She studied japanese.
Languages come in three parts and two blocks. The parts are Reading, Listening and Producing. These are independent of one another and you can be able to read japanese but not listen to it, or only be able to do very basic german conversation but get completely lost in a book, doubly so with a different writing system.
The blocks are grammar and vocabulary, self explanatory. Vocabulary comes first because you can kind of do a conversation with "meat eat money how much" kind of english but grammar is just rules for stringing together words.
Understanding language learning like this instead of relying on unfocused methods works faster and better.
Understanding that you need to learn all three separately is the key to not giving up when you've been reading yotsuba for three months but you cant understand a single word from a podcast.
Japanese grammar is piss easy if you did morphosyntactic analysis in HS (curricular in europe), and for vocabulary you either autistically rote memorize a whole list or you go do immersion. Kiara doesnt think media works for learning a language so chances are she just bruteforced every kanji up to N2 and every word in the vocab list to lern japanese. This works, if you can do this you can learn any language in months.
UN diplomats with fluency in 8 languages and conversation level in 22 do this. They sit down and literally just "study portuguese", all the words with their grammar rules, until they can read a book. If you can do this, if you're disciplined enough and capable of memorizing, sit down and learn japanese. This is THE way.
If you cannot, just do immersion. Pick a day two weeks from now and from that day onwards your phone, computer, browser, social media and videos are all in your target language. The prime issue with this is that it only works if you already know what words mean, else you'll just start clicking until you get to "printer settings" if you need it, so it loses effectiveness very quickly if you have a job. The secondary issue is that you need to study anyways, immersion is NOT an alternative to study. You can know how to read 機, but do you actually know how to write it? Did you study the strokes, did you study both readings? Even if you know what it means and you can sort of infer what a word must mean, you still need to learn how to read most words and most kanji, which is something immersion cannot do. Game menus in japanese can only help you associate common words to common concepts, you still need to study definitions and readings.
