From Flashcards to One Piece: What I Learned Learning Japanese
Last updated: October 14, 2025
Today, we tell the story of a Migaku user who found himself in an all-too common dilemma: he'd been consistently studying Japanese for a few years, but wasn't really any closer to being able to watch anime without subtitles.
And then (I feel somewhat wary of how gimmicky this sounds, but it happened like that)... he sat down, made a new plan, stuck to it, and was watching anime without subtitles within about three months.
Here's his story, The Plan That Changed Everything™, some recommendations for beginners, and what he'd do differently in hindsight.
Let's go:
- Ok, so tell me a bit about yourself
- ... so you're working full time, studying part time, and learning Japanese. Sorry but how?
- I heard about this 100 Day Plan of yours...
- How's life on the other side?
- Detour for a moment—let's talk about anime for beginners? What should a new learner watch first?
- How's learning Japanese after finishing your plan been?
- What did your 100 Day Challenge teach you?
- Let's talk about the future. What's next?
- Any advice for total beginners? What would you do differently if you were to start over?
Ok, so tell me a bit about yourself
I'm currently studying computer science at university, am 25 years old, and have been studying part time at uni for seven years now. I've also been working full time in the IT/data field for about eight years. I've been interested in Japanese for quite awhile, I just, well—between work and school, I never really had the time.
... and then COVID happened.
Work slowed down a bit, and there weren't really any social things to do in Australia. Everything was pretty locked down. Suddenly, I had a lot of free time.
So I decided to start studying Japanese.
... so you're working full time, studying part time, and learning Japanese. Sorry but how?
Well, for the first two years or so, all I was doing was flashcards, so it wasn't really that bad. Flashcards don't take much time, they're just boring. I used WaniKani and Bunpro to learn the kanji, vocabulary words and grammar. After some experimentation, I came to a three-part routine that worked for me:
- Step 1 — Morning pass-through: I’d do a quick, no-pressure first pass as soon as I woke up. I didn’t worry about getting everything right. The idea was to get my count of 100–150 reviews down to a more manageable / less scary batch of about 10–30 "try again" cards.
- Step 2 — Throughout the day: I tackled the "try again" cards in short bursts of 5–10 minutes throughout the day—just whenever I had a moment. On the bus, waiting for the microwave, walking to work. Little pockets of time like that.
- Step 3 — Reward myself with lessons: After everything was completed and I got home from work I would sit down to learn new stuff. I worked really hard to create a good mnemonic based on the kanji or word that appeared in inside of WaniKani/Bunpro, trying to make its reading and meaning stick the next day.
I also experimented with other tools and methods:
- Bunpro for grammar (an app that uses a spaced-repetition system to teach grammar)
- Core2k/6k for vocabulary (a classic/popular Anki deck that teaches the most common vocabulary words that occur in the Asahi Newspaper)
- Passive immersion (having Japanese audio playing in the background, but not really paying attention to it)
- Graded Readers (books written for Japanese learners that intentionally use very simple vocab and gramar)
- YouTube grammar videos
... but I never ended up sticking with any of those things. I'm not trying to dig on them. I know other people like them. They just didn't really work for me.
I heard about this 100 Day Plan of yours...
Editor's note: You can read through that yourself in The Migaku Discord Community.
So, over the course of about three years, I learned about 2000 words through WaniKani and Bunpro. And I was just finding myself in this really frustrating cycle where I'd:
- Spend a month or two on WaniKani
- Try to read a copy of Hunter x Hunter that I'd bought
- Understand nothing and get frustrated with WaniKani
- Import all the words I learned on WaniKani into Migaku
- Boot up a basic anime like Usagi Drop and check my comprehension
- I wouldn't really understand anything
Which, you know, sucked. My goal had always been to reach a point where I could follow a basic anime well enough to enjoy it.
🚩 Red Flag 🚩
Unfortunately, I felt like I was spending months learning kanji and vocabulary, but never making any progress in my ability to actually understand Japanese. It seemed like I wouldn't get any closer to that goal, no matter how long I did WaniKani.
In particular, I began feeling like it really was necessary to learn a bit of grammar as a beginner. Not just vocab and kanji. So I signed up for a once-a-week Japanese class and began learning basic JLPT N5 grammar over the course of about six months.
And, in the midst of all that, three important things happened:
- Migaku released their Japanese course. The one with like 2,000 cards that includes grammar and promises to get you up to 80% comprehension on Netflix. Having been stuck at 60% comprehension for what felt like the longest time, that promise was really attractive to me.
