This is part of a series of notes I'm taking as I learn Japanese. While learning you are constantly improving, but when you're experienced you forget what it was like to get there. I'm writing down those thoughts so fluent future me can know the idiot who created him.

I had been studying for 3 years and 6 months when I posted this.

A couple years ago I started writing a series of posts on Japanese particles, mostly to help myself comprehend them, but also in the hope that they might be useful for other learners.

I remember those posts being really helpful to write because they made me analyze the grammar enough to be able to explain it in English. It really was useful to build a model of the meaning so I could fit it in my head. Those models were all I had, and at that point I was mostly translating sentences to English so I could map them onto that model in order to understand things.

When I wrote those I was heavily into using flash cards to try to memorize vocabulary. I got to about level 12 in WaniKani, then about a year ago I decided I was going to stop formally studying and just use the language organically. I changed the language on my phone and computer to Japanese and made myself read the dropdown menus to figure out how to do things. It’s hard and slow at first, especially with new apps when you don’t have muscle memory and keyboard shortcuts down yet, but I think actually using the language day to day and having to identify what I’m looking for in Japanese has made a big difference.

Another thing I’ve been doing is playing video games in Japanese. Games are extremely good for learning because you have to decipher what the characters are telling you to understand what to do next. It’s easy to gauge whether you understood when the things you’re seeing on the screen line up with the words you just read. And they’re good for slow readers because games will usually wait for the player to sit and stare at a dialog box for a few minutes if that’s what they need to do.

I still find myself looking up and translating parts of more complex sentences from time to time, but for the most part I can read through a sentence and comprehend the basic meaning without thinking about English equivalents. I do regularly encounter Kanji I don’t understand, but it feels more like reading college textbooks as a kid, where you can read the sentence over-all but there are a couple words you don’t know and the meaning isn’t crystal clear.

Interestingly, now that I have more of a feel for how particles actually work, I find that my understanding of them doesn’t really map to the explanations I had back then. Those posts feel like an overcomplication of something simple, but at the time I felt like I was simplifying something complicated.

A lot of Japanese teachers on the internet repeat the “input, input, input!” mantra, even going so far as to say that’s the only thing you should do. While I think they’re right that exposing yourself directly to the thing you’re trying to learn and absorbing it is best in the long run, I also think that while you’re on the path of learning there are going to be things that are extremely useful for you to do at that moment, but not as much down the line, and maybe those same things wouldn’t be useful to others, but they work for you.

There isn’t really a wrong way to learn. It’s all stepping stones. If you have a strong desire to learn and patience with yourself, and you keep putting in the effort, you will keep improving. Not just at languages, but at anything.