20 years ago vs today

I thought I’d write about what’s changed in the 20 years I’ve been studying Japanese, in particular just how many learning resources are now available online even if you don’t live in Japan.

My off-and-on Japanese journey

I started intensively teaching myself Japanese in 2000, studied abroad in Japan in 2002-2003, and worked on a fan translation of Phoenix Wright 3 in 2005. Over the next 15 years I mostly let my Japanese skills slowly rust, while I focused on my life in the US.

In 2021 I flipped open a Murakami short story collection I had bought two decades earlier, turned the page to Super-Frog Saves Tokyo (my favorite story of his) and tried translating the first few paragraphs to English. But I barely recognized any of the kanji anymore.

How hard could it be to derust my Japanese back to my old level? My old enthusiasm came back, and this wound up turning into a sizeable life project.

When I started derusting I really had no idea what learning methods were considered effective nowadays. I was tempted to simply dig out my beaten-up Canon electronic dictionary because it was so familiar.

A few months into my derust, I discovered learnjapanese.moe/resources/, an in-depth hub of learning techniques and tools. Today my reading/listening comprehension is surprisingly better than when I lived in Japan.

The first thing that’s changed: getting Japanese media

In the early 2000s:

Before I went to Japan, I had access to English-subtitled anime and ROMs of Japanese versions of videogames, and that was about it. The first Japanese media I read from beginning-to-end was Final Fantasy V.

When I spent a year in Japan in 2002-2003, it was incredibly exciting to be able to go to bookstores and videogame stores. I spent a hours every week roaming them and sampling. It was hard to decide on the few things I could afford: the yen was so strong compared to the Canadian dollar, and I was a broke student. One thing I remember being chronically frustrated about is having to choose manga purely from their covers: they were all shrinkwrapped to prevent tachiyomi.

When my study-abroad year was about to end, I made a big list of classic novels, and brought back 30 or so paperbacks by Soseki, Kawabata, etc. But almost all of them had Japanese far beyond my level (N2-ish), and I wound up reading zero of them. I realized I should’ve brought back more fun stuff but by then it was too late, unless I wanted to pay exorbitant shipping costs. I went back to downloading Japanese ROMs, like Chrono Trigger and Phoenix Wright.

Today:

I was amazed to realize that from my couch in the USA, I now have access to the full gamut of kinds of media I had while living in Japan. In some ways even easier: every manga has at least 5-6 sample pages available online, finally ending my shrinkwrap agony.

Buying digital media abroad is in a gray area where it’s probably legal but probably against terms of service. Japanese publishers evidently feel my foreign money is more trouble than it’s worth, but they’ll still take it if offered in the right way.

The main trick is that most digital content can be bought with giftcards. Nintendo and Apple yen giftcards are very easy to buy online with US dollars (I use japancodesupply.com):

• With Nintendo cards you can buy games on the Switch Japanese eshop. You can even share the same Switch with a US-region account.
• With Apple yen giftcards, you can buy manga and novels on Bookwalker (which can then be read on the Bookwalker app on any device), and audiobooks on Apple Books.
  • The Japan-region Apple account has to be the only account on the iOS device. I first factory-reset an old iPad for this, and after I decided to start listening to Japanese audiobooks, I got a dedicated iPhone 13 mini I carry alongside my main Android phone.

Anime of course continues to be easy to obtain online. A really useful learning aid nowadays is that many shows’ Japanese closed-caption subtitles are available on kitsunekko.net. I find I learn 3x more if I follow the kanji as I’m listening, and pause to look words up in the dictionary and add them to my flashcards.

Live-action Japanese TV is the biggest category I’m not quite sure how to obtain. I’ve been thinking it would expand my vocabulary in new directions to watch news and variety shows, but I’m not sure how. TV streaming subscriptions all require a Japanese credit/debit card. I’d be interested to learn if there’s any tricks I’m missing on this one.