Daily Japanese Study: 2025

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 19:00:00 +0000

Background

Sometimes an accidental decision has interesting second-order consequences that you really don’t see coming. One of them was being dropped from my intended class during my first-year fall and having to take JAPN 101 instead. Unexpectedly, I found that I quite liked the challenge, and soon I found myself increasingly invested in something I had never originally intended doing:

Fall of 2023: JAPN 101, starting to quite like the grammar challenges, investing increasingly more time into the language.
Winter of 2023/2024: JAPN 99 (Winter Study) course, applying to Japanese summer intensive programs, getting into KCJS!
Spring of 2024: APN 102, begin assembling my own Anki deck (Zipf’s Law sorted collection of coursework vocabulary), finishing Genki 1 and 2 in my free time to be ready for the summer.
Summer of 2024: Complete KCJS, which is effectively equivalent to completing JAPN 201-202 at my school.
Fall of 2024: Then JAPN 301, which is the single hardest humanities course I have ever taken.

Then something shifted in my thinking around the winter of 2024. By that point, Japanese study was so engrossing that I had to make the call to prioritize what mattered most: my Geosciences studies. What drove me to make this choice was because I realized that a class I really wanted to take in Geosciences conflicted with the time offerings for Japanese, and that taking both would effectively be an overwhelming workload that would prevent success in either course.

Japanese on nsf.name

Daily Japanese Study: 2025

Background