クリーム is cream, not claim. クレーム is claim/complaint

Im 64 years old and have been studying Japanese for six months. I find it very interesting and it keeps my mind active. My trip to Japan last year was amazing and I wanted to learn more about the culture and language. I enjoy it and I’m having fun with it. I don’t expect I’ll ever be fluent, but that’s ok. It’s not a waste of time!! Any endeavor to learn is not a waste of time!!

Instead of discouraging me from learning Japanese, this video just made me think about how valuable time is. Like the vlog style by the way, I think the cuts are a bit too frequent, but that's just my take, other people might like it.

“ the abyss looks back with cold, dark, meaningless eyes”😂😂😂

Chinese learners laughing at Japanese learners complaining about Kanji 😂

Japanese gets pretty easy later on tbh. I never thought it was difficult anyway. I just consumed a ton of content and now books and series are not that hard to understand. 3 years of study for those who may ask.

Not trying to be billy badass or anything but I’ve trained in martial arts my whole life and what it’s taught me is how to be consistent, be patien, and to enjoy the journey. I love the idea of learning something that can never be mastered. There’s always something new to learn. That’s how I feel with martial arts. So I see Japanese as something that I’ll never be able to master but it just makes me love it more. It’s the mountain that never ends but the views just get better and better

I'm newly married to a Japanese woman and we plan to move to Japan in about 5 years (we live in the US now). I'm just starting to learn the language...yep it's hard! She told me it will take decades to become native-level...

So glad this Chanel just popped up on recommendations, KZfaq finally got “1” right 😂💀

3 years into my Japanese language learning experience and I can say it was worth it. I want to go to a language school in Japan next year to really immerse myself in the language.

474th sub here. I stopped learning japanese years ago but now I decided to learn this language again. I want to become fluent in a year

Been studying Japanese for over a year now. I'm 34 with 2 kids and very little free time. If I can go back I would definitely not do Japanese. By far the hardest thing I've done is try to learn this language. But now I'm at a point where it's like, I'm in too deep. I do love seeing my progress and mostly have fun while studying. Great Video, good luck with this KZfaq path. I'll be checking in for more !

English has kanji. It's called english spelling

The way you describe standing on the edge of the abyss, as the universe stares back with its uncaring eyes, is so much gold. It's how I've felt learning any language. The world is vast, and when you begin to realize how little you know, that's when it starts to eat at you, and you feel the desperate hunger for more, and/or you run in fear from it. I'm at the spot where I'm beginning to have the kana right, and have begun adding kanji. I think there's a lot of context use in Japanese, so having a teacher, or at least a native speaker to help provide context to make things make more sense. I read something about "leveling up" in life. If you are 20 years old, and you've spent your whole life speaking one language, you have 2 literal decades of language learning under your belt, with lots of public and private support to do so. After only a few years of studying hard, you still won't have had that support structure of constant immersion and home education for years before a public education took over the reigns. You've levelled up in Japanese past that of the language acquired by native speakers in the same amount of time (given they are infants incapable of speaking for years) to be capable of conversing and understanding what is going on around you. You have this comparison in your head, but it really isn't fair to you to compare yourself to an adult who's spent their whole life learning the nuances of interaction in their home culture and language. It is much more accurate to compare yourself to a toddler or a small child, since you're working with a similar amount of time dedicated. But even that comparison is limited and really inaccurate at best. Just keep consuming media and learning like you did with English by constant exposure and practice. You will get to your goals in time. Maybe lots of time, but some things are worth it. You said you let your KZfaq ideas sit on the backburner for a while. Maybe this is time well-spent in pursuit of those dreams. But maybe it comes into play elsewhere in your life later, too. In a way you didn't expect. I enjoyed this. I hope you enjoyed making it.

Holy crap, the Videos are so enjoyable to watch. I'm currently learning Chinese, but I always enjoy watching People in Japan. After I watched the video, I think in the Future I'll probably go through the pain. But until then, I would've already mastered a lot of other Languages.

Another absolute BANGER

As I just got out of my online Japanese class, this video weirdly made me feel a lot better about my apparent lack of progress. Or, perhaps, this was the 4D chess of motivational speaking all along!

Hi from Fukuoka 👋 I really like you video cutting style!