- I took to Japan earlier this year (2024). I was able to pick out a bunch of words in menus and stuff, and that was really motivating... but it also was very obvious how lackluster my Japanese was. Whenever I tried to have any sort of basic conversation or follow anything I heard, it was pretty obvious how far I had to go.
- A friend of mine told me that he wanted to learn Japanese, so now I had a study buddy.
So my "plan" was basically to finish the Migaku Japanese Academy and start watching anime within 100 days. I just didn't exactly know that at the time.
Was that a scary transition?
Well, yes and no. From my WaniKani/Bunpro days, I already had a routine I knew I could stick to:
- A zero-stress pass through my flashcards in the morning
- Review bursts throughout the day to finish remaining flashcards
- New cards in the evening as a reward
So the transition itself wasn't scary. I basically just kept doing what I'd been doing, but with Migaku instead. I averaged around 123 reviews per day during the challenge, leaning on the Migaku discord for support during low-motivation days, and generally just kept going.
Actually, let me rephrase that.
💪 Tl;DR 💪
I knew I could do it because I'd been doing it for years. What I was nervous about was that I hadn't really gotten anywhere, despite my effort, and I wasn't sure if Migaku would be any different. That was scary.
At what point did you realize the new plan was working?
At some point, a few hundred cards into the course, I realized that I'd just made sense of a pretty long sentence. So I thought maybe it was time to give anime another try. I turned on Usagi Drop (my go-to "have I been learning anything" test) and gave it a shot.
As it would turn out, many of the sentences in the anime ended up being shorter than the ones I was seeing Migaku's course. I could follow them! So in addition to the course I started watching more anime.
It's fair to say you liked our course, then?
Yeah. I think the course is a good stepping stone for beginners.
With Anki I would get analysis paralysis. Everybody has their opinions on what the best settings are, what the best deck is, and all that. It was overwhelming. But with Migaku... everything is already set up. You just download the Academy deck and go from there.
For me, that simplicity was good.
And how'd that work out for you?
Again, to be clear, I went into day one already knowing 1,500–2,000 words, so I wasn't a total beginner. But, here are a few milestones that stood out to me:
- Day ~25: I tried watching an episode of Usagi Drop and it was doable.
- Day 60: I finished the Academy deck, and for the first time, felt like grammar was sticking. Long sentences didn’t scare me anymore. I could break sentences down and understand why they meant what they did.
- Day 75: I hit 4,000 known words. That was the turning point where I could watch anime and actually understand 80–90% of what was being said. That felt massive.
- Day 96: I made my 500th flashcard using Migaku. This was big for me because I'd struggled to stay consistent with sentence mining before. (Editor's note: sentence mining means extracting sentences from Japanese media and making flashcards out of them).
- Day 100: I’d finished 75 episodes of immersion and reached 4,500 known words. I wasn’t relying on subtitles anymore, and my mental stamina was noticeably improving. What used to feel exhausting now felt doable.
- We followed up: A year later, he's at over 7,000 Japanese words learned.
There were a lot of other little things, too, but these were the big things.
💡 Insight 💡
More than anything, the 100-day plan helped me build habits. It stopped being about finding the perfect method and became about showing up every day, even if the day wasn’t perfect. And honestly, that’s what changed everything.
How's life on the other side?
Well, funny story.
WaniKani runs this book club through their forums—people vote on a book and read it together. Anyway, way back when, I had bought one of the Book Club books (called "Happiness") and ended up giving up because it was just way too hard for me.
But then recently, after my success with anime, you know, like, I remembered that I had that book. So I decided to try it again. I just laid in bed and started reading, and the next thing I knew I was like halfway through it... and I'd understood like 99% of it.
I'm hoping that happens eventually for Hunter x Hunter, too, but I'm not quite there yet.
Detour for a moment—let's talk about anime for beginners? What should a new learner watch first?
Well, the big mistake that I kept making was trying to watch anime that was made for really young children. Like a lot of people recommend Peppa Pig because it uses super simple vocabulary.
It's really easy for kids to understand, so it'll be easy for you to understand, too. Like, you can watch a Peppa Pig episode in Japanese... and you'll understand it, even if you miss all the Japanese. It's just so obvious what they're doing.
Anyway.... I just couldn't sit through an episode of Peppa Pig. I'd try for five or ten minutes, then give up—feel like I was wasting my time.
💡 Insight 💡
So, my first recommendation is to watch something that you know you're going to enjoy. The first episodes will be difficult, no matter what, so you need to enjoy what you're watching enough to get over that initial hurdle.
