cesartalvez Learning | Learn Anything!

こんにちは　 👋 (that’s Good Afternoon in 日本語)

Last month, I unleashed this beast on Youtube: 

1 year #japanese Speedrun!!??? | 日本語 スピドルの

It’s my Official Japanese Speedrun Challenge: Learning Japanese in One Single Year:

• be able to watch an Anime in Japanese
• be able to have a mid-level conversation with a Native
• Learn at least 1000 Kanji

I knew at the time that it was extremely difficult, so to motivate myself, I added a constraint / motivator

“If I fail, I have to donate 10,000 BRL to Charity (less than 2,000 USD at the moment).

One month later, after researching extensively about the Subject of Learning Japanese, and also about Learning and Linguistics itself, I came to a stark, but funny realization:

I am going to fail, most likely. 🤣

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And here is is why ↙️

Motivation is Lacking ↘️

Motivation is the TOP FACTOR when learning a language, and I thought putting my bank account on the line would motivate me. But the thing is:

I don’t care how much time it takes to Learn Japanese at all. I just wanna have fun with the process.

And donating 10 thousand BRL to Charity? Something I am happy to do! ☺️

Unfortunately, Japanese seems to descend on my priority list as the days go by. Here’s an example of the hilarious, scary list of things I am managing as of today:

• Meditation (always my Top Priority) 🙇
• Writing for Two Blogs (Personal Blog, Learning Blog)
• Managing a Youtube Channel (Planning and Producing Content, Editing)
• Managing Social Media for Several Projects (Oh so painful)
• Coaching my Intern 🧑‍💻(yup, I have so much work to do I hired one)
• A Reading List that just gets larger as the days pass
• Five Instruments. Yup.
  You would think I am just a beginner on each, but well… I could probably teach all of them except Flute
• Exercising / Yoga 🧘
• Learning Japanese 🇯🇵- Finally! 🫁

As I need to Eat, Sleep, Bathe and try having a stable Social Life, I only have roughly 7 waking hours* to perform all of these activities. On the 16th of December 2024, just to name one of the days I can recall, I did not study Japanese formally AT ALL.

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To sum it up, I am likely to fail because my Motivation is not very high and there’s no downside to being unable to reach my goal.

Too many things to Learn: 10,000* words and 1000 Kanji 😅

I calculate I would need roughly 10 thousand words to be mildly fluent, which means that…

• Having 360 days to study (5 breaks), that leads to 10,000 / 360 = 27 words / day. 
• So, I would need to learn 27 frequent words per day (on Average).

Now let’s add Kanji.
Without even picking a Calculator, I would need to Learn 3 Kanji per day; again, on Average.

Another issue with Kanji: although at first I thought I should memorize them individually, many Youtubers I found are in favor of Passively Learning them through Vocabulary alone.

But going to the bottom line, with the mathematics above, I concluded that I need to:

“Learn 30 Units of Information per day”

Now, the reality:

I can study roughly 15 new cards on Anki per day without getting crazy, and that number diminishes every single day, since I am favoring other methods of acquiring new vocabulary.

Or, to be more precise… 

Getting extremely bored with the whole endeavor and realizing that I lack the discipline to keep up.

And although this aforementioned Lack of Discipline definitely plays a large role, guess what I realized?

Other people are doing that as well?! – Getting bored with Anki, frustrated, and favoring other methods. I also heard an extremely well observed counter-argument to using Anki. It can make you favor memorizing Flashcards, not Vocabulary itself! Topic for another article.

And now the truly surprising:
Getting fluent with Japanese??!

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With all of this in mind, I finish the article with the stark conclusion that I might not be able to reach my goal, although I already have some ideas of how to counter several of these blockers. Topic for another article, after all, I don’t want to sell the magical beans to cheap and, besides, I would prefer to time-test my theories, using myself as Guinea Pig 🐭

But thanks for reading up to this point! I hope you got something useful from this article.

Perhaps you’re Learning Japanese yourself or were just curious about the title. Let me know what you think!

And reiterating, you can accompany my Japanese Journey on Youtube <3: https://www.youtube.com/@cesartalvez-learning?themeRefresh=1

I don’t know at which point of my adventures you are reading, so I might be Fluent at this point! Or at least so I hope! 💧

ありがとう！ さようなら 🎎