I have seen a lot of posts of people sharing their progress, or people in youtube speaking high level japanese in a few years, I’d like to share my progress because I feel like I’m not advancing that quick.
I’m taking N3 this december, having passed N5 in december past year and N4 in july. I usually say that I’ve studying seriously since around agoust past year, as I techincally started before but only took seriously to finish minna no nihongo and take N5 from agoust 2024. So I usually say that I’ve got a N3-ish level in 2 years (still not taken the real test but have gone well in all past test I’ve done these days).
Regarding japanese media, I feel like I can understand some content that I like, for exampleダンダダン,チェンソーマン or some romcoms, I’m in a point where I follow animes and mangas I’m interested in in jp, also I’m reading a lot of web articles of themes I got interested, and enjoyed some rpgs. So I can now enjoy japanese, but only with aid like OCR, dictionaries or jp subtitles, without it I can only grasp the plot of simple animes likeクレヨンしんちゃん but not all sentences, some shows are still quite hard, likeモンスター, right now I’m watching Death Note and can understand overall plot but get lost quite often when using some police-wise jargon. News and some web articles are quite taxing for me right now, specially if they include a lot of historical or political terms and youtube videos are only capable if have jp-subtitles, and still then they are way harder than anime or dorama.
So Japanese is much more comprenhensible for me right now, but I’m far from proficient. Same for speaking, where I can express simple ideas but not always speak about certain topics, or not always express exactly what I want to say, I even commit grammar errors like confunding particles or adjetive types.
I studied for N5 and N4 with minna no nihongo, and slowly switched to an inmersion based approarch as I was more and more being capable of understand japanese, right now the only textbooks I use are Kanji in Context and sou matome n3 for grammar and vocab, but not rely on the latters a lot. I started to use anki after taking n4, just for sentence mining (i don’t like it for premade decks, preffer to study vocab list the traditional way) but looking back I feel like I’ve not been exposed as much time as I thought, I try to expose a least an hour of listening a day, and another in reading, but a lot of days I don’t reach some of these goals and they are not that much time compared to the suggested to learn the language (some people spend like 5+ a day), however I don’t really register the time, so I usually just try to watch 3-4 anime episodes, learn a bunch of manga or surf the web, read some twitter etc.
My main question is if I’m being harsh on myself, as I found my progress to not be as good as others, and even, despite N3 feeling like a great achievement past year, the closer I’m to it the less impressive it looks for me. Same for proficency, I’ve progressed but I still require a lot of aid to understand almost all content, and even when I tell somebody that I’m studying japanese, they think that using jp subtitles, dictionaries and so on is simply like not knowing the language at all, as it looks like anybody can understand it that way. I’m currently ashamed of telling people I’m studying the language, and the more I think of it, the less impressive it looks my actual level of japanese. You guys, how was your progress in 1,2 or more years? Is n3 in 2 years too slow? Is it normal to still rely on as much AID as I can?
When I started learning japanese, I had some goals that right now I’ve somewhat achieved, like watching anime in japanese with jp subtitles, reading japanese texts written for japanese, or manga, or enjoying games i like, that time achieving that even if requiring to use dictionaries or not understanding everything seems almost imposible, right now I’ve somewhat got up to that, but I’ve noticed that wasn’t the great level I thought. Have you feel that way, the more you reach your goals, the less impressive they seem to you?
by AnywhereMoist1908