N4 and further expectation

[Warrie]

Thanks for the feedback! Yesterday I actually completed my first book in Japanese which felt great (although it was a childrens book )
I did things in a bit of a weird order… completed WaniKani in a year (that’s the basic 2100 Kanji and around 8000 vocab), after that continued studying vocab with Iknow and refreshed the Kanji with the KanjiStudy app.

For grammar I did read content like Tae Kim and watched the Cure Dolly videos so I got the gist of the basics but it wouldn’t really stick well enough to write sentences on my own.

So a month ago I reset BunPro, did a lot of conjunction practice and now I feel I kind of know the most of N5 well enough.

I know this is not the recommended order to learn things, but learning grammar does get a lot easier now that I know most of the Kanji and a lot of the vocab.

Onto N4 it is

[Warrie]

Ouch… I was hoping for that ‘after N5 everything gets supereasy’ answer
Thanks, now I know what I can expect

[Warrie]

Interesing insight, thank you.

[simias]

We actually have a fairly similar learning experience then, I basically spedrun wanikani to level 40 before focusing more heavily on grammar and vocab. I’m about to finish the N3 content right now. I also used Tae Kim and Cure Dolly for basic grammar.

Absolutely do go for N4 and N3 at your stage, it’s well worth it. I’m doing two new items/day which means that it took me a bit over 6 months to go over N4 + N3 with some reading practice on the side and my reading ability has really skyrocketed over that period.

When I finish with N3 in a couple of weeks I’ll slow down with the grammar and spend even more time “immersing”.

[Warrie]

Ah that’s good to hear. Did a speedrun too for WK, that was tough but it also became kind of an obsession to finish that as fast as I could I absolutely will do N4 and up, wasn’t even in my mind not to, I was mostly curious about what to expect. Awesome to hear what it did for your reading ability, can’t wait to get there.

[imsamuka]

Thanks for the post! I’m in a very similar situation, so I wanted to ask about it as well!

I have started N4 this week; the word nuance is giving me nightmares. But so far it’s not being that much different to the end of N5, it’s just being actually “more things” to wrap my head around at once, specially when they all mix in a single phrase .

I feel like I’ll get overwhelmed soon by all this, so I already slowed down. Either way, things are looking bright, let’s do our best !

[Warrie]

That’s the most difficult part right, each point is easy to understand but the more I learn - the more I mix them up or simply have forgotten it. It will probably simply need a lot of time and reading before that grammar really becomes second nature.
I’m doing 3 lessons per day now, in 5 days I’ll hit N4 so I can see how bad the ‘nuance’ suffering is going to be for me

[bunnypro]

I don’t mean to put you off at all - just trying to recall the truth of how it was for me at least.
Everyone is different and you might have a totally different experience
Actually, I also did the speedrun with kanji approach and don’t regret it at all (well, maybe the last 10/20 levels because I think I’ve forgotten almost all of those kanji because I’ve probably never seen them since lol).
But lots of those kanji will definitely help you with N3 and N2, if you can keep them up.

However, for now, if you’re anything like me, you might get super-frustrated at all the words in N5/N4 which are written in hiragana but would be much easier for you to read if they were written in kanji.
From what I remember, it can be pretty frustrating in N5/N4 not knowing where one word ends and the next one starts because it’s difficult to pick out the nouns/verbs/adjectives from among all the grammatical endings.

With a solid kanji background though, if Bunpro is working well for you, I’d say just stick at it and you’ll become a master through practice and repetition - and also watch a few YouTube videos to help with the “problem areas” of N4 like all the causative/passive/causative-passive stuff I mentioned before. Then I think hopefully you’ll be fine!
Even if there is the odd really confusing thing on the test, it’s not the end of the world - most of the test probably won’t be like that and it probably won’t impact on pass/fail, not least because of the system they use to work out the scores for the JLPT.

[Warrie]

Oh that is already a major weak point for me - learning words which are hiragana only. I wrote down the ones in N5 in my notebook and had to keep studying them to memorize them.
For some I wrote out the most stupid mnemonics which does help for me.

Same thing after I was done with WaniKani and I started to learn new vocab with Iknow - the hiragana only vocab is so much more harder to memorize!

One nice thing about studying the basic 6000 words with Iknow btw is that quite some vocab does use Kanji from WK level 40-60. Occasionally even Kanji that’s not in WK’s Kanji at all. That at least didn’t make me feel like those 40-60 levels were all done in vain

[Neon_Kitsune]

@bunnypro

From what I remember, it can be pretty frustrating in N5/N4 not knowing where one word ends and the next one starts because it’s difficult to pick out the nouns/verbs/adjectives from among all the grammatical endings.

This is where I am now! I read a sentence, and while I may have the vocab to understand part of it, I have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the sentence! I’m just like, what are all of these endings and why did they make the sentence so long? I just started N4, so hopefully it will get easier eventually.

[Slysoft]

It gets easier with reading practice. Recommend starting with free graded readers from tadoku and eventually moving to satori reader

Tadoku - Free (series) | L0-19??

