Thank God for those polite, calm, female characters in Japanese games. They are the only ones I can even vaguely understand. Barret in FFVII, Ryuji in Persona5? No chance!
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I’ve lived in Japan for 5 years and can reasonably carry on a conversation with people. However every time I try to watch an anime without Japanese subtitles it might as well be a different language completely.
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In Japanese school, I think it was around N4 level where I didn’t feel completely lost when listening to others, both for grammar and actual listening reasons. However, that’s meeting every weekday and listening to a teacher for ~4 hours with a dedicated listening activity once a week. So, you need to be constantly listening. Maybe several of those audio Japanese readers/e-books would be good (actually have a few that I haven’t tried yet).
But otherwise your average Japanese sentence seems to be a mix of all levels of grammar, so if grammar is an issue it’s simply a matter of getting through the material. i.e. almost every sentence I hear or say contains N2-N5 or N3-N5 grammar. I’d say once you reach N3/N4 you’ll start recognizing grammar points on a regular basis and understanding some sentences from that perspective, but then vocabulary will begin holding you back. Until then, it’s grammar that will hold you back.
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Like catching characters speech patterns tells you a lot about their personality (which often does not make it into the translation)
This is very true. Thing is, when I was playing Japanese video games for example, (even before studying Japanese), I was like “wait, he didn’t say that, this is a terrible translation” so many times. Though when you learn about the language you realize, it simply doesn’t make sense if you translate it to English word by word. For example, character may say “Hayai!” and translation would be like “Great! You are fast!”, so that doesn’t actually fit but you can’t simply translate it as “Fast!”, that wouldn’t be natural English. In some cases translators even add jokes themselves, sure that’s nice but sometimes jokes are so out of character or have other issues.
In the end yeah, these little things are pretty fun and I’m a person who likes learning stuff, that’s the only reason I study Japanese actually.
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I actually started training grammar after around 2 months of Anki so I had some knowledge.
Before all of these though, I tried WaniKani and decided I would prefer understanding the language before reading it so I totally ignore it right now. Reading is not a skill that would be very useful to me right now, maybe in future.
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I’ll echo everyone else’s responses here: Exposure, exposure, exposure!
My own background with Japanese is a little different from most of the replies; I was just a completely degenerate anime junkie back in my early teens (00’s), and after my 300th show or so (not an exaggeration), I started to realize that I was recognizing some vocabulary and grammar patterns… It also helped that I was into a ton of vocal doujin music by that time (and still am), as listening to songs I liked over and over and over helped me iterate over the same material a lot, and I picked up a ton of vocab and expressionisms through the lyrics of songs.
So, I cultivated that ability first, and, basically, started the language with phonetic / listening proficiency, and that has been my reference point for all my subsequent learning since. This is in stark contrast to literally every other person I know who is trying to learn Japanese, as they start with the kana charts, kanji, and then start to “ease into” listening and speaking practice…
Instead, as soon as I noticed I was starting to pick up some patterns from anime, I just paid closer attention when I watched more shows, and used a bunch of quick-and-dirty romaji input to machine translators to pick up a few scraps of knowledge… Then, once I was a ways through that, I started actually learning my kana (and a few years later, kanji) and focusing on literacy.
Bottom line: your brain WILL start to find patterns and make sense of things in the background, all on its own, if you just keep exposing it for long enough. I would have never even stuck my neck out to try learning this language (which I basically picked up “on accident”) in the first place if it didn’t! 
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It’s actually been a relief for me to read the replies here and realise just how many others struggle with listening. I’m just about now getting to a point where I can understand some conversations between natives, 2 and a half years into living in Japan. And it all depends on the person, how clear their speech is, if they’re a motormouth or not.
I think my coming to understand has come with a lot more focused immersion, active listening, taking the things I’m reading and trying to catch wind of them in real life. Much like what the entire thread says, haha. However to offer a bit of a unique perspective, I’m hard of hearing, so I’ve accepted that listening is always gonna lag behind reading for me. It was literally the same for me learning English as a child, haha. But I do what I can with what I got.
I would say that reading and listening go hand in hand, at least for me. When I’m reading, I read aloud (when I can!). I try and internalise what’s going on, hear the words spoken aloud, and that in turn makes it easier for me to recognise when it pops up in real life. So I know you don’t wanna focus too much on reading, and that’s fair right now, but I promise you that reading will be a skill that would be super useful for you on your listening journey should you make use of it well!
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This, so much this. This is what I meant in my post above about phonetics being my “reference point”; it takes me forever (in relative terms) to figure out what a written sentence is saying, and I’m usually just trying to figure out readings for things for most of that time, but as soon as I know how the entire sentence is read (or if the line is voiced to me), I can understand what it’s saying in split-second time, easy. No-brainer.
