Given your level (or study hours) of Japanese, what areas of Japanese do you think you should have already mastered but still haven’t?

Do you have areas in Japanese that you should already have established given your level or hours of studying but still haven't? Passed N2 this July and I think about the areas I still suck at and should work on. Here they are.

  1. I suck at numbers. Regular counting and days of the month. If you ask me to speak out 756 I would have to consciously think about it and take a while to say it. When I listen to numbers, same thing where I have to take a bit more time to process. It's still not natural. Also I can't even remember whether youka or yokka is 4th.
  2. I am slow at reading katakana. I read visual novels, manga, JLPT stuff but when I see katakana it's like I'm still in the 2nd month of studying Japanese.
  3. Haven't mastered the kenjougo and sonkeigo yet. While I do okay with listening, the speaking part of this is not good. In the Language Exchanges I have attended no one spoke with these, only teineigo. The other instances I hear them are JLPT items and anime. In my one trip in Japan I was so shocked that they really do speak in kenjougo, specially the bus driver when he repeatedly apologized for a 5 minute delay of departure cause of 2 passengers being late.
  4. I abandoned writing kanji 4 years ago, so I can't be asked to handwrite. Used to be able to write around 500 of them but I switched my focus to recognition.

Those are what I still suck at a lot even if they should have been established even at N4 to N3. What do you think about this situation?

Now for what I can do, it does check with JLPT N2's can-do list for N2.

Since there's no speaking test in N2, I can only use my Language Exchanges and 6-day trip in Japan as reference.

In the VR Chat Language exchange there is a topic for the day you have to talk about. So I can understand most stuff, around 85-90%, depending on the topic being common or specialized. When it's my turn to speak about the topic I can talk about it. If I prepared then it's smooth but sometimes I don't prepare but should still be able to think about what to say. When it's the other member's turn to talk about the topic, I can response accordingly, give comments, ask question etc. to keep the flow of conversation.

In Japan I was able to speak in Japanese 99% of the time. Ordering food, asking for directions, asking for recommendations (restaurant, places to see), ask about the significance of items bought, talk about procedure for the tax free purchase, describe to a shopkeeper an item I am looking for, discuss with sellers in Comiket about the books they have and what they're about, confirmation of shinkansen platform (we almost missed the train cause we were on the wrong platform) etc.

For reading, I mainly read visual novels. Should be able to understand 95-100% of stuff in stories like Summer Pockets, with the use of dictionary sometimes. Meanwhile with stories like White Album 2, I need that dictionary more frequently because of more specialized terms and idioms. I probably still suck at newspaper stuff cause I don't read them. Have to work on that.

For writing, maybe I can still remember writing at least up to N4 kanji, but most of N3 to N2 I know more only with recognition.

by ManyFaithlessness971