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japanese

5000 words

Autumn Skerritt

• 4 min read
5000 words
Photo by Y.A / Unsplash

5000 words.

I hit 4000 words 87 days ago.

That's 11.49 mature words a day.

Stats since 4k words:

Stats

10k average daily characters.

2 hours of visual novels a day on average.

Since I hit 4k words in December:

800k chars read, 128 hours spent reading.

I've averaged 1 hour a day of reading (work....) and reading an average of 9.1k chars a day.

💡
My reading speed went from 5k / hour to 6.4k / hour!

I've come across 15.5k unique words, and 5.8k of those I had never seen before.

In that time I read:

  • Limelight Lemonade Jam
  • Marco and the Galaxy Dragon
  • Summer Pockets Reflection Blue

In terms of Anki:

💡
Not all my cards are in Anki, a few hundred are in Migaku Memory.
💡
I don't care about JLPT that much, only about reading. In theory I am definitely N3, maybe N2. Who knows. I don't care. I just know that reading visual novels is still difficult for me

332 hours studying Japanese since 5k words.

I've been doing Migaku Memory Japanese Course for like 3 months now for funsies.

What I made

Firstly for GameSentenceMiner I added these things:

  • Added tokenisation to GSM stats
  • Added per game stats
  • Added Anki stats

For Yomitan:

  • Added popup blur when under frequency

I also made an Anki addon that turns your mature words into a freq dict so you can combine both of them.

For Manabitan, a fork of Yomitan I:

  • Added MDX support
  • Made it way faster with Anki dedupe
  • Added themes

OpenAI awarded me free Codex for my contributions to the above,

I also made Bee's Character Dictionary:

Bee’s Character Dictionary
Generate auto-updating character name dictionaries for Yomitan based on what you are currently playing/reading

To make name dicts.

And also Bee's Custom Dict Maker for easy plaintext Yomitan dicts:

Bee’s Custom Yomitan Dict Maker
Create and edit custom Yomitan dictionaries with plaintext.

What my routine looks like:

  • Anki - Every morning. Usually 10 - 15 mins.
  • Migaku Memory - 5 to 10 mins
  • Visual Novels - between 1 and 6 hours a day, depends on how hard I work.

Since December I now work at FAANG so I don't have much time to immerse anymore, still it is the most important thing to me.

I currently do 10 new Anki cards a day, some number of Migaku cards if I can be bothered, and I just read a VN to finish it off.

I don't watch anime all that much, maybe 6 hours total since December.

As for manga, maybe 15 minutes...

I just read visual novels :P

My plan is to just continue this. I'm making progress, albeit slowly.

Goals

  • Hit 6k words by August 2026
  • Read Kanon in the winter
  • Read Manosaba this year
  • Read STEINS;GATE this year