Follow up to my last post. https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1n8o3s2/6_month_progress_what_worked_for_me/
Progress has slowed at least vocab wise, I'm only at around 2200 kanji and 8.4k words. I'm currently reading 雪国 right now and it's not particularly that hard, the sentences are definitely quite long and some of the grammar it uses I've never really seen, but my familiarity with Japanese sentence structure has gotten to a point where it's not really an issue to read this with a dictionary.
芸者のいる家は料理屋とかしるこ屋とか色褪せた暖簾をかけているが、古風な障子のすすけたのを見ると、これで客があるのやら、そして日用雑貨の店や駄菓子屋にも、抱えをたった一人置いているのがあって、その主人達は店のほかに田畑で働くらしかった。(stg half the sentences outside of dialogue look like this)
As for speaking, I started taking some Italki lessons and am able to hold conversations, but I do use a lot of vocabulary that isn't very "natural" partly because my only "practice" has been internal monologues of me coming up with battle scenarios in my head (or other chuuni-adjacent scenes), but it's understandable for my teacher. Most of the conversations revolve around me talking about the content of the works I read, which are mostly combat/action centric works.
Heading into the 1 year mark, I do want to get back to the vocab grind like I was doing those first 6 months, and hopefully spend some more time on listening practice. I've been a lot busier lately and it's been hard for me to devote the same time as before, but I've stayed consistent and hope to carve out more time in the future.
by UntitledBridger