No need for a long post, but I’ve been learning 3-4 years, and cannot read or understand Japanese setences, just the general gist and no nuance. Same goes with listening, just cannot pick it up.
What’s going wrong?
How much do you practice reading and listening?
I’d go further and ask how much you practice overall ? There is a lot that can or can’t be done in three years, depending on how many hours you spent learning.
None at all. Just use the review and learn more vocab and grammar
Language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) are separate skills, and you will need to specifically practice the ones you wanna be good at. studying the theory (grammar and vocab via an SRS system) will support you, but not replace actual practice. So it is totally natural that you can read or understand japanese well! It’s like expecting to be able to swim after reading books about the theory behind it: Knowing that theory will give you a head start, but you will have to actually jump into the water and practice a lot before you are a secure swimmer.
I had that issue in the first couple years of my learning journey, and I think the biggest issue was that I wasn’t “thinking” in Japanese. Books and flashcards can increase your knowledge dramatically which is essential, but you might need more hands on.
For me going through Pimsleur lessons is what helped me start thinking in Japanese. There are 5 total units, and if you do them 30 min everyday it may take several months to complete, but I think it’s worth it. After taking those courses I was able to communicate with people in Japanese at a very basic level, use full sentences, and understand a lot more nuance when it came to politeness levels. It’s not the be all, end all, but served as the basis to the real start of my Japanese learning journey. It teaches you how to speak, respond, and understand basic sentences in Japanese and that’s it.
They can be a little expensive, but might be available through your local library or Libby app. It’s also available on Audible.
Bunpro is an incredible app and I praise it to the moon and back everywhere I go, but I only view it as a supplement to my learning. You can only learn so much with sentences in isolation with no previous or following context which actually makes the sentences really hard to understand at times. You’ll learn how to think in Japanese by learning how to converse in Japanese and it’s general flow by participating and following real conversations. I don’t think that there is any other way to do it.
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