In August 2016, I moved to a small town on the Japanese island of Shikoku. I had almost no Japanese ability and I didn’t have an expectation that I’d stay very long in Japan. Maybe I’d stay in Japan for one year.
10 years later, though, I’m still in Japan. I’m now married. I have a daughter. I run a business from Japan. And I can live my entire life in Japanese if I need to.
Looking back, there are things that I’m incredibly proud of in my Japanese learning journey and a few things that I wish I had done differently.
So in today’s episode of Thinking in English, I thought it would be interesting to discuss my past 10 years of language learning experiences: how I went from zero knowledge of Japanese to being able to live in Japanese daily if I need to. Hopefully by listening to this episode, you guys will receive some motivation and some advice about your own language learning journeys.
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Vocabulary
- consistency (n): the ability to continue doing something regularly over a long period of time.
- “Consistency was more important than motivation in helping me improve my Japanese.”
- immersion (n): the process of surrounding yourself with a language so that you use and hear it constantly.
- “Living in Japan gave me opportunities for immersion, but I still needed to study actively.”
- proficiency (n): a high level of skill or ability in something, especially in a language.
- “My goal today is not perfection, but continued proficiency in Japanese.”
- plateau (n): a period when progress stops or becomes very slow after earlier improvement.
- “Many language learners experience a plateau after reaching an intermediate level.”
- motivation (n): the reason or desire that makes someone do something.
- “My motivation changed over the years as my life in Japan changed.”
- accountability (n): the responsibility to complete tasks or achieve goals, often because someone else is checking your progress.
- “Taking regular classes gave me accountability and helped me stay focused.”
- structured (adj): organized according to a clear plan or system.
- “My Japanese improved quickly because I followed a structured study routine.”
From Zero to Daily Life
As I said at the beginning of this episode, I moved to Japan for the first time 10 years ago. I moved to the island of Shikoku to be an Assistant Language Teacher after I graduated from university. In fact, it was my first job, and I had my 21st birthday in Japan.
I had absolutely no Japanese ability when I first moved to Japan. Maybe I had spent a few weeks learning a few Japanese letters. I’d also been given one Japanese class to help me practice my Japanese self-introduction so that I could introduce myself to my new colleagues and other teachers at the [00:04:00] schools I would be working at. But I could not speak Japanese.
I did not grow up interested in Japanese culture. I did not grow up watching Japanese TV or reading Japanese comic books. I did not grow up eating Japanese food. I knew nothing about Japan.
You can find out more about why I moved to Japan in some previous Thinking in English episodes. I think I did one last year about what I’ve learned from living abroad.
But this episode, I want to be a bit more focused on my language learning journey. 10 years ago, I spoke absolutely no Japanese. Today, I use Japanese every single day in my life. I speak to my family in Japanese, my friends in Japanese. I use Japanese for my business paperwork, for when I go to the shop.
I use the language every day. I’m still not at the level I would like to be, [00:05:00] but I am fully communicative. I can speak in Japanese as much as I want to.
So today, I want to talk about how the journey has happened. How I have gone from zero to my current level over the 10 years. And I want to do this to show you that progress is not necessarily a straight line. It’s also not always going to increase at the level you hope.
In my case, my first two years of studying Japanese were incredible. I really, really, really improved quickly. And then the past eight years have been a bit more stagnant, a bit more of a plateau. I have improved, but just not as quickly as I did in those first two years.
That’s just the reality of trying to learn a language while working full-time.
The way I’m going to structure this episode is to talk about five things that I’m proud of and then five things that I regret.
Pride 1: Never Quit
So the first thing that I am proud of in [00:06:00] my learning journey is that I never gave up. I never gave up studying.
I have been studying Japanese continuously, maybe not as consistently as I want to, but I have been studying without giving up for 10 years. This is probably the reason why my Japanese is still at a decent level.
I know people who have lived in Japan for many years, and I know people who are married to Japanese people, but just never committed to language learning. They cannot use Japanese professionally and really, they can’t use it personally either.
In fact, last year I was asked to translate for someone who had lived in this town for the past 20 years but had never bothered to learn Japanese to a higher level. So they asked me, a volunteer, to come in and help translate some kind of educational session.
Something to bear in mind here is that, yes, I never gave up in [00:07:00] my learning journey, but that does not mean that I have been studying at the same intensity over that period of time. My motivation for studying has changed significantly over the past 10 years.
