At what point should you start the next N Level of Grammar learning? Should the majority of your previous N level be at Expert or Master?
When you feel like it, basically:)
What other learning resources are you using?
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Wanikani for vocab and kanji, Bunpro for Grammar, and I completed Genki I. I also read Doraemon and the graded readers on Bunpro
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I start immediately. There is no clear line between N-levels anyways. It’s just based on averages.
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When I’m reading I tend to bookmark and slowly add grammar points that I notice coming up in my reading so I feel like its fine to start doing that and ignore the N distinctions if you already have a solid grammar base (good grasp of te form and negative, past, casual, and affirmative endings)
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There is basically never a good reason to stop learning new grammar. Everything you learn makes the earlier stuff easier to grasp and remember. Even if you have to pause new additions to the review queue to thin out your load, that shouldn’t stop you from using other resources or reading ahead.
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I’m currently around early N1 or so, so I’ll share what I learned in my journey so far. In my experience, you should temporarily stop new lessons if you’re burned out and have too many reviews, or if what you’re currently immersing in is too easy and you can’t seem to get the new grammar points in your head because you haven’t seen them in the wild enough. Also, feel free to start doing some grammar points out of order (for example, pulling in N+1/N+2 grammar points) if you see them in your own immersion a few times and you want to lock them in.
Otherwise, I recommend immersing in material that’s just slightly above your level, and that uses a lot of the grammar points at level N+1 that you’re trying to get to (i.e. if you’re around N4, trying to read something that uses a lot of N3 grammar points). That way, when you do finish all N4 grammar points and you start on N3, you realize you’ve seen a good percentage of them already and it’s easier to absorb them.
Also, I think most grammar points are quite interconnected, and the more you learn, the easier it is to both learn new grammar points as well as review old ones, because there are many grammar points that are just combinations of ones you already learned in previous levels, so everything helps. In fact, if you get to a relatively advanced level of Japanese, instead of doing Bunpro lessons and reviews, you can just read books, which acts like an auto-SRS because it reinforces what you learned through Bunpro and teaches you new grammar points (some of which are in Bunpro and a few that aren’t as well).
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