After a trip to Japan in October of 2024 I decided I wanted to start learning Japanese. I dont know if I'll move there one day but I figured learning it would be nice for vacations there and anime/manga.
Right as I hit 1 year I hit some cool goals of mine:
Finished my N4 vocab book
Finished N4 grammar on bunpro
Hit level 19 on wanikani (was hoping for 20 but so be it)
Some days I feel like I can read a decent bit other days even basic sentences I struggle with the grammar nuances. I still struggle with listening a good bit too. I didn't practice listening for the first few months because I thought it would get easier if I knew more vocab, but now I see that even the vocab I "knew" I didn't always recognize. Kanji is about the only area I feel pretty good on so at least there's that.
I always see post of people blazing though N5 & N4 but for me it's take a while. I probably study for ~1.5-2 hrs a day and it's taken a year for me. Even now I still plan to take at least a month to practice N4 grammar and listening because it's so much harder for me to hear than to read.
I don't really know what I should do after I'm confident in N4. I have a trip to Japan in Feb so hopefully that'll keep me motivated this next year but Im not sure if I should start sentence mining or just work through the N3 vocab and grammar first.
Part of me feels like trying to read a manga would make studying more fun. The last few weeks kinda felt like a grind. The other half of me doesn't feel all that confident in trying to read a manga yet. But maybe it's like listening for me where I never really felt prepared. In any case I've certainly realized this will be a long journey to proficiency but that's okay for now.
For anyone who's past N4 how long did it take you to feel confident in the (N4) grammar? Did you just keep moving to N3 material? Did you starting mining right after? Any mistakes you wish you avoided?
by Raijin225