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The original was posted on /r/learnjapanese by /u/Belegorm on 2025-07-02 01:44:58+00:00.
Detective Galileo is teaching me Japanese!
I was wondering for a while if I should make one of these posts. Honestly, this subreddit has lead to me finding my groove, so I figured why not. Apologies for rambling here, and for being lengthy. If you don’t get to the end of this post then I wouldn’t be surprised lol.
I think I’m not alone, in that I tried and failed many times to learn Japanese. Where like I knew the absolute basics of chapter 1 of the textbook, but didn’t know the right starting point and was afraid to miss something. And now I have finally found what works for me.
I’d always wanted to learn Japanese, ever since like high school. Lots of my favorite games were from Japan. Friends introduced me to anime etc. And I tried many times to start learning it. Tae Kim was something I’ve known about for many many years, I’d start reading it, then get bored. I got Remembering the Kanji, and the Genki books, but tapped out quickly.
In 2017 a new co-worker told me about Wanikani (immersion people don’t run away just yet!) so I started there. But I ended up stopping all study basically when I moved to Japan, met my now-wife there, and after 2 years moved back home.
I guess due to being married to a Japanese person I had a decent advantage, but I just never could make time to study. Always wanted to play games instead. But this year I finally decided to start studying, at the end of March. And here’s my results after ~3 months in.
Useless Attempts
Problem was, where to start? I had this problem where if I started from the absolute beginning of like Genki 1 then everything was familiar, easy and boring. The end of the textbook was unknown to me. Where to start, with any resource? Do I start halfway and then potentially have missed something along the way? I had a lot of anxiety over the years about this, where to start.
My job offered this program called Gofluent. So I gave it a shot, tested into A2 level. But this program is absolutely terrible. Disorganized, teaching business Japanese from the basic level, in Japanese, too early on.
I also tried the bird (Duolingo). I’d started using it randomly back in 2020 when I started commuting to work on the train, but then pandemic and… no more train lol. Duolingo is really great if you want to order green tea I guess but you’ll spend ages just talking about that.
Finding My Way
Two things that were kind of working, were, once again trying to read a little bit of Tae Kim every day if I could, and Wanikani. Honestly, I kind of hate studying grammar, so it was hard to motivate myself to read Tae Kim. WK was better, but very slow at the start.
That’s when I started reading this subreddit and people offered links to the Moe Way, and to the Lazy Guide. I’d always kinda known about stuff like AJATT which sounded crazy to me. Especially to a guy with a full-time job and 2 kids. But mass immersion started to make sense. I started watching Youtubers, some who taught how to do immersion, and others who gave updates. So, I decided to try and immerse.
Oh, and I started Bunpro.
Immersion time!
This was probably around one month in of trying to learn Japanese again. At this point, WK and Bunpro were going okay. But I decided to start immersing following TMW and the Lazy Guide. Two difficulties here:
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I’m not technical these days. Anki and stuff like that overwhelmed me. The Lazy Guide really saved me here. It took a lot of steps (the setup is decidedly not lazy), but the writer succeeded in me getting Anki, Ankiconnect and Yomitan set up on my PC, and eventually, on my phone.
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I’m not really that into anime, manga, light novels etc. anymore. Not that I hate them or anything - it’s just while I really liked them in high school and college, in my 30’s now, they were less appealing. Plus I really spent more time on gaming.
But I figured, we have the setup, let’s channel my inner teenager and let’s go.
I started by starting the Kaishi 1.5k Anki deck. This was really, really good - I highly recommend this! It was not too hard for me - I already knew words like 魚, 赤, 金曜日 and so on. So I usually did 20 words a day, sometimes 40 if there were a lot of easy ones.
I started immersing with reading Ranma (manga). Still fun but I still kind of had to force myself. Plus, lots of battle-related vocab lol, 格闘 was one of my first words lol.
I also started watching The World God Only Knows, an anime I never saw the end of but had really enjoyed the manga like 15 years prior lol. Closer to slice of life, and it had more common words.
I was mining, I set it to 20 words a day. Pretty soon, I set everything to targeted sentence cards - I’d see the full sentence, with the target word highlighted. I found that easier to remember, seeing it in context, rather than vocab cards. Usually makes reviews take longer.
But I was still kind of meh on manga and anime, they only really show conversations. Also, usually short sentences. NHK Easy has longer sentences, I wanted more like that. So, what about novels?
What about novels?
I found this one Youtuber, Hullo, who mostly read light novels. Back in the day, I enjoyed reading translated versions, but these were far rarer than manga. I also wanted to read “serious” novels, but figured light novels would be easier.
I found this great site called Learn Natively. You can choose if you want to sort by novel, or light novel, and can sort by difficulty. So I looked up light novels (at this point I was getting more interested in anime-ey things again), and started with 何故か学校一の美少女が休み時間の度に、ぼっちの俺に話しかけてくるんだが?
It was super cringey, and I wanted them to just hurry up and get together. But somehow, I made it work, after a bit over a month of trying to learn Japanese. I didn’t stress out about grammar, pretty much looked up most words using Yomitan, and understood most things by the gist of it. I was mining words with an i + 1 approach. I got through the first couple novels.
I found that starting novels was challenging, but really rewarding, and the more you read them the easier they get. I also got those longer sentences.
After finishing the first novel I read some more manga, watched some more anime, then read the second one.
Grown-up novels time
This was before I figured out Ttsu reader for my phone. Usually on the weekend I’d be setting with my phone out in the living room and wasn’t really immersing much. Most of my immersion was after kids were in bed, on my PC (let me tell you, reading books late at night makes you struggle to stay awake sometimes lol). I’d watched this youtuber, Bunsuke, who recommended learning through literature. He had a link to こころ, by Natsume Soseki on Aozora Bunko, a site that hosts classic public domain books.
Armed with Yomitan on my phone, I figured what the heck, let’s try and read. And was super slow, but I kind of was getting it.
My wife was like “if you can read that, why not read a normal novel?” One she recommended was Higashino Keigo, a mystery writer. I was never big into mysteries, but figured they’d be better than like fantasy. So, (on my PC) I started reading 容疑者Xの献身.
It was insanely slow reading, constant lookups. Really intensive stuff lol. He uses kanji a lot. Also, a lot of the vocab I was learning was super morbid and specific lol. But I slowly, but surely, over more than 3 weeks, made progress in this book. It was exhausting, but I picked up speed a bit as I got used to it. I got really, really into this book by the end, and have become a fan of Detective Galileo as a result. I’ve seen a bit of the drama and a couple of the movies as well now (the first one being the adaptation of this book). I went a little crazy with mining on this book but it was really the point that I was enjoying reading a lot for the first time.
Meanwhile I figured out Ttsu reader on my phone and for the weekends I decided to find a super easy LN to read on my phone, so I started with わたしの知らない、先輩の100コのこと1
I thought it would be standard LN slop, but it was surprisingly wholesome and easy to read. However, I found that like with all new books, I had to get used to the writing style and the vocab. So, I read this on the weekends here and there. Basically a girl on the train gets interested in a boy who always reads, so she convinces him to have them each ask one question to each other every day. And like most LN’s I’m like how long till they get together lol.
2 months in: More novels
I was a bit tired out after finishing 容疑者Xの献身 so I decided to read some easier LN slop from learn natively, so I found 経験済みなキミと、 経験ゼロなオレが、 お付き合いする話。
My wife says this book is super hentai
This book starts out super horny lol, but c…
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