new word a day, is learning one new word a day, you know, that's one more
word than you did yesterday, like, that's really great! And you know if you're making progress,
you're making progress, like, learning a language is a marathon not a sprint. It takes a lot of
trial and error to figure out what works for you because you're going to learn the best if you're
using materials that are really exciting and interesting for you to use, and that's going to
be different for different people. Unfortunately there's no perfect routine that you can follow
that will make you fluent, everyone's just trying to figure it out. Now if you're like me and you
love watching people talk about learning Japanese I have a playlist that you can check out that goes
into more detail about everything I talked about today. I have a in-depth guide on how I
went through the Genki textbook, I have a tutorial on how to get started and using Anki, a video that
explains how WaniKani works and why I really like it. If you liked this video make sure you give it a
thumbs up so that even more people can find it and that is all I have for today and I'll see you soon!