Every single day of 2025, there were Anki cards to be reviewed, and failure wasn’t an option. And just recently, this insane grind has started giving me results.
I’m now able to read easy manga such as Yotsuba& (with lookups here and there), and I can watch simple slice-of-life anime such as Karakai Jouzu No Takagi-San (I understand like 60% of what is happening).
My main Anki deck is called 日本語, and it is composed of 1.5k cards from a premade deck called Ankidrone Foundation v7, around 800 N4+N3 cards from the deck Ankidrone Essentials v8, and the remaining 1.2k cards that I mined from Anime and Manga.
In the very beginning, my comprehension was very low, and the more I learned, the more I became aware of how much I didn’t know. At times, it felt exhausting, an uphill walk on a never-ending mountain. But I trusted the process and followed the advice from Tatsumoto, and eventually, the language started to click. It is difficult to explain, but you just “get it”. Unfamiliar phrases start to make sense, and the grammar, which I basically never seriously studied, enters your brain naturally, like magic.
It is like a phrase I read on a YT video comment: You just have to show up and let your brain do the rest.
My current routine
I’m using Reminders to never forget my tasks.
1. Read an easy Japanese story.
Free Tadoku Books helped a lot in the beginning, then, once on N3 territory, the stories quickly became boring and uninteresting. The solution was pretty simple: read a manga chapter. It made such a difference that I feel like it was the biggest drive in my improvement, and I can’t stop stressing this enough: read materials you find interesting, even if they’re difficult.
Around March, I finished 2 volumes of Ijiranaide Nagatoro-San that I had bought from Mandarake.
Then, I started reading online on Pocket Shounen. My favorite manga in there are 屋根の下のアルテミス and ナマイキ旭ちゃんをわからせたい.
I also started reading Yotsuba&, such a lovely manga, it is one of my favorites.
What I do is: while reading, whenever I find a phrase with a single word I don’t get, I take a screenshot. Then, after it, I create Anki cards using Anki Image2Card. This method of dealing with the “unknown” is the best approach in my opinion, it reinforces what you already know and increases your vocabulary at the same time in a very pleasant manner.
One side note is, if I don’t have enough time during the day, I just read an NHK Easy News article and that is it.
2. Watch at least 30min of Japanese content
This one is easy, I just watch one or two episodes of anime with Japanese subtitles. There is an insane amount of anime out there, it is easy to just pick one you find interesting, to find subtitles you can use kitsunekko.
Since I use Anki Video2Card, I also create Anki cards from words I don’t know while watching anime because it is easy to do.
My choice for 30min minimum being the target is because it is a task easy to achieve, I watch far more than 30min of anime per day thou. Sometimes I watch YouTube too, just so my vocabulary and way of speaking doesn’t get too much “anime-ish”.
YouTube is an amazing tool too, but I only use it for free flow immersion: when you don’t pause every time there is some unknown word. My recommendation is to create a special channel and then only watch Japanese content using it, after some time, you start only receiving Japanese videos recommendations.
3. Review Anki
Pretty straightforward: open Anki, do your reviews, done. It takes like 30 to 40min to do all reviews + new cards, and the process has become so automatic that I often get surprised with the “You have finished your reviews” screen after reviewing the last card. Nothing much to say about it, except that Anki is amazing.
2026’s plan
Below is my master plan, updated from the last year’s post, with some tweaks:
- Learn Hiragana - Done
- Learn Katakana - Done
- Learn grammar by reading Tae Kim’s guide - Done
- Complete deck AnkiDrone Foundation (first 1.5k words with Kanji) - Done 5.
- Add important vocabulary N4 and N3 cards from AnkiDrone Essentials (around 800 words) - Done
- Sentence mine until I reach 10k words (actually sentences with the word in it) - 35% progress
My plan for 2026 is to increase my deck from 3.5k to 6.5k words.
I’m on the last part of my master plan, but it is also the longest part because completing these 10k words is going to take me 2 years or so to achieve. And by the time I’m finished, I hope that I’ll have achieved my goal, which is simple:
- Watch anime comfortably without subtitles
- Read manga comfortably without lookups
- Being able to hold a conversation in Japanese
- Being able to read a novel in Japanese
The grind to get these 10k words by mining them is the driving force behind my language acquisition. You see, Anki is a tool to help me memorize the parts I didn’t understand during immersion and not a tool that “teaches” me the language. This is a huge difference.
Anyway, let’s see what I’m capable of in 2026.