The anime I started with was One Piece
The first few episodes will be hard, but there's a ton of recurring themes. Like, at first, you'll see 海賊 (kaizoku, "pirate")
, and that's a hard word... but it just comes up again and again. Before long, it'll stick.
This happens with tons of words.
💡 Insight 💡
If you watch a lot of anime, the words you hear over and over again just stick. Then, after the first five or ten episodes, things suddenly feel much easier.
So the key is to enjoy what you're watching enough to get through that initial difficult phase. By episode 20 you'll have gotten basically all the common vocab under your belt. One Piece has like a thousand episodes in total, so if you can get through those first 20 rough episodes, you've now got a ton of content that you can just enjoy.
Another suggestion that often came up was Slice of Life anime
Yeah, a lot of what I initially watched was slice of life anime. I wasn't into that sort of stuff in English, but it was actually OK in Japanese. The go-to recommendation for beginners is Bunny Drop, which I mentioned earlier.
(Editor's note: SoL, or "nichijou-kei" anime, is a genre that focuses on real-world stories, often in a high-school setting. It's about real people going through real things, so it's more accessible than, say, sci-fi or courtroom dramas.)
I also recommend:
- "Normal" Slice of Life → Bochi the Rock, A Place Further Than the Universe, and Horimiya
- "Romance" Slice of Life → Waiting in the Summer, Romantic Killer, Blue Box, My Dress-Up Darling
- Mystery-ish Shows → The Promised Neverland, Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny-Girl Senpai
If you're not sure whether something is right for your level or not, you can look it up on LearnNatively:
Or you can turn on Migaku, load whatever looks interesting on Netflix, and see if your comprehension score is decent or not:
💡 Insight 💡
These Slice of Life series are often just twelve episodes, but that's actually surprisingly rewarding. Your first episodes will be very difficult, but you'll learn the common vocabulary and go on. By the time you finish the show, you might hit a 90% comprehension score. Like, you're starting to really understand it.
Seeing the Migaku comprehension score go up like that is really rewarding. You just follow a series and gradually watch the number go up. It's cool.
How's learning Japanese after finishing your plan been?
Well, I had finals come up at university so I haven't been putting in as much effort as before. Recently, I've just been working through my Migaku Japanese Academy reviews.
💪 Gains 💪
I noticed early on that immersion was basically an instant improvement to my Japanese.
Like—I thought that it would take awhile to see progress, but even after just about a week of watching a few shows per day... it was noticeable. Your brain starts to pick up on patterns. Things start sticking out to you. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine.
It's happened so many times where I'll have a flashcard for a word, but I just keep failing the flashcard. It seems like I can't remember it. Then, I watch an episode of something, and that trouble word shows up out of the blue. I hear it three or four times in the context of the show—and it just, like, sticks after that. It's so awesome when that happens.
Another thing I really struggled with was that I really needed to have at least 80% comprehension.
I know some people can just tough it out and watch stuff with Japanese subtitles even if they understand very little of it... but I couldn't. So it took me awhile, but now that I'm here, things are just so much better. There are so many more things I can watch, and it's so much more engaging.
Two sorts of people, you know.
But, in my case, if something is difficult, I prefer to put it to the side for a few months. To come back after I've improved a bit and can enjoy it. And like, you know, there's also something motivating about that. Enjoying something that used to be difficult.
💡 Insight 💡
I'm doing these reviews today because, I know that if I keep it up, I'll be able to understand that show that I want to watch before long.
What did your 100 Day Challenge teach you?
Well, a lot of things. A year later (Editor's note: I followed up 💪), I don't think I realized how important the challenge was to my growth at the time. It set a lot of important things in motion. If I had to pick just a few things, though:
- Consistency is important. I was always pretty good about doing my cards during the week, but then I wouldn't always finish them on the weekend, so come Monday I'd have a stack of like 300 reviews to do. That wasn't sustainable. And if you give up on Monday, it'll be worse on Tuesday. Eventually you'll give up altogether. So, you know, pick a pace that's sustainable for you and stick to it.
- Having a reward is motivating. Like I said, with my study partner we agreed that after 100 days we were going to get dinner at this new place that we'd been wanting to try for a long time. Having something to lose helped squeak by on low-motivation days, and it made it all the more awesome at the end.
- The first few weeks are the hardest part. Once we hit 100 days—we'd been at this every day for 100 days, so we couldn't just quit now, you know?—The streak became its own source of motivation. But you don't have that early on. If you can stick to it every day for 30 days, you can probably stick to it for 300 days. So you just have to do whatever you can do to get through that first week, that first month, trusting that it'll get easier as you go and that your efforts will be rewarded.