The brain is a weird thing.
This may be a minority opinion, but I had a terrible experience with Wanikani when I made an attempt at Japanese a few years ago, and my frustration with it contributed to discarding Japanese for a while. I’ve since learned that my suspicions that Wanikani isn’t even well structured and designed and won’t really help you through its isolated exercises are correct. I won’t be doing it again. The way to learn Kanji is through context, worrying about on’yomi and kun’yomi is for chumps (thank you, themoeway!) and all language learning is contextual and through immersion. The entire planet learns it that way as children. We can do it again.
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You’re not wrong, but I think it’s more appropriate to say that the usefulness of a tool depends on the person. For me, WK is exactly what I need, as I desperately need to compensate for my sore lack of literacy with raw, rote SRS exercises, so it’s perfect for me (even if I agree about the UX sucking. I hate doing WK reviews, BunPro prompts are a thousand times more fun and engaging).
Now, if BunPro just takes over that entire domain and makes decks for all the joyo kanji, we’ll be sitting pretty, but at the time I was looking around for learning tools, WK was the best option.
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Yes, I think you’re right, and that’s a more measured take on it. Others have mentioned how WK has been a godsend for them, and I respect that, but caution that it should be only a small, specialised part of your practice (and if you have time for only a bit of Japanese daily, my opinion is that it normally should not be WK, especially if you desperately need vocabulary acquisition). SRS in general is a superpower with massive efficiency gains, and Anki for me has been a saviour in that regard. I’m actually kind of impressed at how “digital” the Japanese learning community has become in recent years, with mining rigs, animecards, the Yomichan Chrome dictionary plugin, customised Anki setups and whatnot. I’d like to try my hand at Egyptian Arabic someday so I wonder if some of these techniques can be imported into other language learning communities.
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Hi, I will use your response to tackle similar concerns to the OP, but with different ranges.
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I started WaniKani in 2019 after learning Hiragana and Katakana in 2-3 weeks. I advanced daily for 1.5 years, learning 1500+ Kanji until I realized I was not really speaking or understanding Japanese, just understanding the Kanji.
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I read Minna No Nihongo and Anki so that I could have a better grasp of the grammar. In theory it all made sense, in practice I wasn’t “getting it”.
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In parallel I went through Anki decks and some iPhone apps (kinda useless as the WaniKani and Bunpro approach is just better)
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I forced myself to WRITE the Kanji so that I could instantly recall the On’yomi and Kun’yomi, since WaniKani is “read only”. This proved to be VERY helpful as Im very good at recalling those 1500 Kanji now.
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Had a Japanese tutor (living in the UK, I live in Costa Rica), she was very good but could not customize the learning experience with my actual grammar-Kanji awareness so it was a bit painful for both, plus, she had a lot of other students and couldnt customize my experience further.
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Found Bunpro, and Im 100% N5 and about 35% N4. It has been very good in making me realize my REAL gaps (conjugations are always problematic, って vs て for example (basically the small っ is impossible for me to understand so I just try the 2 ways until one is accepted).
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Current status: I can read some simple manga, I can understand “the general idea” of some Anime episodes (with Japanese subtitles, Kanji are generally a very good help in corroborating what is being said but they are also a crutch, I depend on the Kanji too much to get the actual context, instead of just “hearing it”). I understand maybe 4% of real Japanese Speech, and while I can write and read what I write very well, in a 100% real time conversation I usually freeze.
Its a long post, and all that context is to be able to ask:
What would be the next step? Besides continuing Bunpro and writing the Kanji daily? You mentioned “pimsleur”. Could that be a differentiator?
Reading other suggestions: “Total Immersion” is not something practical in my case, as every time I dont understand something I PAUSE it to understand the reasoning, which causes frustration. I also haven’t found anything that I would like enough, that hearing it constantly could counter the frustration.
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In response to this, specifically, “Keep looking,” basically, would be my advice. There is a lot out there, once you start actually breaking into the actual Japanese internet, so to speak. If you can read very well, this will help you a lot, as you’re already decently well-equipped to navigate the Japanese internet. Try to find Japanese versions of some things you already know you like a lot in your native language, possibly by searching for them in Japanese, in the Japanese locale of some search engines!
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Leo, you’re so much more advanced in your Japanese than I am (and by the way, I am finding Pimsleur quite helpful to practice speaking fundamentals, so +1 recommendation for beginners-to-early-intermediate, though caution: it is expensive) but when it comes to immersion: you gotta do it. It’s the royal road, and has helped me break down French and German. Pausing to check on words must be the bread and butter of it, and replaying hard-to-understand dialogue is massively useful. When it comes to frustration, I would try to think about those emotions. Instead, maybe think of it as a great puzzle, that you have not solved yet but will day-by-day… and it’s exciting not knowing because you are confident you will figure it out!
