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My Japanese Learning Journey

Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with Japanese. Between raising a kid and building software, I carve out time each day to study kanji, vocabulary, and grammar. It's slow, it's humbling, and it's one of the most rewarding things I do.

Last updated July 12, 2026

Grammar Corner

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Study Journal

I keep an accountability log on the Bunpro community forums. Here are my entries, newest first.

This week I finally got to review my entire Bunpro review backlog (almost 200 items). Last week I went with my family to Istanbul, Turkey, and didn’t have a lot of time to do my reviews, let alone learn any new content. I find myself enjoying Wanikani reviews a lot more compared to Bunpro reviews, so my Wanikani backlog is almost always empty.

My Bunpro learning queue consists of 10 vocab items and 1 grammar item per day, and today I managed to check these after a 2 week break.
Today’s grammar point: いがい (JLPT N4) | Bunpro

あいにく、最近日本語の勉強以外にあまり趣味がない。昔はギターを弾いたり、コンサートの写真を撮ったりしたけど、ソフトウェアエンジニアになるためにやめてしまった。また将来始めたいです。

Hi everyone!

Background:
I’m a software engineer from Romania that’s been learning Japanese on and off for years. I started during university before my classes, waking up at 5-6am to go through Genki I, but stopped for a while to focus on switching my domain from biology to software engineering :man_shrugging:. This happened two more times with several years in-between because of various reasons, but here I am today going through N4.

Resources:
I’m currently only using Bunpro and Wanikani. Besides work I also have an almost 3 year old that makes it difficult to focus on multiple resources at the same time. I was listening to Nihongo con Teppei a while back while driving my son to the kindergarten, but it started feeling too much like a chore and I stopped doing it.

My goals:

  • Finish all the N4 Bunpro materials by summer end
  • I want to take the N3 in winter of 2027. The JLPT only takes place in the winter here in Romania, and I don’t think I’ll manage it in 2026, unfortunately.
  • People always ask me why I’m learning Japanese, and it’s difficult to give a clear answer. I’ve always been attached to all things Japanese (and I’m not even much of an anime fan nowadays), and working/living in Japan is not on my family’s radar now, so nowadays I’m doing it mostly to fill an inner void I have whenever I’m not learning something new.
  • Push myself to write some thoughts in Japanese in this topic, as well, as my writing comprehension is lacking since I’m only using Bunpro and Wanikani currently

では、頑張ります。