But the main thing is just continuing to experiment. Even outside of language learning—say, trying to eat healthy. Some people, if you eat unhealthy on a Friday, they'll just continue eating like shit after that, 'cause they've already "failed", you know.
💡 Insight 💡
The thing is, one trip up doesn't mean you've completely failed. Just because you eat that brownie or fail to finish your reviews—like, slipping up once is kind of negligible, in the long run, so long as you get back on the horse. Eating that one brownie on Friday is so much better than eating a brownie every day. You slip, but you keep taking steps in the right direction, and you get there. If you study 299 out of 300 days, that one missed day is basically nothing.
Let's talk about the future. What's next?
Well—initially, my first big goal was that I wanted to be able to enjoy simple anime well enough that I could enjoy it. Not understand everything, necessarily, but understand it well enough with minimal lookups so I could really enjoy it. And I'm kinda there. It's hard, I'm not completely over the hurdle... but I can do it, if I focus.
From there—well, from now—my next goal is really just to build up my stamina. Before, I was only really watching an hour a day of anime. Maximum three episodes. After that, I'd just feel like I'm so drained. But I think that, as I immerse more, that "drained" feeling will go away. I'd like to be able to spend more time in Japanese, when I have the time to do so.
But my really big goal is that I want to improve my listening ability.
To become able to listen to podcasts and stuff like that. So I'm:
- Not looking at the subtitles while I'm watching
- Trying really hard to listen closely and pick out what they're saying
- Looking at the subtitle afterwards to check if what I heard was right
Ahh! That "check the subtitle afterwards" is our Intensive Listening function, right?
Yeah! I guess you should show that briefly in the blog post. It's kind of confusing to explain, but it makes sense when you see it.
➡️ Commence the editor's shameless product plug:
Migaku offers several different options for syncing a video with its subtitles:
The user just mentioned Intensive Listening mode, which we designed to (nearly) painlessly build your listening comprehension skills. We do this by hiding subtitles when your video is playing:
But then briefly pausing after each line of dialogue to show the subtitles:
Whereas most learners overly rely on subtitles, entirely neglecting their ears, this Playback Mode ensures that you utilize your ears to listen to the Japanese audio and then confirm whether or not you understood what you just heard. It's intense, but super effective.
Any advice for total beginners? What would you do differently if you were to start over?
💡 Insight 💡
When I first got started with Japanese, one of the things I read was that you want to make sure you're interested in the culture: motivation dies down eventually, so you need to make sure that there's something pulling you, something you really want.
And like, that's why I got started with Japanese in the first place. There's so many good Japanese series out there, depending on your level and stuff. It's hard to get there, but once you're there, you just have all of this awesome content to enjoy.
But if I were to list my own pieces of advice, I guess I'd have three things to share:
- Know that your motivation isn't a constant. It exists in flux. It's cool to optimize your routine... but planning a hyper optimal routine that takes a lot of effort is a recipe for failure. Plan around your worst days: start with a low goal that you can reach even if you're not feeling it. If you consistently meet that goal, gradually increase your commitment.
- Focus on what you enjoy doing. If you're enjoying yourself, it doesn't really matter if your learning is absolutely min-maxed. This will be a way you're happy to spend your time... and if you're having fun, and thus staying consistent, you'll eventually learn.
- Having community around you is really helpful. It's hard to keep yourself accountable if you're alone. But if there are 10, 20, 30 other people in this chat room who are also interested in Japanese—they can keep you accountable, they can encourage you on your week days, and you can share what you learn together.
And so we go...
I definitely hadn't appreciated the magnitude of learning a language early on—especially a language like Japanese. I thought it would be a much shorter process.
I've recently gotten up to where I have an 80% comp score for most things, and the difference is noticeable. The difference between 80% and 85% is significant. The step up to 90% is also a big deal. Recently I've gotten some 95%s, and like, 95% is super comfortable. I mean, when you do the math, 80% comprehension means one in 5 words are unknown... but 95% means one in twenty are unknown. That's a huge improvement.
💡 Insight 💡
So, I guess, if someone takes only one point from this article—what I'd tell them is that the first 1,000 words is the hardest.
It gets better.
Trust the process.
(... and, as an editor, if *you're* wondering how to get through your first thousand words in Japanese—what you're looking for is our Migaku Japanese Academy. Download the Migaku app to give it a shot.)