Japanese 2024 in Review

Discussion post on reddit

Summary (tl;dr)

In 2024, I spent 1773 hours and 27 minutes doing the following:

Interestingly enough, compared to last year, I spent almost exactly the same amount of total time (1773 hours vs 1780 hours) on Japanese content. This is completely unintentional and is very good evidence that having a consistent routine and baking Japanese into your personal interests carries you a lot farther and more consistently than just motivation alone.

Same as last year, I have graphed the tracked hours into a monthly chart split by media type.

For a total cumulative hour graph split by months, you can refer to this one.

A few highlights I want to point out for this year:

• The months of March and October were insane even for my standards. March was the culmination of my Utawarerumono series obsession, and it coincided with the release of my game of the year: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. October as well saw both the release of 界の軌跡 and Metaphor, both 100+ hour games.
• This year I read much less manga, but somehow ended up watching more anime than usual, but the cake goes to how many VNs I read. I didn’t consider myself a big Visual Novel reader, but this year I really got into a lot of them and the genre is really growing on me.
• Anki usage has gone down (as it should), and it’s really just a mere 2-3 minutes a day keeping up with reviews. And that’s fine.

Since the beginning of 2024, I have also started tracking my daily immersion in greater details on my lingotrack account which shows a lot more fun graphs and stuff if people are interested.

Manga

2024 has been a fairly slow year for manga for me. My backlog keeps growing but my actual volumes completed is not very high. I read a total of 29 manga volumes. Compare it with last year, which was almost 70, and the difference is striking. In my defense though, I started reading more shounen jump individual chapters which aren’t being tracked as full volumes.

You can see my 本棚 of manga at this bookmeter page.

Videogames

Videogames is my jam… it’s always been. Last year I focused almost completely on the trails of series and while I didn’t complete as many total games, the amount of time spent was still equally insane. This is because each trails game is hundreds of hours long. This year on the other hand I completed a lot more games, initially focusing on the yakuza series (as I had promised myself I would as one of my new year’s resolutions). In total, I have completed 21 games, with a couple still ongoing as carry-over to 2025. Here is the full list with total playtime in reverse chronological order:

I have also started tracking my games more accurately on my backloggd account, and as a side project I started writing a list of games on this website sorted by language difficulty with some short mini-reviews from the point of view of the average Japanese learner.

Visual Novels

As I mentioned earlier, I’m really awakening to the VN genre after all. A lot of my usual gaming time has been shared with VNs too this year. I have completed a total of 13 visual novels, and here they are, in reverse chronological order:

NOTE: I know I know, technically 13 sentinels is a strategy/adventure game, but I put the difficulty to easy because I did not care about the battle sections, and I pretty much treated it like a visual novel for the rest of the routes. It’s whatever, really, it’s still an amazing game.

My highlight VN for this year is… たねつみの歌! Also known as Seedsow Lullaby in English, this VN has completely blown me away. It is sooooo good, it’s such a great narrative experience, a pure fantasy adventure story as good as it gets. I strongly recommend it to anyone into fantasy stories, seriously, go read it.

Also, I managed to clear the Utawarerumono trilogy, as I was promised myself I would do a year ago, and I’ve become a huge fan of it (I’m even playing the gacha right now).

Light Novels / Books

Closing on 2023, I was in the middle of reading the Spice and Wolf series, and one of my plans was to continue until I completed all of the books. Well, unfortunately I didn’t get to read as much as I wanted, and I didn’t get to finish the series, but I made some decent progress and discovered some new stuff that has kept me hooked too. In 2024 I read a total of 9 books, you can find them also on my bookmeter, and here they are:

Here’s the list of what I read:

• Spice and Wolf volume 5 -> 8
• ある魔女が死ぬまで volume 1 and 2
• ミニスカ宇宙海賊 volume 1
• Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear volume 20
• 星界の紋章 volume 1

I really enjoyed ある魔女が死ぬまで, there are only two novels out at the moment but I am eagerly waiting for the rest to come out. I found out about it from the fact that the anime will come out also in 2025 (which I am really looking forward to), and I didn’t want to wait so I jumped on the novels instead.

Also, now I am currently reading the second volume of 星界の紋章. It’s a relatively old sci-fi epic space opera light novel, and while it took me a bit to “get it”, now I’m really enjoying it. There are a lot of books in the full series, but the initial arc is a trilogy which I think I can finish pretty easily.

Anime

There’s honestly not much to say about the anime I have watched, I’ve mostly been lazily watching some of the currently airing series by watching some episodes during lunch once in a while. I am tracking all the anime I watch on my annict account.

Where do I stand with Japanese now?

Well… I try to write a few lines every year to motivate myself and reflect back on my progress but I’m not sure how much is worth it anymore. I feel like I am “done” with Japanese. At least from the point of view of “learning” it. I can say I “know Japanese” now. Is it perfect? Hell no. I still have a long way to go compared to a native speaker, but honestly I don’t feel like I am hindered by much anymore, at least from the side of media consumption.

Output-wise, I do believe my ability has naturally improved since last year. I’ve found myself in more and more situations where I need to speak and interact with people more. In 2024 I spent a lot of time with my wife’s family, my son is growing up and I’ve had to deal with things like daycare and other parent-related stuff. Throughout the year I’ve been looking for a new house and I’m happy to say I finally bought one and will be moving in a matter of (literally) days from the time of writing this post. I had to deal with banks, mortgages, real estate agents, house viewings, contract signing, buying a car, and all kinds of stuff in 100% Japanese and I am surprised that from what I can recall there have been no issues in communicating nor anyone had to point out anything about my language or anything like that. I’m surprised because I still believe my output is not that good, but it’s definitely not an issue anymore.

Next year I’ll be living more towards the countryside, and I expect I will be interacting more with the neighborhood, neighboring families, other kids and their parents, etc. So there’s that to look forward to next!

Plans for 2025

Last year I made myself some short list of “nice to do” things for my Japanese immersion journey. I had promised myself I’d play through the yakuza series and I did just that. I also wanted to advance with the spice and wolf series, which I didn’t do as much as I wanted, but that’s how life goes.

For 2025, funnily enough, I’m planning to do something a bit different from the norm. I’ll continue to track my immersion hours (this is a habit by now) but at the same time I have decided to make sure I do not “overdo” it. I will be using the app moyase to record my goal of roughly 1200 hours (precisely: 200min/day) of Japanese. Compared to my usual yearly rate of 1700+ hours, this is reducing it by 500 hours, which I hope to “invest” in other hobbies instead. I used to code videogames and compose music, and ever since I started learning Japanese I pretty much stopped all of that. I think it’s time to get some of that time back.

Of course, I will not be forgetting Japanese, and there are some things I am looking forward to. I want to finish the 星界の紋章 LN series (at least the initial trilogy), and I want to continue reading Spice and Wolf. Also, since two years ago was the year of the “trails of” series marathon, and last year was the year of yakuza, I’m kinda getting the vibes of going for a “Persona” marathon next. I might spend some time going through Persona starting from 1 (yes, really) and ending at Persona 5 Royal, including the Persona 3 remake that I had skipped in 2024. I’m also really looking forward to the new Yakuza 8 Gaiden game, that looks like a lot of fun.

あけましておめでとうございます everyone!