Japanese Stage 0: Personal History

Hello everyone,

This blog is a way for me to document my progress following the Mass Immersion Approach by Matt vs Japan in order to become fluent in multiple languages.

(Disclaimer: Any links found in this blog are not affiliated or sponsored in any way. I am including links so that you can check out my sources for yourself. Any opinions found in this blog may not be reflected by the sources I link to.)


My language history so far:

I'm currently a sign language interpreter and studied American Sign Language for a total of 6 years in high school and college. I consider myself to be at an advance level but nowhere near native. I'm currently on a path to switch careers.
I studied Spanish in high school for 4 years. I have a very minimal understanding of Spanish. I still understand some of the grammar and minimal vocabulary.
I took the first course of French in both high school and college. I have even less of an understanding of French.

Within the last year, I started learning Japanese. I think it was sort of a New Years thing at some point. I researched a bit and found some different methods to try. I found a timeline to follow on Reddit and bought all of the books I needed. I attempted to implement it but didn't make it very far. I've probably spent at least $500 over the last year on different learning methods (books, online courses, apps, etc).
I made it to level 4 on WaniKani, so I can recognize those Kanji and may know some pronunciations. I started and restarted up to chapter 1 in Genki I probably 3 times. I can recognize about 80-90% of the Hiragana and probably 30% of the Katakana. That is about all the progress I've made in Japanese so far.


The Mass Immersion Approach:

Somewhere along my Japanese research, I found the All Japanese All The Time method for learning Japanese. I didn't like it. I found it very difficult to follow the table of contents and didn't find anything that stuck out to me as important to learn. This is just my personal opinion. A lot of people  found great success with AJATT.
An expert voice in the AJATT world is Matt vs Japan. I became familiar with some of his videos, including his massive 3 hour long timeline video. 
I passively followed his work and watched some of the update a Q&A videos along the way. When he put out the Mass Immersion Approach content, I became highly interested but not motivated.
Now, I have the motivation and will make my attempt to follow Matt's method and see where it takes me.

In the next post I'll be talking about specific things I'm doing to get ready for Stage 1 of MIA. After that the plan is to make a weekly post about my progress and any resources I find.

After I take on Japanese for a while, I would like to branch out and do more languages with this approach. I'm considering either 2 weeks on Japanese and 1 week on another language.