I love how every sentence has a new camera angle

skill issue japanese is easy if you just grow up there

As a Chinese speaker, learning Japanese kanji is pretty easy, some of the readings are pretty similar to Chinese, and most kana are foreign words or basic words, so I can basically read Japanese 🤷‍♂️

The effort u put in to change the background for the video, every 10-20 secs, so cool

Can you make a video on how you learned Japanese? Thank you! Also the quality of your videos are really nice 💗 keep up the hard work !

Well, I speak Portuguese, English and French, but in the process of learning French I lost my passion to learn languages. I had to learn French to live here in Québec, BUT since I was a kid I wanted to learn Japanese, I've been postponing it since then. I just started, like 2 weeks ago, I feel I'm in the right track again, maybe what I needed was a good challenge, and it seems that I've found it xD Thanks for the video!

man you made a really high quality video, I like your style

Great video! I'm currently in the process of transitioning from N2 to N1 myself.

And even after all 17 min, i still use my one and only brain cell to push through kanji lol, great video, really enjoyed. Found your channel by pure chance, imma stay here, excited to see you next video!

after coming to Japan after learning japanese for 1 year only, i regretted that i did not learn more japanese lol after moving back to my home country i sticked to learning it everyday until i come back to jp

On my second and last week in Japan, bouta go home tmrw, so I've been getting a lot of Japan related videos recommended on my TL Really glad I stumbled upon your channel cause I really respect the amount of effort you've been putting into them I believe you got a lot of potential so you earned yourself a sub! Looking forward to more content being put out from you 🙏🙏

I'm learning Chinese and Japanese at the same time. I can confirm Japanese is way harder in terms of word structure. The verbs can change based on situation and emotions. While Chinese in my experience I had trouble with the pronounciation and writing. Chinese word structure was slightly more predictable. I like to learn Japanese more due to how cool it sounds and the writing wasn't as complicated as Chinese.

no it going to take a decade or more to learn it well and still you will not fully know it, stop listening to what books say stop trying to rush it and just enjoy life instead of stressing over where your at, you will progress slowly and naturally in time

Yo dude, this video is Amazing, especially considering that your channel is new. All the best for you. Underrated channel for sure.

Good video man rather interesting.

Loved the last sentence, but hey, even if AI can let us speak with anybody across the world without speaking their native languages, I still want to pursue my dream of learning Japanese ✌Actually, I've been watching/listenning to your video while doing my kanji exercises, lol, hope to watch more of your content to practice my japanese audio skills 💪 ánimo!

Whilst studying my kana I stumbled onto this video. Loved it! fml at the ending lol

I hope you blow up man. This content is looking really cool and its all so well shot!

After watching this video I am even more willing to learn it and I am learning it every day bit by bit! Just want to make sure, you said that you could learn only 30% of native japanese speaker, but you meant in those 2 years am I correct? There is a way to surpass even that, there has to be right?

To anyone worried about kanji, I strongly suggest trying the free levels of wanikani. If you haven't heard of it, it works by first teaching you the radicals of each kanji, then pre-made mnemonics to cement them in your memory. On top of that, it uses a spaced repetition system to maximize your retention over long periods of time while minimizing study time. You don't need motivation, just show up every day, do the bare minimum and you will learn the joyo kanji in a year and a half plus 6000 vocab words. In my experience, it's unreasonably effective at teaching you to read. If you've just learned the kana and don't know what to do next, I strongly suggest giving wanikani a try.

Thanks for the laughs 😂❤ If you accomplished this much Congrats on your progress!! I'll probably share this to anyone I come across who is interested in Japanese

14:30 we dont do things because they are easy. We do them because of the challenge.

Congrats sir, your vid hit like a truck. I'm planning on living in Japan in the next years, and I'm totally decided to keep going on learning, your video simply stated perfectly what I believe about Nihongo study, but also gives even more value to this decision, and tests the limit of the one who's passing trough these issues rn. Also I'm really impressed by the editing, the cuts and all, must have taken a lot of time and editing, nice damn job!

good luck with the content you are trying to put out man. pretty sure you are gonna kill it

congrats on 200!!, when youre good you can do what xiaomanyc does and pretend your a tourist then start speaking fluent japanese that would be great content

Good video, this needs more views! :)

