I just finished my first year of Refold. It is actually still the smaller part of my journey (unfortunately) and I want to explain where the rest of the time went, so if you’re only interested in the Refold days you can skip the first two sections and jump to section 3.

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Before this long rambling post though, here are my basic overall stats:

Watching: 853 hours

Reading: 242 hours

Total: 1095 hours

Avg/d: 3.00 hours

Graph: https://imgur.com/YapXwVz

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1) The beginning:

1210 days ago I was spending an average of two hours every weekday riding the train to work. I would typically scroll through Reddit during that time and I thought it would be better if I was more productive during that time. It was that day I started the Japanese course on Duolingo.

Soon after I spent some figuring out what else I should be doing to learn. Anki and RTK got recommended a lot so I jumped into that. It’s kind of a distant memory now, but I believe I spent something like an average of two hours a day for five months until I got past 2000 cards and enough reviewing to wind that down. I still did reviews on them after that but for much less time. I started dabbling with other decks and also some very limited video immersion with English subs but nothing really stuck and became a habit other than a core 1k vocab deck which I completed after a couple months of maybe an hour or so per day. I also went through Genki 1, but it just wasn’t really working for me. One last win for me though was buying a keyring of cards for every Hiragana and Katakana character, even the ones like きょ missing in most decks I had seen. I manually put them all into Anki and spent a month drilling them in. Really glad I went through that early on.

Anyway, I kept going without much of a clear direction and at some point I got burnt out or for whatever other reason I just did the bare minimum for about 8 or 9 months which basically was keeping my streak going in Duolingo.

2) Getting back into the groove:

A lot happened since I started learning. The pandemic came and my original purpose for learning was now gone (no commuting). I had a lot of other major changes going on in my life. New house. New relationship. A lot of adjusting to new situations. Despite being on a huge break from the hours of studying I was doing, my passion for Japanese wasn’t gone. In fact it had grown in a way I hadn’t expected. I still kept myself exposed to the culture through videos about Japan, listening to Japanese music, and watching the occasional show. I was getting more and more fascinated by Japan and the language. I think by this point I had been exposed to AJATT/ MIA but was too intimidated to start it especially while in the funky break I was in.

At some point, about a year and 4 months ago I decided to start taking things seriously again. I needed a way to ease back into building the habit of working on the language every day again. I decided the easiest way was to just go all in with Duolingo. I had paid for it from a sale at the beginning of the year and so had about 4 months left. I decided to make a goal of finishing the entire course by the end of the year when my subscription would be up. It was a tall order because I was only about halfway through at that point. I spent about 3 hours a day grinding for a few months and eventually reached that goal, a few weeks ahead of schedule. I know app time like this pales in comparison to time spent immersing but I’m still glad I did it because it got me back into studying and making goals again.

3) Enter Refold:

By this time Refold had come out and it was an easy choice for my next step. I was already sold on it and its predecessors awhile back. I decided to make another goal. I would watch and read for one year and try to get in at least three hours a day. I would find out this would be a tough challenge with a full time job and many other responsibilities.

4) Watching:

I started out very heavily leaning towards watching. Almost all my time spent was on Animelon and Netflix. Sometimes I would try to get into Youtube but it never stuck. I eventually started watching Shirokuma Cafe and luckily was one of the people to really enjoy it. I learned a ton from that show. I have probably watched through all 50 episodes at least a half dozen times. I still remember understanding almost nothing of the first episode, and below it was a comment from someone who was so excited because they understood it all. I was so jealous. By the time of writing this, I’m no longer jealous.

All together I spent a total of 853 hours watching shows, the vast majority of it being Anime, which I didn’t care for when I started my journey. Much like many other things about Japan, my love for anime grew the more I got familiar with it.

I have to admit that I did have a policy where if I was watching something for the first time I would keep English subs on as well as Japanese subs. I never watched anything with only English subs, but I do understand the quality of many of my watching hours wasn’t optimal because of that. Fortunately I am the kind of person that can rewatch things over and over, as I indicated before with Shirokuma.

I mostly stuck to Slice of Life anime and my ability level is generally pretty good. With an entirely new show I can understand at least half of everything, but there is still too much I don’t understand. Of course it depends on the show. For easier content like Shirokuma, I can understand almost all of it. For some of the episodes I understand everything easily except for a few words, even when it is just playing in the background.

Aside from the first run TL NL subtitle thing, I typically jump back and forth between raw and TL subs for rewatching.

