Even then, it can’t be possible. There are cultural aspects to the language to take into account as well. If it was a year, that’s more possible. But not 3 months.
And that’s already more than you could do previously! Always gotta recognize the little victories
Besides graded readers, which I haven’t used much of, I agree with @simias suggestion of replaying videogames. Steam has a nice feature that you can change the language in the settings and download the other language’s content; so I use that all the time for games that I played to try it again in Japanese. I don’t try to read and understand everything in that case since I can always fall back on my memory for the gist of the plot, but I try to keep my immersion to a comfortable level.
I do play Japanese games and visual novels and read some manga that are untranslated however, and while I’m at technically at a N5 level on Bunpro because I haven’t dedicated enough time to work through N4 and N3 yet (I’m over 2 years into my Anki study and only learned about Bunpro maybe half a year ago), I’m basically teaching myself Japanese by looking up lots of words and concepts and memorizing the most frequent that I come across, so a lot of the N5 and probably N4 grammar feels already somewhat familiar to me. I do this for a variety of media types to accumulate a less focused lexicon. A lot of it feels slow and is probably inefficient however, so I wouldn’t recommend this approach to a lot of people, but I have my own goals that I’m working on.
As an example, I’ve been replaying Elden Ring in Japanese, and to accompany that, I’ve been reading this website for build and boss guides, that I found from this google search 「Elden Ring 防御力説明」which means for Elden Ring defense power explanation. エルデンリング攻略Wiki - 神ゲー攻略
I don’t aim for 100% comprehension, more like just enough so that I can get enough use out of my learning, or to be able to entertain myself from reading a story. Tutorials are great because you can get achievable results even if you’re not comprehending all the details.
So anyways, my suggestion would be to try to find something specific that you’d like to experience in Japanese natively and figure out a path that’ll get you there sooner, such as having a separate vocabulary deck for your own journey. For example, if you are an aspiring artist, you could mine tons of words and concepts from Clip Studio Paint tutorials for example, and follow other artists on social media. Written tutorials would probably be easier. If you don’t have something like that, you can try out something new. Or, you can simply keep learning and eventually you’ll get to that level anyway.
While native stuff might feel a bit far off, here are some suggestions for working up to it ^^
Podcasts: I really liked Nihongo Con Teppei for early listening practice. He doesn’t speak unbearably slow, instead repeats stuff a lot and gives lots of examples e.g. どんな料理が好きですか?どんな料理が好きですか?甘い料理が好きですか?辛い料理が好きですか?ご飯好きですか?麺が好きですか?僕はめん好きですよ。うどんとらめんとそばを食べます。etc etc, not actually a transcript i just made it up in the style of the podcast but as you can see, even if you don’t understand a word, for example 料理, he gives examples like sweet or spicy, then rice or noodles, which kind of helps you figure out what that word means without the english translation (cooking/food). So I’d suggest trying that, its on spotify, about 5 min for one episode and like hundreds and hundreds of them. Theres also easy and harder versions too.
Manga: (maybe not starting straight away because it is quite difficult to be able to, but you could probably do this after N5/start of N4 stuff)
For starters, pick an easy manga, preferably that you’ve read or watched in english/english subtitles before. Its best to purchase a physical copy for this. (With furigana)
Start with the first page or couple of the whole chapter and read through it, if you rely entirely on the furigana thats algs too.
After reading the first couple pages or however many you did(I like to do just a couple of pages maybe 2 or 3) grab a pencil and read through a second time, but this time, when you come across a kanji that you know, cross out the furigana with the pencil.
Either during that time, or after, I go through and search up the words I don’t know and write the meanings in pencil next to the japanese words. Then I pick the most useful looking words(or search them all up and add the JLPT n3 and below or whatever), and add them to my bunpro queue(of if you use anki or smth else u could do that too).
Then like a week later, after you’ve learnt more of the words, you go back to the manga, and erase the translations of the words you’ve learnt (and maybe cross out the furigana if you know the readings now), then re-read.
Repeat!
It’s a bit slow, and focusing on learning rather than enjoyment but its a good way to start reading! As you continue it gets a bit faster since you will know more words. The struggle with this is if you don’t know all the grammar yet, so focus on studying grammar, and skip over the stuff you don’t know.
Theres a site called Natively or learnnatively, which grades japanese and korean manga, novels, kids books, video games, anime, etc so you can look through to see what would be at your level. The N5 stuff is very limited in the manga section, but if you follow what i suggested, you can do stuff thats a bit harder too
Kids books: theres lots of reading practice stuff for JLPT n5 level online, heres some links of stuff I used:
I hope some of this helped!
Thank you for your advice and all these lovely resources. I shall certainly look into them
Learn to Read in Japanese, Vol. I, by Lake and Ura is really the best place to start reading. They teach you the language for scratch, assuming you know next to nothing, and systematically build up your reading ability, while continually reinforcing what you already know. It’s a 3 part series.