As someone who's been learning Dutch, French, and Japanese for the past few years, it's true that learning germanic and romance languages takes less time and faster acquisition, but I feel like knowing Japanese has more practical value. English is the lingua franca of Europe, so most places in Europe will be able to accommodate english speakers, in fact if they sense you're not a fluent speaker, they'll switch to English, which gives you less opportunity to practice the language. Whereas in Japan, on average there's far less people who are able to speak English to a conversational level. Being able to speak Japanese in Japan has helped me far greater than being able to speak French/Dutch in France and in The Netherlands.

i don't know how this got reccomended to me but i watched the entire thing. I hope you'll make the videos you want now that you've spent all the time learning japanese! imo you've already gotten the video part down, lets see if japanese can help you get more content out!

Not only is Japanese considered by the FSI a very difficult category V language, it gets an asterik, denoting "a language that's more difficult for native English speakers than other languages in its category". So more like category V+.

You have high school energy in the way you think about things, you really reminded me of people I knew back then. I have some advice, it seems like you've been passionate about studying Japanese. A better way than studying a language is to acquire it. Other people talk more about this on KZfaq if you're interested. Like you correctly identified that studying kanji readings isn't the optimal way to learn, but rather learning words. Secondly, learn the framework to put words into. People use their preexisting frameworks from their native language and put foreign words into them and it leads to problems. When 文法 rhymes with うんこ in your mind it's not a good sign. Unless you meant 運行. Learn building blocks of Japanese, kana rhythm: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gMV4f7xht9nXXZs.html and pitch accent: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gZ51YMaGlp-0faeI.html19PMs Good luck.

Thank god I'm a Mandarin speaker, which massively shorten the time requirement for learning in Japanese

Hey bro! Watching from Brazil here, haha. Loved the way you record the video, in random places and random positions lmao It's jsut perfect! Continue making content like that, it's very original! And even after watching your video I'll continue learning Japanese, I'm trying to get a software dev job there and I love the place haha

what if I just learn japanese without any kanji? Is it possible to speak with someone at a good level of understanding w/o knowing any kanji?

Lolz great video. I'm at the N5 going on N4 level now. It's great to know that I will still feel like an idiot two years from now, but at least I'll be able to watch shonen without subs hahaha

I'm thankful for this video. But yeah, I can't give up. I'm gonna live there sooo...yeah....

Now would you say this is a criticism of learning Japanese or the n5 to n1 system? I’ve been studying Japanese for maybe about 2-3 months but am still getting off the ground and from what I gather most people see the n1 especially as not worth it and those tests as a bad measurement. Maybe the metric shouldn’t be testing but what you’re able to accomplish entirely in Japanese?

the difficulty of it makes it fun

This does explain why in spite of how much I've learned over the past 5-6 years I'm still not content and keep going. The abyss fully has it's grip on me. Help.

I'm only a year in, but this is such a vibe. This is the language I want to learn though. Hoping to make the move one day myself 🙌

Hey, I just gotta ask this really quick... Are you by any chance of Finnish and or Scandinavian descent?

The amount of sarcasm in this video was quite refreshing

The first language that I really studied is japanese(I know English growing up) and boy it's a huge task when compared to my recent experience studying French. I had a clear goal of learning jp, to read raw Manga and play VNs

I graduated from engineering school this year and I studied Japanese for fun when I got bored of studying the equations, I thought it was pretty fun, maybe I don’t see the big deal😂 I also am bilingual English and Spanish. I can pronounce most sentences in Japanese as fast as natives😂 I think I’m just lucky

Thank you for this information. I did study Japanese in college for a year and only dabble in Hiragana and Katakana, while also learning some grammar along the way. I totally agree with everything you have said. Japanese is hard. I also think it can be fun and rewarding given how you can be very expressive with what you can say. I also decided to learn it because i want to watch anime without subtitles ahahahahah. Can't wait to see more of your content sir. Look forward to seeing you speaking more Japanese.

People on MAL have racked up 10,000 plus hours watching niche anime so that means 10,000 going to studying and then not having to juggle subtitles with watching is worth it, especially since you could funnel those anime into the input exposure required to reach proficiency

giving up on the right time is honestly the best you can do when learning languages…I spent two years in Russian with zero improvement and I understand the feeling of the time wasted without moving a bit…i felt the most freedom in my life when I dumped the Russian mess…I’m intermediate in Spanish now after six months!!…

I studied Japanese for 6 years. I started to be proficient at around 4 or 5th year. Now I can almost do anything like playing rpgs, go on forums , look for jobs, and talking with Japanese people

Honestly I'm content with learning just enough to stumble through ordering food at restaurants

88 weeks, like classroom hour weeks or like how is it calculated?