[Sidgr]

This is an interesting thread. Many people have laid out a version of this idea, but I want to try my hand at explaining it. I generally gloss over the role that Kanji and vocab play in this discussion as it is a constant background consideration.

N5 is difficult for 2 main reasons. First, it is all new, every aspect of Japanese, especially if you are coming to grammar lessons with no kana or kanji background. Second, you are learning the ‘universal grammar’ it is very amorphous at this stage. You are not just learning what the conjunctions are, but how conjunctions function as a whole in Japanese. Same goes for particles, Japanese’s conjugation system, word/phrase/clause order, etc.

Once you get to N4 you should be comfortable enough with those foundations, but now you have to iterate on each of them in a multiplicity of contexts. How does any given particle interact with the others. What are the main patterns to conjunctions, what are the different ways to express modal concepts, etc.

N3 as most people has pointed out is really the point where you have 80% of core grammar locked in and reading becomes much more accessible, however you are now dipping into the concept of nuance. Not just that you should use a certain grammar in a certain context, but that given your nuance your mood, or social situation, one is more or less appropriate.

N2 is the same but more so, there are so many near synonyms that have shades of meaning and Japanese patterns or thinking that are more or less foreign to non natives that it takes a lot to unlock that idea, but you are still using that foundation from N5 and N4, unless it is a formal or archaic conjugation you do not need to learn new particles, or new conjugations, but how in situations those take on additional meaning.

I am not to N1 fully yet, but in principle it is the same, but the domains of contexts are even further expanded.

For those truly ambitious, N1 is also really just the start. Think in English that there is so much more English than what you learn as a senior in high school. There are higher level tests as well:

[Warrie]

Finished N5 but before starting with N4 I put quite a few lessons back to SRS1 level. I keep making too much mistakes and thought it would be better to really get N5 under my thumb before progressing

[imsamuka]

Nice! It can help to check the additional learning resources on the points you’re having most trouble with, and changing ghosts from “Minimal” to “On”.
Also reading practice, which is something I’m needing more as well, since I have problems with hiragana-only word boundaries too, and identifying grammar points on the wild… But doing it already helped me a lot, it really works!

[imsamuka]

Also, it’s kinda personal, but I got a little scared about going at N4 at first, being a new level (probably selected semi arbitrarely by some linguists), and the fact of feeling that fear got me a worried that I would stagnate or something. In the end I got so pissed at these feelings that I just started N4, before completing my own plans to polish my N5 grammar, until they somewhat vanished.

I don’t know if you’ll pass through the same or something similar, so It’s hard to give any advice, but I hope my experience can help you out if it happens

[Warrie]

I just did the later lessons a bit too fast I think, I keep forgetting the more longer grammar points like のなかで～がいちばん, なくてはならない, argh
But dropping those back to srs level 1 with ghosts on helps a ton. Think it’s better doing these over and over again for a week or 2 before moving on.
My biggest mistake was using the undo button too much after I saw the correct answer, thinking ‘ah yes I knew this’. Turns out I didn’t
Just another week or 2 repeating these lessons before starting to move on to N4. I’ll get there

[ctrlplay]

I was in the same situation with N4 where I finished N5 on a fixed schedule to complete it on the same day as I reached my 2nd year Anki anniversary, so I ended up taking about a month off from adding new grammar afterwards. I also took 2 weeks off completely and let my grammar queue build up so the next 2 weeks I was clearing it and building on my N5 knowledge while being careful to not overburden my study load. I was doing heavy immersion for that month so I wasn’t wasting my time. But now I’m down to about 5 reviews a day so it’s time to ramp up again and get to working seriously on N4 grammar.

[simias]

That can be

@Warrie

Finished N5 but before starting with N4 I put quite a few lessons back to SRS1 level.

That can be helpful but be careful not to overdo it. Those N5 points are going to come back endlessly in your practice anyway so you’re going to get ample exposure regardless.

Also I would recommend setting “ghosts” to “on” in bunpro to generate a ghost after every mistake. This way you get a lot of extra practice on things you struggle with that way.

[Warrie]

Thx for that feedback. I kept making the same mistakes for quite a few lessons, I became a bit frustrated with myself. So I set the ghosts to max and now I’m getting those reviews over and over again.
After a couple of days doing this things go way better. After finishing most of the ghosts I’ll move on to N4

[Warrie]

So I waited a month or so to get rid of most of my N5 leeches, then started with N4. I did around 5 lessons per day, depending on how difficult they were. That made N4 go by pretty fast, took me around 40 days. Again I’m going to get rid of the leeches first before moving on to N3.

I did find N4 a bit harder than N5, mostly with the questions where the answer was combined with other grammar points. Sometimes I really had to search or ask on the forum to find an explanation for the correct answer, but that also helped me to understand combining grammar better. Still that’s an area where BunPro could improve I think, a better explanation in cases like these.

The good news is that I’m using Satori reader and so far most grammar I encountered was N5 and N4 so it does feel like I’ve done most of the basic grammar now. I increased my reading time per day a lot, feels like that is the best way to get really familiar with the grammar.