When I started, my motivation to learn Japanese was survival. I was working in a school with no English speakers. I was living in a town with no friends, and I really just needed to speak some Japanese so that my life would be easier.
Then it became a hobby. I was interested in Japanese. I wanted to learn more. My motivation was enjoyment. This meant that I studied a bit less intensively. When you need to study something, you tend to study harder than if you just like studying.
Then I studied Japanese as part of an educational requirement when I was a research student, so I took formal classes.
And now I study Japanese both for enjoyment, but [00:08:00] also to make sure that my family in the future, my wife and my daughter, we are a fully bilingual family. So that I am fluent in Japanese and that my wife is fluent in English, and that our child will be fluent in both languages as well.
Sometimes I have studied really intensively over this past 10-year period. Sometimes my progress really slowed down. But I never stopped studying completely.
Even now, I’m not studying too much in my personal life, but every Friday morning, I take a Japanese class. It’s that consistency over 10 years that really matters.
Pride 2: Fast Progress
The second thing I am proud of is going from zero to intermediate level in Japanese in one year.
I started at an absolute beginner level. I did not know any Japanese vocabulary at all. I did not know any Japanese grammar. I did not know Japanese phonics. I had no knowledge of the language at all.
I started to attend [00:09:00] local Japanese community classes when I first moved to Japan. Most of my classmates were people working in more manual industries. People working in shipbuilding or ship cleaning or in caregiving.
Initially, I took two group classes a week, and then I added a third class, a private class as well, with one of my Japanese teachers.
I also studied personally myself every single day. I used to finish work, and then on the way home from work, I would stop in at a cafe or a restaurant and study for one hour.
I was fortunate because maybe I had a bit more time, personal time to study than my other classmates. Within six months, I was the top of the class, and then I moved to the next level up in the classes.
I passed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test N4 level, so that’s the second level of the test in my first eight months of studying Japanese. And then one year later, I passed N3, which [00:10:00] is intermediate Japanese.
Beginner learners can often underestimate how much progress is possible in a single year. I went from nothing to having conversations in Japanese, and that is something I’m really proud of.
I have friends who moved to Japan the same time as me and never learned anything. I was not going to let that happen to me. I wanted to make progress.
Pride 3: JLPT
The third thing I am proud of is passing proficiency tests. The main proficiency test for Japanese, the equivalent of the IELTS exam or the TOEFL exam in Japanese, is the JLPT, the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. And I have passed this test now three times.
I passed the N4 level in 2017. I passed the N3 level in 2018. And I passed the N2 level recently, in the past two years. And I’m [00:11:00] really proud of these achievements.
The certification itself doesn’t really matter too much to me. I don’t necessarily need it right now in my life. But what matters here is that passing these tests represents years of effort in my life. It is proof that my effort was worthwhile.
The fact I could pass tests is evidence that my Japanese was improving.
I’ve also failed the exams. I failed the N2 exam my first time taking it back in 2021, and I also failed the N1 exam last year. N1 is the highest level of Japanese proficiency test. Hopefully, in the future, I’m going to pass the N1 exam, but it’s not guaranteed.
But I’m still proud of my effort. I’m proud of passing these exams.
Pride 4: Real Connections
The fourth thing I am proud of in my Japanese learning journey is building real relationships in Japanese. This is probably more important than my proficiency test [00:12:00] results.
My first attempts at making friends in Japanese were unsuccessful. My Japanese level was not high enough. This was back 10 years ago.
But when I moved to Tokyo during the COVID pandemic, I didn’t have many friends. It was COVID. There too many international students moving to Japan. I was lucky that I was allowed to move to the country. And I started to go to this cafe maybe two or three times a week. I’d drink a nice cup of coffee, and gradually I started talking to the owner, and then I started talking to other regular customers.
And in the end, I would visit this cafe all the time, and I would have amazing conversations. The cafe also turned into a bar, so at nights I would go and meet more people and chat with people, and it was all 100% exclusively in Japanese.
It made me feel so happy, so proud that I was able to communicate with this variety of people who just five years before I would not [00:13:00] have been able to talk to.
I’ve also built relationships with my wife’s family. I get on really well with my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, and my sister-in-law, and my brother-in-law, and all of that is done exclusively in Japanese as well.
I also try to participate in community life here in Japan. I try to attend events and volunteer in different things when I can.
These conversations that I have now would have been impossible 10 years ago. I have met people who I would never have been able to communicate with 10 years ago. So building relationships has been something I’m really proud of.