12:25 After 462 hours learning Spanish, you would most likely be at a workable but basic level, not a "very advanced level", and you would probably feel the same frustration with your Spanish level as you describe for your level in Japanese. There are no easy languages to learn, just hard ones and harder ones.

What a genuine and honest video, also nice style and play with the dark, lights and shades. Nice and chill narration. My story: always wanted to learn Japanese but started to learn Chinese instead. Everything you said about the Japanese learning process applies also to Chinese learning process. It's fun but the constant questioning if you made the right decision with learning this language is huge. I could've learned Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (all three easily) instead and what's sad about it is that my Chinese is still very miserable (let's say A2 level). Positive thing is that if I started to learn Japanese one day, I would already know the majority of Kanji so the learning process would be much smoother and quicker. Not sure what my motivation would be though. I wanted to learn Japanese when I was a teenager and was watching anime. That is not the case anymore. I still like the way the language sounds, sometimes I listen to some Japanese music but I'm not sure if that's enough of a reason to learn a language. The same with Chinese. Since my level is extremely low, I can't really use it and profit from it fully for example at work. All job opportunities come at higher level (at least B2) and I am far away from that! It was just recently when I came to my local Chinese restaurant and wanted to order beer in a bottle to take it home. My good friend Chinese owner didn't understand me even though he knows me and I always say the same sentences to him. So that was embarrassing, after learning Chinese for around 8 years or so 😅 (not continual, there were long breaks inbetween but still lot of time that could've been invested otherwise).

Been doing it for 3 years ...still keep going

I honestly only have an interest in learning romance languages lol. I see my Japanese mate reading Japanese and it just blows my mind. Even he struggles when it comes to the more traditional writing of Japanese, the one that is more influenced by the chinese. I just love the look of the latin alphabet, and it's hard enough just learning german

From what I have seen you need to do learn and use properly about 20K words but honestly now with all the tools created to streamline the process it pretty easy and you have endless amount of content with a VPN and streaming. It is easy but time consuming but it still better than having to put up with terrible subtitles. Also Musk predictions are off by double or triple the amount of time. I would also mention that Pokemon is a great way to learn kana since they have spaces.

Good content!

i realy love your personality and i am on n5 :D/:( LOL KEEP going big bro :D/

When you look at the abyss, abyss looks back at you. 😂

no matter how much u learn japanese ,no matter how much you are good at it ,they wont feel that u r one of us ,and this is the reason i lost my enthusiasm in learning japanese ,am living in japan for almost 5 yrs but still didnt cleared jlpt n2 ,you are right about the jlpt test its weird , i would pass if the test had interview instead of dokkai

Really nice video, I didn't know it was that difficult. I mean, I just learned some of it for fun and was thinking about diving in. Kanji learning looks painful. If not for the adoption of english in europe, I would definitely prefer learning 3 or 4 european languages instead of japanese, but, at the moment, I would rather learn japanese for watching anime or enjoing my holidays in japan than learn french or german for...what? Yeah they're fascinating and super cool languages, but I wouldn't really have a use case for them unless someday I decide to move there (which I doubt).

Tbh there are people i want to talk to that are japanese and shows id like to watch

Good video brother

I wonder how many hours Japanese speakers have to put in to become fluent in English? 🤔

I am not discouraged x) I see it as a fun and rewarding thing to do. I speak french and english currently and learned a lot through my english learning journey about how to go about learning a new language. Also im skipping kanjis because f.. that aint nobody got time for that x) im not planning to live in japan, my life is in quebec. I just want to be able to interact with and understand japanese people. Also im recently single, live far from families and friends because of work so i have a lot of time to spare. I got nothing to lose and i dont need to improve my job situation so like :p

i love japanese 💛 honestly i dont regret starting on japanese almost 4 years ago. its the only language i find interesting, fascinating even. i feel like my time is well spent whenever i study or immerse myself really i dont think japanese is that hard to learn, just time consuming. theres so much material (anime, manga, games, etc), im definitely not running out of content to get immersed in living in japan or communicating with its people isnt really my goal, i just like what theyre producing, and thats fine by me my opinion? try it, maybe youll love it. especially if its on your mind often or if it ignites some sort of spark in your brain. and if you give up? try again maybe. i gave up on japanese at least twice before finally committing of course you dont have to bother if you don't want to, that's a viable option too 👍 anyone can learn a language ✌️

tbh what I found out after 6 months of learning that spoken Japanese is quite easy and fun, but writing is a nightmare!

