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Babel

Babel is a leading Medium publication exploring human expression through language and art. We publish powerful stories celebrating the diversity of voice, culture, creativity, and the ways we communicate meaning through our unique voices across several mediums.

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How I Learned Japanese From Scratch: My Full Timeline (Year 2)

7 min readJul 9, 2024
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Photo by Niketh Vellanki on Unsplash

This is a continuation of part 1, where I share everything I learned during my first year as a complete beginner. If you’re learning a language and wondering what the journey is like, I hope my story will help you!

Fall 2011 (September to December)

Just one year ago, I was a nervous but excited kid stepping into my first class of Japanese 101. Now it was time for Japanese 201, and things felt a bit different.

I had significantly fewer classmates than I did a year ago. Things were starting to get more intense — Grammar points and sentence structures were complex and had more nuances to watch out for. Kanji was getting bigger and more scary-looking.

Thankfully, none of this fazed me. I knew I was in the language learning game for the long run, and everything I learned in this class would pay off later on.

Like in the previous semesters, I attended every class, did every homework assignment, and studied for every test. But I started to realize that it wasn’t enough.

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Babel

Published in Babel

Babel is a leading Medium publication exploring human expression through language and art. We publish powerful stories celebrating the diversity of voice, culture, creativity, and the ways we communicate meaning through our unique voices across several mediums.

Alex Chen
Alex Chen

Written by Alex Chen

Language, music, tech, and dogs 🐶

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