Pride 5: Public Speaking
And the fifth thing I am proud of in my Japanese learning journey is public speaking. I have been public speaking in Japanese since the first year I started studying.
I have entered speech contests, I have given presentations, I have talked in front of people, and it is really fulfilling.
My first speech contest attempt [00:14:00] was in 2017, within the first year of me studying Japanese. I stood in front of an audience of people and talked about the English holiday of Pancake Day, which takes place on Shrove Tuesday.
I had spent weeks practicing my speech. My Japanese teacher had helped me write a text, and I stood in front of people. I gave my speech. I was on TV. They featured me on the local news. And I won the beginner or the lower intermediate category in the speech contest.
I was so proud of that achievement. The fact I had written something, practiced something, delivered it in public in front of an audience of people, all in Japanese, was such an amazing achievement.
The following year, I tried to do the same, but this time I entered the upper intermediate level of the speech contest. And in front of an audience of people, I completely [00:15:00] forgot my words.
I had made a much more challenging speech, a longer speech. It was harder for me to remember. It was probably at the edge of my ability, and I forgot my words. It was a bigger stage. There were more people watching me. I started to sweat, and I forgot everything that was happening.
But instead of stopping me from speaking in public, it just encouraged me to keep going and keep trying. I took a public speaking course when I was a student in Tokyo, for example. That was one of my favorite Japanese classes I’ve ever taken, actually.
It was a 10-week course on public speaking. And in fact, it’s something I want to do for Thinking in English in the future. And then last year, I entered another speech contest, speaking about the history of the region I currently live in. So I just really enjoy speaking in public.
Now, I get nervous, really nervous. But after every time I speak publicly, I feel proud of myself. I prove that I can stand in front of an audience. I prove that I can [00:16:00] deliver a speech and handle the pressure. And I prove that I can express myself publicly.
There are not many people who are confident enough to speak in a foreign language, and there are far fewer who are confident enough to stand in front of an audience and deliver a speech.
Regret 1: Linear Progress
Let’s move on to some things that I regret or things that I have learned along the way of my studying journey.
The first thing is that I assumed my progress would be linear. Linear means a straight line.
When I first started studying Japanese, those first two years, 2016 to 2018, I improved really quickly. I was going through a chapter of the textbook every week, learning new grammar points and new words every single day. My level was increasing rapidly.
I assumed that if I kept studying as hard as I had been studying, if I kept my motivation and my consistency, my progress would be [00:17:00] linear. I would continue making progress. I went from beginner to intermediate. I would go from intermediate to advanced in the same time.
That is not what happened. I assume most of you guys have experienced similar things in the past. I assumed progress would be linear, a straight line. It was not linear.
I had really fast improvement at the beginning, but then I hit a learning plateau. A learning plateau is when your progress stops. Perhaps even language ability deteriorates. You become worse at the language.
There are many reasons why progress would not be linear.
People’s motivation changes. Mine certainly did. Life changes. I moved from living in Japan back to the UK in 2018 and that was certainly a reason for not studying Japanese as much. Now I have much less time, which means I can’t dedicate hours a day to studying Japanese like I used to when I was in my early [00:18:00] 20s.
So language learning is not a straight line. Progress is not guaranteed.
Regret 2: Lost Structure
The second thing I regret is losing structure.
When I first studied Japanese, I was really structured in my progress. I took three classes a week. I would study for at least one hour a day, usually after work, but sometimes before work as well. I used textbooks consistently.
I knew I had classes. I knew I had study time. I knew I was going to use textbooks. But I have lost that structure now.
I don’t use the textbook correctly. I don’t take classes enough. I don’t study daily. If I have free time now, it’s either spent working or with my family. That’s kind of it. Life is busy.
Once you hit that intermediate level of a language, it’s easy to stop your structure. It’s easy to drift away from what had been [00:19:00] helping you work. I had made great progress with having a organized day of studying, and just as I was reaching the peak of my Japanese progress, I moved to the UK. And I stopped studying every day, and I stopped taking Japanese classes for a few months, and I stopped speaking in Japanese regularly.
Regret 3: Skipped Writing
The third thing I regret from my studying experience is not practicing writing. I think this is something that many of you listening probably can relate to.
I did not practice writing Japanese really at all for the first two years of studying the language.
I did write, I did learn how to write the Japanese characters, some of them, but I just didn’t really practice writing, handwriting especially.
An interesting story is that most of my Japanese writing ability developed after I studied Chinese instead. I started to study Chinese in 2018 when I was doing my [00:20:00] master’s degree. I did Japanese as well, but I started to study Chinese, and as part of my Chinese classes at university, I had to write.