Mastering Japanese was so much easier back in the day when we only had to learn 1945 kanji. (Sarcasm intended) But seriously, I learned the meaning of the kanji and more importantly learned the components of the kanji first -- before studying Japanese (there was some overlap) and it took me 2 years living in Japan (and working) to get to N1 level. But N1 level is far from "mastering Japanese" I've learned way more AFTER passing the JLPT than I needed to know to pass N1. I agree with you that it takes a lot of time to get proficient in Japanese, but knowing kanji makes gaining vocabulary so much easier -- the first time I saw the word 糖尿病 I knew what it meant because I knew the kanji, even though I had never seen the word before (and at that time I didn't even know how it was pronounced). But again, if I could have all the time I've spent on learning Japanese and use it for learning Python or Web development or real estate or whatever, how different life would be. But, knowing Japanese is really really useful if you live in Japan -- both for convenience, for making your life richer, and for social reasons. If you don't live in Japan or have some very personal reason for learning it, I agree that spending that time is probably not worth it. Deciding what to study next was always the hardest part of Japanese. Studying kanji meant I didn't make progress on grammar. Studying grammar meant my conversation skills weren't improving much. Besides front-loading my studying with learning the (English) meaning of kanji, generally following the JLPT curriculum seemed to work for me, and of course living in Japan I took all opportunities I could to hang out with Japanese people and use Japanese. If you just study but don't use it, it's like reading a book about playing tennis but never actually playing games. Of course you're not going to get good doing that. Kanji are of course complicated, but there's a lot more logic to them than you would think. First grade kanji have a lot of "pictographs" 火 fire 日 sun 水 water (even though the "pictures" don't really look like the thing). But more complicated kanji usually have a reading and meaning component (for onyomi only). Yeah, it's complicated, but knowing the system makes it much easier than just trying to remember 2000+ kanji without systematic knowledge. Who would try to learn to read words without first learning the alphabet?? that's stupid to say there's 75,000 kanji. The hardest Japanese test (for Japanese language professionals, native speakers) has 6600 kanji on it (Kanji Kentei) and 99% of Japanese would never pass it. 99.99%. I think smart native speakers can read 3000 or a few more kanji, and if you know the systematic rules I pointed out, you can often read kanji you've never seen before. 鮟鱇 for example. never seen it? No problem. Maybe you can't write it, but you can read it and understand it even if you've never seen it. Only 2-3 hours per day??? But going and hanging out with Japanese people for 2-3 hours a day in addition to studying with textbooks or apps or whatever for 2-3 hours a day would probably more than double your progress. If you live in Japan and want to get good at Japanese you definitely should do both. Your point that the time spent learning Japanese could be better spent on doing other things is well taken. As someone who has spent decades learning Japanese (while living here), I often think of what else I could have done with the time. I think for someone who really wants to be in Japan though, you could get very close to N1 and know 2000 kanji in 2 years, and have a good time doing it, and have a great sense of accomplishment. I don't know if N1 is 30% of what a native speaker knows, but I do know that it is nowhere close to what native speakers know. But it could be enough to make life in Japan convenient and fulfilling -- but not enough to work on equal footing with Japanese people in a Japanese company (but the pay sucks, so probably not what you should be shooting for anyway). Maybe a way to put it is to say: be aware of the size of your investment (your time) compared with what your returns are (the level of Japanese you achieve), which will be far from native. For you, if you want to live here longterm, I'd say keep studying. If you don't, I'd say cut your losses and find a way out sooner rather than later. Time is limited, as you point out. Good luck with your studies, and I hope you make the right choices and can be at peace with them. No matter what you do, you may find yourself second-guessing your decisions in the past, but all you can do is act in the present. Nice video.

