I'm planning to focus on learning Japanese with the primary goal of being able to read books, even if I have to rely on a dictionary at first. I don't mind not being fluent in speaking or listening—I just want to reach a level where I can understand written Japanese reasonably well.
If I dedicate myself to studying Japanese for about one year, or at most two years, would it be realistic to read books (not necessarily advanced literature, but novels or non-fiction) with relative comfort? By "comfort," I mean being able to follow the content without struggling too much, even if I have to look up words occasionally.
If anyone has experience with this, I'd love to hear how long it took you to reach a similar level and what study methods helped you the most. Thanks!
by Basic-Ad4402
2 comments
It’ll be a lot of work, but years is the incorrect measure, it’s hours. If you study an hour a week, then absolutely no. 8 hours a day, absolutely within possibility. Somewhere invetween? Maybe.
Also there’s no clear definition of struggle, and it depends heavily on what books.
I don’t think one year is realistic. Two years is doable, but would be a lot of work. I’d roughly expect you to be at ‘comfortably reading novels with occasional dictionary lookups’ after a 4 year college course, with good grades and/or a decent amount of out-of-class study (the two should be interchangable statements if the grades are meaningful). A diligent independent student can certainly double that pace, but it does mean putting in a lot of hours.
Unless you’re neither working nor going to school, it would be unreasonable to go any faster than that, and in any case there are diminishing returns on your time. There is a limit to how much you can effectively learn in one day no matter how much you study.
I don’t think you will be able to or should try to avoid learning to listen and speak the language. Of course you don’t have to spend a ton of time working on perfect pronunciation if you’re not interested in becoming a good conversationalist, but if you want to read novels you’ll want to be comfortable with the spoken language. For dialogue, obviously, you will want to be able to hear the voices in your mind, but for reading in general, we subvocalize when we read. Without reasonable familiarity with the spoken language, our internal narrator will be flat and expressionless, hindering both enjoyment and understanding.