All together I am pleased with how much better my listening ability has gotten. It has gotten to the point where I am enjoying shows a lot more just because I understand a lot of it without effort. Even when I do have NL subs on I tend to stray from them and then notice I’ve stopped reading them for awhile.

5) Reading:

I think I took too long to get into reading but then again it never really interested me in my native language. I’m not the kind of person to go buy a book and then lay down all afternoon and go through it. I much prefer visual media.

Once my listening caught up with my prior couple years of learning vocab, I knew I had to try to get into it, especially because I still couldn’t really get back into Anki. I eventually ended up deciding on using Lingq and after going through the beginner material started importing the subs from shows I was watching. Shirokuma was the first one I did. The first episode has very little going on, not a lot of vocab, and not a lot of text anyway. It took me two hours to read that episode. By the time I got to episode 50 it took me a half hour to read an episode. I read through all of it at least one more time since I was rewatching that show a lot.

The effort paid off a lot. I was picking up vocab at a fast pace and it was constantly clicking while watching because it was the same set of words, but I wasn’t too trapped in a limited set of words because the series is so long and has at least 6k unique words overall.

In this first half of the year I also read a few other shows like Yuru Camp. I also read my first light novel which was book 1 of Konosuba. I didnt know how to buy books and convert them and import them yet, but someone else had done it and shared it on Lingq. I loved the anime so I thought it would be a fun read. It was but oh man was that difficult. Much like my other reading experience though, it got a lot easier towards the end.

About halfway through the year I got burnt out again and ended up taking time off doing the bare minimum Duolingo again (just getting legendary status everywhere cuz i didnt do those when completing the course).

Fortunately I got myself back into the swing of things by watching a lot more anime with TL NL subs and then got myself back into reading again. At this point doing the usual anime sub reading for shows I was already familiar with was getting too easy and boring. I decided more light novels should be what I focus on. I figured out how to buy Japanese books and import them into Lingq and then started spending the majority of my time going through them.

I recently crossed a half a million words read in Lingq, a quarter of them being in just the last month. Im about to finish my fifth light novel and I’m actually having a lot of fun doing it. My vocab has been ramping up again and I can definitely feel it when I go back to watching.

There are still sentences full of words I haven’t understood yet but it’s starting to get rare to come across “blue words” (words i havent seen before). The amount of sentences full of known words has absolutely increased a lot and explains how I can get through chapters in a half hour now as opposed to an hour or two when I started.

Altogether I spent 242 hours reading. Not a big number and I have a long way to go but the vast majority of the hours have come in just the past few months and unlike watching my entire focus is there on Japanese when I’m reading. If there are any low quality hours while reading they are few and far between, like when I’m falling asleep or just bored to death from some part of the book.

6) Output:

I occasionally text and post in Japanese but I am purposely avoiding putting much time into output because it seems to be a waste of time considering how much i struggle with listening and reading. I believe this part of the Refold path makes perfect sense and I hope to start focusing on output in another year or so.

7) My future plans:

I am definitely a goal driven person, so I'm sure I should keep that going, but honestly I dont think I need to change much. This is clearly working for me.

Maybe I should watch less NL subs but that seems to already be naturally happening, and I still like to enjoy a first pass of a show knowing everything that is happening. I might just let that drop off when I already understand most of it regardless if they are on or not. Still, it will be my goal to continue to be more mindful of how much I’m doing that and so I plan on minimizing that much more than I have this past year.

For reading I want to continue to spend most of my time there. I am still better at listening at this point and my vocab still needs some gains until I can freely jump into new content and be comfortable and consider myself to be at Refold 2C. I also want to finish 30 light novels over the next year, which should easily be possible at the rate that I am going.

8) Conclusion:

I’m definitely not one of those wild success stories and I don’t have any JLPT certificates or any other notable trophies for all my work. I did manage to reach my goal though, 3 hours of immersion per day on average, despite taking around a month off. This doesn’t count time spent doing Anki, which still comes and goes for me, or time in Duolingo which I still do every day (only keeping my streak going so I know how long i've been doing this and also to make sure I'm always doing at least something every day), or time spent chatting or listening to music or any other Japanese related activity. I also don’t include time spent watching credits in shows. So overall my total time in the language is much higher but it felt overwhelming to track everything so I slimmed it down to only actual active immersion (granted with NL TL subs sometimes)

I’m really proud of my progress and can’t wait to see where I am in another year!