I'm with you :)

I totally disagree, you can apply this to anything you want to learn. Pick out the bad parts, say "its a waste of time", keep on focusing on how much you have to learn, and there you go, you've just convinced thousands of people to stop learning whatever they're trying to learn. Ive been studying this language for the past 11 years, I so no point as to why you made a video that says "studying japanese is a waste of time because of all the shit you have to study". Ive had the craziest opportunities in my entire life because I decided to study this language, and no I do not regret it.... If you made this video for the attention, ok great, but at least have a bit more compassion towards Japanese learners. I wouldn't call thing "trying to save you", it's actually just straight up rude tbh. The parts you pointed out are what I found to be fascinating, and it's actually what kept me motivated to study. It's such a beautiful, rewarding language, completely different from English, or any other language to be honest. Try again buddy, I don't think this was the right approach.

I have to admit my personal experience with learning Japanese doesn't entirely match up with what you dedcribed. In my experience, I picked up Japanese relatively naturally over the years by regularly watching anime, with only an intensive learning period of a few months at the beginning. However, I've recently felt a similar sense of frustration and discomfort as I've started learning Russian. This video has made me reflect on my perception of the difficulty in language learning. It's quite thought-provoking. One thing I've noticed about my experience is that I had a much lower standard for Japanese back then. I began conversing with native speakers using only around 500 basic words, without fear of making mistakes. I thoroughly enjoyed watching anime despite my limited proficiency, and felt satisfied with a basic understanding, easily connecting with Japanese people on an emotional level. I relied more on context and the speaker's intention rather than kanji for interpretation. I believe this mindset is what made Japanese relatively easy for me to learn, whereas the lack of that same mental state has made Russian significantly more challenging.

は ([ha] read as wa) = is が (ga) = is the thing that is 空は青い（そら　は　あおい　sora wa aoi) = the sky "is" blue (general fact) what color is the sky? It's blue. Haven't you seen it? (は wa situation) 空が青い（そら　が　あおい　sora ga aoi) = the sky "is the things that is" blue (current state of sky) something is blue(right now)! what is blue? the sky is the thing that is blue (が ga situation) 君は好き（きみ　は　すき　kimi wa suki) = I do like you (as opposed to others subject doesn't like) 君が好き（きみ　が　すき　kimi ga suki) = You "are the one that" I like (this is how people usually phrase it instead of kimi wa suki)

My friend said kanji make japanese easier than korea , because in korea and japanese have many homonime and kanji make it easier yo distinguish the word.

Kichijyoji ❤ Please consider coming on my podcast to talk about your experiences ✨️

Great content but PLEASE focus on improving your lighting. It’s seriously lacking. Keep grinding 🙌

im wondering so are you going to continue ??

i just want to learn enough to watch non dubbed shows and play games. i have no plans to move to Japan, im learning for fun 🙂🙃🙂

You got this.

I really like Japanese literature and there’s only a limited amount of literary works that are translated. Also I feel that the translations don’t hit the same as the originals It sucks cause ik I have to memorize a ton more kanji than most that just want to converse and watch anime

Maybe because I'm trying to learn japanese just to communicate with people I've had as acquaintances for years, I've been studying since February 2023, and I am still very motivated to keep it up. I honestly don't really watch anime or read manga, which makes me such an outlier compared to every other Japanese language learner I know lmao. まだ僕の日本語は上手じゃない

I am where you are, finishing up with N2, having learned a ton of kanji and still struggling at times. It's a tough pursuit for sure. But at the same time it is rewarding. I think too often people lose sight of the goal and get lost in the process. You can burn out fast on SRS. You can kill yourself trying to study, study, study. But once you reach this level it's totally possible to consume and enjoy content where you're still learning but actually having a good time. So that's what I've been focusing on. Reading books, watching movies, anime. It's a good place to be. Yeah it takes time, but to compare it with having accomplished other tasks isn't quite right. Although I totally get the insanity and doubt you feel lol

how old are you? how do you have 2-3 hours every day?

the way I see it, just learn it for life. the journey what makes it interesting, not the comparison of the time it takes to with other language.

17 minutes is kinda long. I watched the first 6 minutes and then skipped to the end. I really liked the unique style of having each sentence spoken with a different background. Never seen that before, so well done.