Also, you might check out this Jazzy guy on Reddit, who is clearly awesome - passed the N1 flawlessly after 8.5 months of Japanese in 2021, and it was mainly through inhaling content (in a smart way) over hours and hours. Most of us don’t have as much time or energy to do this, but I think it’s really cool and inspiring that it can be done, even with a really challenging language like this one, and it’s generous of him to share the roadmap he used.
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[WaniKani] should be only a small, specialised part of your practice…
That’s the key. Some people make the mistake of using WaniKani as a tool for learning “Japanese.” It was never designed for that purpose. Its objective is to help you learn kanji and some associated vocabulary. Conversely, Bunpro’s objective isn’t to teach you kanji. Its primary use case is grammar (although we have vocab decks now, so it’s starting to become even more useful). But that’s still not enough because you’re only being exposed to a handful of example sentences that are intended to reinforce certain grammar points. And also, you’ll end up with a major vocabulary gap. And the listening exercises are limited.
That is all to say, there is no “one stop shop” for learning Japanese. I heartily recommend using many different tools that come at the language from many different angles. And don’t get discouraged when you try applying your Japanese skills. You’re not going to understand everything said in anime. That’s OK. You’re not going to be able to read every bubble in manga. That’s OK. You’re not going to comprehend all of the dialogue in video games. That’s OK.
What I recommend especially is copying new words and grammar you encounter as you interact with materials and using those for later study. Although it’s dreadfully boring, an SRS app like Anki is one of the best known ways of reinforcing memory. Flashcards can be very hard to do because they’re just so mind-numbingly dull, but keep your goals in mind. You’re not doing it because it’s fun, you’re doing it because it will enable you to have fun. Once you have a good-sized vocabulary and understanding of grammar under your belt, you’ll have to look up fewer things and will be able to enjoy the experience more.
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As stated previously, I started phonetic-first and learned to read later, but I have a story about an era of my Japanese studying “career” where I was attempting to immerse myself in an effort to learn to read which, I imagine, would share some common themes to someone trying to learn to listen.
Some time around 2012 to 2014, after I had the kana mostly under my belt, but long before I ever found WaniKani, I was actually using some (very finicky, but workable) optical recognition software called KanjiTomo as a crutch to help me read kanji on-screen and brute-force through material that I wanted to be able to read in the first place, and while it was an inefficient learning process, it was how I picked up my first few dozen kanji, and got my “foot in the door” for learning the stuff. The reading experience sucked, but I did fumble my way through a lot of doujin manga and a couple of visual novels with it, and it was still fun, because I just liked the material that I was forcing myself through that much.
For someone learning to listen, there are probably similar “crutch”-like tools that can be used to bridge the gap between a frustrating experience and an enjoyable one. Subtitles (in written Japanese!) come to mind, and I believe YouTube offers the ability to show auto-transcribed captions for videos where it detects Japanese audio (I’ve seen it as an option on a few Hololivers’ videos)… which probably aren’t going to be correct all the time, but I reckon that’d offer an experience of similar fidelity to what I ended up doing with my OCR software 
It’s OK to sacrifice learning efficiency if you can do your learning in the background while you just enjoy doing or watching or listening to what you already have fun with. At that point, it’s just a matter of staying dedicated and continuing to immerse yourself over a long-enough time period.
You’ll get there. Take it from all of us here; we guarantee it!
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I take issue with this being stated as though it’s simply a fact. I found WaniKani to be wonderfully structured, and really feel as though, less than two years after starting it and Japanese in general, I have an almost uncanny superpower to read kanji and guess (kanji-based) Japanese words, despite still being at a low-medium level in terms of grammar.
I’ve been primarily concerned with reading while learning Japanese, but I’m beginning to realize that not having developed any real listening skills is holding back my reading. So I second this!
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I remember seeing a conversation about how the results were probably faked, while I cant find the original conversation when you put it through fotoforensics it suggests it was probably edited.
The website believes the pink parts have been edited. While the website is not 100% accurate Ill let you make up your mind on if hes telling the truth, I just wanted to warn that these types of posts are often faked and take it with a grain of salt. 
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And just to add: Even if you can pass N1 in a year of studying, it’d have to be so highly specialized and targeted that I highly doubt you’d have a well-rounded grasp of the language as a whole, even if you look amazing on paper.
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I definitely call “BS” on that Reddit post. If going from zero Japanese to passing the N1 with a perfect score in 8.5 months isn’t impossible, it’s at least a savant-level accomplishment. If the poster in fact did that they ought to have immediately switched their major from physics to linguistics because they have genius-level aptitude for language.
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