28 months in, still waiting for me to hit this point.
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Don’t want to keep giving the same response, but I think something here, is if your native language is english, my anecdotal experience and understanding on the generally accepted knowledge is that Japanese just takes way longer to learn than a lot of other languages. For example, I definitely have Spanish ‘click’ for me at some point that I can still understand a lot of basic or mid level spanish without consistent practice, but Japanese a language I’ve worked to learn for a VERY long time on and off has never ‘clicked’ like Spanish did, but I am better at Japanese than Spanish I would say. I think Japanese is more of a gradual advancement where your number of common pain points just generally decreases at a gradual rate as you get more and more experience, as opposed to just getting a ‘click’. I’m definitely a lot better at Japanese than I was three months ago, but I can’t tell you everything I learned and practiced to get me better.
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For me, there was never really a single moment that Everything clicked. It was more like a series of getting excited that I understood a word or phrase or sentence that I’m still having even a decade later. The simple truth is that we never stop learning a language, even our native languages. We are constantly encountering new words or phrases especially as we explore new areas of life. Watching an anime is different from watching a drama, reading a book, listening to a podcast, or reading a manga, etc.
One example of this is my experience with reading WEB NEWS EASY (a Japanese online newspaper written in simple Japanese). I am around N3 in terms of vocab and grammar so most of the articles are very easy for me to read. However, this changes in terms of the subject covered. For articles that I am familiar with the subject I usually don’t have to look anything up to understand the article fully. However, there are still some articles on the same site that are about subjects I know very little of. For those articles I usually have to look up between 5-10 words. Besides this, if I tried to read the same article on the normal WEB NEWS site, I would have a tough time making it through the first paragraph, lol.
The simple truth of the matter is if you want to learn anything you are going to have to get used to being uncomfortable. Whether you are throwing yourself into native material slightly above your skill level to learn a language or doing projects of increasing difficulty to learn sewing or woodcarving, there will be a million little clicks that make up your journey.
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People be waiting for a moment like…
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idk if this counts as clicking but I could watch relatively simple anime (slice of life stuff) without subtitles and understand most stuff (ofc there a lot of words that I didnt know, but i could infer the meaning), at like 4-5k words and n2 grammar.
i found that once you get past n4/n3 grammar, its more important to focus on vocab as i feel like right now it’s my bottleneck. but like its pretty cool to be reading or watching something, and kind of do it absent mindedly and still understand it. then when you get to a part you dont understand, “woah, im reading japanese rn” and feel proud of yourself for going so long while understanding.
so i feel like 4-5k words is a good goal to shoot for. still got a long way to go but i feel like right now I can understand stuff that isnt too complicated a subject.
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There was not such a "click"moment for me but rather a point where i accepted that its okay for me to be “bad” in japanese.
Also, when i revisited old japanese content i used at the rather start of my japanese journey, i had to smile.
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I guess I just wanted to, with this tread, get a general vibe on what to expect. I’m so early into my learning journey where its mostly still very alien to me and am really looking forward to that point where I can read… anything lol.
I think its nice to know that its not all just difficulty and confusion, there’s those points where you think to yourself “wow, I just did that”. I think that’s more what I meant by that “click” where the progress you made becomes clear and you have that emotional beat of accomplishment, the point where you can feel that its actually staring to come together.
looking down on wanikani vocab for the level I’m on and seeing just the sheer amount of content there is to get through and just plodding along with bunpro. I have just enough knowledge to have realised that I still know very little and its daunting.
Thanks for sharing y’all, its nice to see that there’s meaning to doing all this and it genuinely helps.
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I’m able to read simple stories on lingq. No people know what is it, but it was like “I can not read it” and “it’s to hard” and then in one day “on i know 90% of the grammar here, let’s go”. For some reason I can even listen and keep up.
I think it’s just because I haven’t tried to read it for a few days while learning and reading stuff on bunpro, as well as amount of time I spend a day.
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Nice that you made such a progress! I don’t only read Satori anymore but also started reading visual novels in Japanese, using Migaku to add unknown words to my flashcards. That sometimes still is a struggle, without Satori’s explanation help, but it helps that I really wanted to read these untranslated visual novels. I loved the ‘short stories - seasons’, 2 of them are in the Intermediate. Koibito was reasonable easy to read. I do check out every explanation and read through the whole discussion page of every story on Satori though, even when I completely understand a sentence. There is often so much nuance explained that I still learn a lot from it.
Grammarwise I did up to N3 but decided to stop learning more grammar for a while and focus completely on reading.
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There was a video from a language teacher (sorry I can’t link it atm), I watched that basically explained that Japanese is backwards from English. Meaning, instead of saying “I didn’t go to the store because it was raining today”, Japanese will say “Today, it was raining, so the store I didn’t go.” Japanese will explain the situation before taking about what the subject does.
After that, everything I tried to read made a whole lot more sense. Reading frustrated me before that. I’m 125 days into learning according to Duolingo, lol.
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You have to think about Japanese grammar like Japanese people. Become Japanese.
Wow, maybe I want to become a new Yoda of English
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“Wow a new Yoda of English maybe I want to become”
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うわー多分、新しい英語のヨーダになりたい
checks out