Chinese and Japanese partly share an alphabet. The Japanese kanji alphabet is based off the Chinese alphabet, at least the historic version of it.
I assumed, when I first moved to Japan, that I wasn’t going to live here long term, and my focus was purely communication-based. I wanted to be able to listen to people and reply to them. I wanted to be able to have conversations. So I focused extensively on speaking and listening.
I then did a little bit of reading practice as well, and gradually my reading improved, especially when it came to studying for language proficiency tests. But the Japanese Language Proficiency Test does not require handwriting.
So now my Japanese writing ability is far lower than it should be. I have to do paperwork occasionally, and either I need to rely on my wife to help me [00:21:00] write in Japanese, or I have to copy the Japanese characters across.
For example, in January when I had to register the birth of my child and I needed to open up my phone, type out the characters so that I could write down the information I needed to write, because I couldn’t remember how to write the specific letters in Japanese.
This is perhaps a Japanese-specific issue in that the letters are difficult to write. You have to remember thousands of different letters. English doesn’t necessarily have that problem.
But also, I never really practiced writing structured sentences in Japanese either.
I think if I had practiced writing more, I would be a better reader as well.
So I really encourage all of you guys to not neglect your writing. I encourage all of you to practice writing in English, because I never practiced writing in Japanese and now I really regret it.
Regret 4: Wasted Money
A fourth regret I have is spending money on the wrong resources. I have [00:22:00] spent a lot of money studying Japanese, maybe not as much as some of you guys have spent learning English.
One thing I like to do is buy textbooks. I think on my desk right now I currently have five Japanese textbooks that I barely use. In fact, a few of them I’ve never used. Textbooks are something that, because they were so effective in my first few years of studying Japanese, I rely on a lot. But I struggle to find time to complete the exercises.
I end up buying a lot of textbooks with the hope they’re going to motivate me, and then not really using them.
I’ve also taken courses before, classes online that I just didn’t enjoy. They were a waste of time really.
And I bought resources because they seemed useful rather than actually worth the money.
In fact, I had a Japanese learning app on my phone for 3 years, paying ยฃ10 a month that I forgot I had.
Regret 5: Missed Chances
My fifth regret is that I didn’t take advantage of [00:23:00] every opportunity I have been offered over the past 10 years. By opportunity, I mean the chance to use Japanese or the opportunity to develop my skills.
Let me give you a few examples.
I live in Japan now. I’ve lived here seven out of the past ten years, and I’ve lived here for the past three years non-stop. Likely I’ll live here for a long time.
I don’t use as much Japanese as I should. I don’t use business Japanese. I don’t watch much Japanese media. I don’t read many Japanese books. I could immerse myself in Japanese far more than I currently do, but I don’t really. I am not taking advantage of the opportunities I have.
I probably should immerse myself more.
When I first moved to the island of Shikoku, I did take every opportunity. But when I moved to Tokyo in COVID, for the [00:24:00] first year, I didn’t really take any opportunities to study Japanese. I was a research student at a university in Tokyo, and I had the opportunity to take free Japanese classes, but I didn’t for the the first term.
I don’t know why. I just didn’t take those Japanese classes.
I think this is important for all of you listening. Make use of all the opportunities you have to learn English. Take the opportunity to practice and you never know what benefits you will get from that practice opportunity.
Final Thought
After 10 years of studying Japanese, the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is that language learning is part of my life now. It’s not a project I’m trying to finish. Language learning is part of my identity.
I started learning Japanese for survival, for necessity. Then my motivation was passing exams or making friends. Now it’s [00:25:00] about continuing to improve so I can fully participate in the life I’m building here in Japan.
I’m not a perfect Japanese speaker, and I’m definitely not finished in my learning journey, and I never will be finished. After 10 years, I’m still learning and I’m proud of that. I am a language learner. I am a Japanese learner. And I don’t think I will ever stop learning.
There’ll still be new things to learn. There’ll still be new opportunities to take.
And so that’s my biggest lesson, is that you shouldn’t think of learning English as something that you will complete. It’s not a task for you to do. It is something that will be with you for as long as you want it to be, perhaps for all of your life.
And you will improve, and you will hit plateaus. Maybe you’ll lose some of your confidence, then you’ll improve again, and it’s something that is part of your life.
But what do you think? How long have you been studying English? What are your proudest accomplishments, and what are your biggest regrets?
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