I apologize ahead of time. This post is an amorphous pointless ball of vibes and you will learn nothing from reading it.
I know about ~1500 kanji and ~3000 vocabulary words according to WaniKani (I am level 39). For the last few months, I've been creating cards from everything from text that my phone shows with the language in Japanese, to random manga I pick off the shelf in Book-Off. I suppose I know an extra 200 kanji and 200 vocab words from my Anki deck, but I don't take know or not know metrics very seriously… Even if I know thousands of words, they are biased toward only the kanji I have been introduced to. Maybe once I know all Joyo I'll take more metrics but my reading speed is too slow for much of this to matter.
In any case, I give all this context to say – I assumed that learning Japanese would actually get easier and not harder past a certain threshold with the more you know. Immersion is definitely super hard when you need to look up every single word.
It definitely has gotten easier to a certain extent. I can understand pretty much any prompt that comes up on my phone. I can understand your average conversational sentence. But there are still times where I am listening to song lyrics or watching a video and I get utterly and completely lost.
I'm also surprised by how many kanji I come across that are not in WaniKani that don't appear to be super uncommon. And I'm not just talking about kanji like 薔薇 that only come up as part of one word or something. Kanji like 嘗, 拗, and 拭 – I'm sure there are justifications for each one of these but there are just a lot.
In any case, yeah, I've been studying Japanese for a crazy long time so I guess I'm not demotivated I suppose, but it just seems like there's so much I don't know. It's a little exciting and motivating but I'm also worried of taking on too many new Anki cards or something coming up with my life and burning out again.
Thanks for reading
by johnW_ret