Monday–Friday
Monday through Friday is where the real learning happens. Each day is built from three simple blocks: a morning session where you mine and learn about ten new words, daytime passive listening, and an evening of raw immersion.
🔗 Watch my live study sessions and VODs on YouTube.
☕ Morning (~1 hr): Mine, Then Review
Step 1: Mine about ten new words. Open the show you are working through with MPVacious and go line by line. When you hit a sentence with a single unknown word (the T1 rule), mine it. Stop once you have about ten clean cards. That is your batch for the day. For the full technique, see How to Mine Anime with MPVacious & Rikaitan.
Step 2: Make a cup of coffee. This step is absolutely essential. If you skip it, your Japanese progress may collapse instantly. (Just kidding. But also not really.)
Step 3: Open Anki and clear your reviews. Enable the setting "Show new cards after reviews" so you always stabilize what you already know before touching new material. This strengthens your foundation, prevents a backlog of forgotten cards, and prepares your mind for the new batch.
Step 4: Learn the ten cards you just mined. Because you mined them minutes ago, the scene, the audio, and the context are all fresh. On the first pass, read the sentence, listen to the audio, get the general meaning, and press Again to keep the card in the short one-minute learning loop. When it returns, try to recall it; if you cannot, flip it, read and listen again, and move on. Once you press Good, Anki takes over the spacing.
The sentence is the anchor. Because your cards come from real immersion, lean on the full sentence, its grammar, and the audio rather than a bare dictionary definition.
Deleted cards are normal. Mortician will remove buried and leech cards. If you mine ten and only seven or eight ultimately stick, that is fine. You will meet the same words again and can mine them later. The goal is efficient progress, not saving every card.
Keep the morning batch around ten. It is small on purpose: mining ten words takes only a few minutes, and learning them in the same session is what makes them stick.
🎧 Daytime (~1 hr, passive): Familiar Audio
During the day, listen to audio from the content you are actively mining. You have already seen these lines, mined from them, and reviewed the cards, so you genuinely understand what you are hearing, which makes it far more effective than random background noise.
How I get an hour
My commute is about fifteen minutes each way, four times a day: to work, home for lunch, back to work, and home again. Four short drives add up to roughly an hour of listening, and the commute alone completes the block.
Other listening
You can also put on Japanese music, podcasts, radio, or YouTube if you enjoy it: great for chores or the gym. These are bonus exposure; the core of the block is still an hour of familiar audio from what you are mining.
🌙 Evening (~1 hr): Raw Immersion
The evening block is simple: sit down, relax, and watch raw Japanese with no English. No studying, no pressure, just exposure.
What to watch
Watch something other than the show you are mining. Good options include current-season anime, dramas, movies, Japanese YouTubers, or variety shows.
How to watch
- No English subtitles.
- No Japanese subtitles unless they are baked in.
- No pausing, no rewinding, no looking things up.
Just let it play. At first it may feel like noise. That is normal. Over time, familiar words start to pop out and comprehension grows on its own.
🧮 Summary
- ☕ Morning (~1 hr): mine ~10 words, then reviews and learn those cards.
- 🎧 Daytime (~1 hr): passive listening to familiar audio.
- 🌙 Evening (~1 hr): raw immersion from a show you are not mining.
Repeat this Monday through Friday and your Japanese will grow steadily and reliably. On the weekend, you rest.
Next up: Weekend: Rest Days
🔗 Watch me run this routine live on YouTube.