It's nearly been 2 years since I started Japanese, and 3 months since my last Japanese update:

How I’m Learning Japanese August 2025

My morning routine looks like: Anki I do 20 new cards a day. The cards are ones I have created from reading, like this: I only make cards if: * It’s within 5k frequency, so it’s common to me * OR I know all the Kanji in the word * OR it’s a

Skerritt.blogAutumn Skerritt

Anki

Firstly, let's look at Anki!

In my August 2025 update I had 928 mature cards. I was doing 20 new cards a day.

3 months later and I have:

Almost 3000 more mature cards! That's 34 cards matured a day.

This comes down to reading heavily.

Due to reading way more, my retention is a lot better.

Here's my retention almost 1 year ago:

And now...

Generally speaking my Young cards sit around 77% and my mature cards around 93%

You can see my retention is decreasing, likely because I am encountering harder words now and 20 words / day is a bit of an insane pace.

My average difficulty is 39%

Bunpro

Last update in August I speedran N5 and was doing N4:

And since then:

I've completed N4, and am halfway through N3 grammar!

GSM

Since August I started using GSM heavily:

GitHub - bpwhelan/GameSentenceMiner: An All-in-One immersion toolkit for learning Languages through games and other visual media.

An All-in-One immersion toolkit for learning Languages through games and other visual media. - bpwhelan/GameSentenceMiner

GitHubbpwhelan

I've played 8 total Visual Novels and I am working on my first visual novel of length 1 milly characters.

Here are my stat pages:

I also ended up contributing to GSM heavily, such as the entire stats page.

I also added this goals page to track my daily reading and show me how much I need to read to achieve my arbitrary goals.

What I do daily

My daily routine is this:

1. Anki first thing, 20 new cards.
2. Bunpro grammar review, 3 new items.
3. Read a visual novel for 2 hours 20 (or whatever GSM says)

Everything after this is optional.

Sometimes I watch anime or YouTube, sometimes I don't do anymore, sometimes I read a visual novel more.

On Sundays I go through all my leech cards in Anki and if I see interesting Kanji I add them using the Kanji dict I talked about:

The Best Beginner Kanji Dictionary

Over in TheMoeWay user road_to_redemption shared their Kanji dictionary: It has everything you need from a Kanji dict: * Meaning * Frequency * Top 3 common words with readings + translations * Readings + distributions * Components with keywords I really like this a lot, in particular the frequency + meaning + readings of the Kanji. Current

Skerritt.blogAutumn Skerritt