I feel like I built a maze for myself and I cant find the way.

I've been "actively" learning japanese for around ""3+ years""

First of all the confession, I've made the mistake to blindly rely on Duolingo for most of the time, thats why the words are in quoatation marks. I think its great to keep someone motivatied and its a good way to intruduce someone into a language but other than that, its horrible.

For about 5 months now, I've been studying japanese for at least 2 hours everyday. Listening, Reading, watching youtube videos, Anki or learning grammar. Thats when I realized that I already know a lot of words but that alone is not enough.

I started mining vocabulary for about the same time when i started really learning japanese around 5 months ago. Since then, Im doing my Anki every day (around 70-80 every day with 5 new ones every day). I feel like im making real progress for the first time but on the other side, I feel like its nothing complete.

I tried doing some online tests and realized that I encountered some problems.

  1. I cant even tell where I would fit in at the moment. N5/N4/N3 I know a decent amount of vocabulary but still have a lot of problems understanding the meaning or writing full sentences. I dont know my own level

  2. I cant find proper learning material. I either find easy learning material thats made for day 1 beginners where everything is written in hiragana only (I hate that, i need kanji in order to read and understand something) or things that are way above my level.

  3. I dont know what I should focus on at the moment, learning more vocabulary, learning grammar, learning common phrases, doing more tests until I understand them (like starting from 0 but with some pre-existing knowledge) or just keep going until it works.

It feels like I put every word into a into a box, shook it and learned random words without connections (sometimes). I have a foundation but not a blueprint of how to continue building.

Sorry if the text feels weird to read or if something isn't explained well, English is my second language, i havent used it in a while and because of my autism, i already have a small weakness for writing long paragraphs. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them!

Thanks for reading and thanks for your help.

by Staatsanwalt_Pichu