I’ve been studying Japanese diligently now for 4 months. I’m totally aware that is a very short time, but you have to start somewhere. I’m going down a heavy immersion route with a lot of comprehensible input, currently via level 1-2 graded readers, N5/N4 podcasts, and easier anime shows like Shirokuma Cafe. I also watch reality shows like Terrace House and the odd J-Drama, but as you can imagine my comprehension is currently low for content at that level. It’ll come with time!
I’m supplementing this with the JLab beginner deck and Genki for grammar, Nukemarine’s N5 vocab deck (soon N4 vocab deck) for vocab and I’ve recently started sentence mining and am at around 170 self-mined cards. In addition to this im using WaniKani for Kanji (currently level 6 – switched from RTK around 6 weeks ago). All in all i estimate I touch the language actively 3-4 hours per day, with passive immersion on top of that.
However, I keep reading old posts on here, that say even people who have passed N1 struggle to watch and read a lot of “Native content”. The term “native content” comes up a lot as though it’s some mythical thing, but isn’t everyone immersing with native content well before N1 to learn Japanese?
Maybe im just AJATT-pilled, and a lot of people are stuck in textbooks, but it’s really messing with my motivation to think that at N1 I still wouldn’t be able to enjoy a lot of content.
I know JLPT grades are blurred, “the N1 pass score is so low blah blah blah”, but surely after 5 years of daily study, reaching a level around N2-N1, I’d be able to pick up a new anime series without needing a dictionary lookup every minute, right? I’m not based in Japan if that makes a difference (in the world of the internet).
by Thurgauer