Learning japanese is a long and arduous task, and over the years of practice it can feel like there is no real progress. To prevent myself from being too depressed about wasting hours every day in this task I’m clearly not suited for, it’s become pretty important to me to measure how well I’m doing to see if I’m progressing or not.
To that end, I use the same anime episode that I rewatch months appart and I measure how well I understand it (time for pauses, number of unknown words, etc…). From there I can deduce how much I’ve progressed, and infer a progress per day rate. Over the last few years, it looks like this:
But the progress rate is compound so to look at my actual level, starting at an arbitrary 1 and applying the interest rate the closest, I get something like:
Which immediately brings to mind exponential loads, so I modelled it to get the formula for japanese knowledge:
160 represents my japanese level at the beginning of this ordeal (I’ve been learning for more time than measuring), 500 represents my natural aptitude to learn japanese. Oh and d is the amount of days for which I’ve been studying.
So where does that leave me? It seems pretty clear that I’ve reached the “plateau” and all the progress I might make is going to be very slow. Yippy.
But with that data, I can solve a problem that has long troubled me: if I’m doing better with this anime than the previous one, is it because I’ve progressed or because I’ve picked an easier anime? By dividing the score by my modelized level, I can get some sort of normalized anime difficulty that can compare anime through time!
Well it seems that all this time, I’ve been too close to the plateau for it to make any real difference. It would appear that my progress is super neglectible compared to the difficulty difference between various series.
The positive view would be that hard series are just really hard and easy series are very easy, the negative view is that my progress is damn slow, the very negative view is that it’s slow and plateau-ing. I guess the next step would be to correlate this data with other learners. But at the very least I got a cute equation, so there’s that.
EDIT: To assess this hypothesis I’ve studied a full anime that I had already studied years ago (09/2020 to 11/2022). It would appear that I still made progress, from 27.3 mins per episode to 26.4 mins per episode. It does concur with my estimate of a fragment of a percent of progress per day. However, it did strike me as relatively hard, and on par with the other hard anime I’m currently studying. It would tend to confirm that progress is tiny compared to the difficulty difference between anime ๐ฆ
![tumblr_static_tumblr_ml3snvlooa1rpe562o1_500[1]](https://yo252yo.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/tumblr_static_tumblr_ml3snvlooa1rpe562o1_5001.gif?w=300)
However, a problem arose when spoken japanese and spoken chinese had always been very different all along. But more was needed to discourage the fierce 
The two main ways were to either remove a couple of pen strokes (origin of katakana), or go for a whole stylish redesign with simpler strokes (origin of hiragana). For instance, the symbol ไน
chosen for the sound ku could be either ใฏ or ใ. Unable to chose between those two brillant ideas apparently, they kinda kept both (in addition to the chinese characters, the kanjis). That resulted in a gigantic “3-alphabet” mess, apparently hiragana were originally used by male scholars and katakana by women, but I guess it was too sexist ? so it ended up being hiragana for conjugations and particles and katakana for words of foreign origins. Eventually they decided to write words in the right order and everything was as fine as fine could be.
But since a short example is worth a thousand words let’s consider this guy : ๆฅ hi, a day or the sun, according to the context. Turns out it can be pronounced nichi in compound words, like ๆฅๆๆฅ nichiyoubi (sunday, where you can see it’s pronounced differently at the beginning and at the end). Apparently it can be pronounced jitsu too. Turns out you use that word too to count the days of the month, and in that case it can be pronounced either nichi or ka (if the number is < 10 or ends by a 4. The first day of the month being an exception). And you use it to count the days of the week in which case it’s bi in youbi (see above). And then just for the lulz if you put clear + day you get tomorrow written ๆๆฅ pronounced ashita (or asu apparently but it’s written the same way and means the same things so I guess who cars ??), or you use ๆจๆฅ pronounced kinou to say yesterday. But at least there are not really any other way to write day, contrary to person, which you could write ไบบ pronounced mostly hito or jin or ๆน pronounced kata (but which can also mean direction in which case it’s pronounced either kata or hou… but I think I’ve made my point by now.
Oh yeah just dropping a word about why the Japanese always make a big fuss in the anime about how they call each other, and why the transition to calling by last name to calling by first name is important. It’s because they kinda don’t have a definitive proper word to say “you”, so they end up using each other’s name quite a lot.
![Wakarimasen_by_speardevil[1]](https://yo252yo.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/wakarimasen_by_speardevil1.jpg?w=300)
Part of the fun of the japanese language is its weirdness and oddities. I believe that if you were to build from scratch a whole new language trying to make it suboptimal, you couldn’t do a better job. And nothing beats the satisfaction to discover that husband is written with the chinese characters for master, or that rape is written with three times the character for woman, or that eakon is actually translation and short for “air conditionner”, or bilu short for “building”… There is a deep satisfaction to jump into a language in which, when you ask a native speaker what a sentence means, “I don’t know” is a perfectly valid answer. Go for it. Also, karaoke.
UltimateRealFiction 
