What motivated you to start learning ?
How long did it take you to be fluent ?
What was your roadmap ?
Most odd and most important to be how long did it take you to actually start thinking in Japanese ?
Edit : Thank you all for sharing your experiences it means a lot
34 comments
Good question. Commenting because I am curious as well.
Good question but why the specific ‘after 20’ question?
I was interested in the language. As I got into it, I wanted to teach the language.
I’m not fluent, but after 15-ish years I’m close.
Self study for a year, 2 years at university, one year study abroad, 2 years of grad school and 3 years of living abroad. And 7 years of off and on self study.
These days I’ll think in Japanese after an intense day, but I would try thinking in Japanese from the start.
Thinking in another language, similar to dreaming in another language, is a marker of high fluency and typically doesn’t happen until you are fully immersed and considered fluent.
I’d wanted to learn since high school, but never had the opportunity. When I started watching anime, I’d pick up the obvious weeb words, and then ask my more fluent friend to explain constructions that were familiar to me, but used differently. I tried reading their textbooks, but didn’t get far that way. Learned a few interesting particles and grammar rules, but nothing that helped me construct a sentence.
I eventually took 3 semesters of Japanese at a university, which got me enough to catch more dialogue in anime and movies, and recognize words on stuff I found. A few years later, I picked up Duolingo, which is not a fantastic place to start (it’s generally technically correct, but isn’t always the socially correct way to speak), but has been great for improving my vocabulary and kanji knowledge.
I’m a long ways from fluent, but I’m getting to the point where I can understand most of what’s said in a conversation, and respond at least vaguely appropriately.
I often think very simple things in Japanese, especially when my mind is wandering. “Kutsu wa… doko?”, just dumb little stuff like that. When I catch myself doing it, I try to turn it into a conversation with myself, to challenge my internal dialogue to be more interesting. “Tabun… doa no soba”.
Let’s see… I guess I’ve had about 6 years of just picking up a word or factoid occasionally, and 3 years worth of actually putting effort into it. I’d really recommend some time learning a structured course from a native speaker in the beginning. Getting used to all of the differences between Japanese and English is much easier when you can get a realtime answer.
I started 2 and a half years ago at 38 years old.
1) I started learning because I moved to Japan for work.
2) Having just successfully done multiple job interviews in Japanese, I think I can call myself fluent. It took two and a half years.
3) I don’t really know what language I think in. However, even from the beginning I never would translate in my head. I think its because I mainly followed an immersion style approach.
My bf is ethnically Japanese, when he decided to polish his language skills that tempted me to try and learn it.
I tried an online course. Watched tv and movies in Japanese, watched a lot of anime, just trying to take it in passively. I took it pretty lazy. Though after 3 years of it I can now follow most conversations and usually get my point across.
Mid 20’s and learning for about a year (nowhere near fluent, but starting to read some basic kids’ books)
I’ve been interested in language learning in general prior to Japanese specifically. I’ve been into Japanese music for a while as well (mostly math rock). I come across it very occasionally in Engineering. When the pandemic started, I was living in a new city with no friends, so started watching Anime to fill time. That also meant I consistently had more time to dedicate to learning a “harder” language. I wasn’t particularly interested in Japan, but, spending so much time consuming Japanese media, it felt like a wasted opportunity, and now I want to travel there, too.
I spent many years learning German for no good reason other than it was what my school offered, and it was a cooler group of people because it wasn’t the “easy choice” of Spanish. I continued learning after school and ended up studying abroad there and loved it, so I don’t think you need to have a pre-existing passion to enjoy a country, people, or culture. I just want to get some “in depth” experiences of a few other corners of the globe, and Japanese made sense to learn.
As for the “after 20” part. Yes, it’s easier to learn a language when you’re younger. But language learning is a hobby, and it’s crazy to me that you would tell yourself you won’t do something you enjoy for 80% of your life just because it would have been easier to do in the first 20%. The important part of this logic is that I enjoy language learning itself, I don’t just want to know a language or Japanese specifically.
As for thinking in the language, I think that’s a thing you can train yourself to do from a pretty early level. I know people who are VERY good at German, but obviously still translate in their heads, and people who think more in the language even if they don’t know very much. The important thing is, when you are learning, to consciously connect the words to the IDEAS, not to the English words.
When you read 彼は電車に乗っています, don’t think “he is riding the train”, but rather imagine a male person, and then a train, and then that person is in some way riding, and then you know they’re riding it now. That’s not the same order you would “build” that imagine in your head hearing the English sentence. This also helps a lot with comprehension since the grammar is so different. Trying to translate you will find yourself “holding onto” a phrase trying to figure out where it goes in the corresponding English sentence that you are building in your head.
I studied physics in college, and wanted to work on magnetically confined fusion. At the time, [ITER](https://www.iter.org/) was going to be built in Japan, and so I took two years of Japanese with the intention of doing my Ph.D. at Tohoku.
Life happened, and ITER ended up in France, and here I am with a Ph.D. in microbiology about to do a postdoc at Kyoto with very decayed Japanese.
Comparing the experience to learning Spanish as a little kid, studying Japanese as a college student was very different, but not really an more difficult. Memorizing stuff was harder, but having an adult understanding of logic and grammar made those things waaaaay easier. I’d say it was harder to get started, but the intermediate part was easier as an adult. For me, advanced skills are still an undiscovered country. 🙂
I’ve actually made the most progress between 27 and 29 than I did between 13 and 20.
> What motivated you to start learning ?
I started learning mostly because a Japanese dictionary was the first bilingual dictionary available to me. I more or less was happy to learn any language.
> How long did it take you to be fluent ?
Almost a decade excluding my 7 year learning gap.
> What was your roadmap ?
Random words and grammar on websites and in dictionaries and grammar books.
To repping words in Anki.
To apps (iKnow, then Duolingo, then Memrise)
To dissecting and pulling apart TV shows (with TL subs) and video games, using a dictionary and grammar websites.
> Most odd and most important to be how long did it take you to actually start thinking in Japanese ?
Probably just a couple years in because I was trying to talk to myself often. It wasn’t necessarily grammatically correct, or phrased right. But eh, that’s a stage.
I always enjoyed anime, and older Japanese cars and architecture. So, as my graduation trip after university I decided to take 6 months at a Japanese language school in Japan. That was the start.
It’s hard to say exactly what counts as fluent, but I passed the N2 after about 14 months of studies, and passed the job interview for my current job in all Japanese after a total of about 18.
Since I went to a language school I kind of had my roadmap laid out for me. Their schedule was something like N4- in 6 months, N4+ in 12, N2 in 18, N1 in 24, N1+ in 30. I pushed a bit more to get N2 earlier for job hunting.
I think it’s a shame to say that we think in a language, because it limits the senses you can think with to only one. I would avoid literally translating in my head right from the start. Still, sometimes you wake and remember a dream or something, and only quite recently did I recall someone from back home speaking Japanese in a dream I had. This is after living in Japan for more than 5 years.
1. Motivated by wanting to use work benefits (free classes) and wanting to learn an Asian language that used Chinese characters (so, either Chinese or Japanese, and I went with the latter)
2. After 2-3 years’ with of active learning, I’d only claim fluency in limited scenarios. Probably 1-2 years away from feeling comfortable enough to say “fluent”. (And even that will leave plenty of room for improvement)
3. I generally went with taking classes. The first phase (work benefits!) was 1 hour per day, 5 days per week, plus tests and homework. Nowadays, I take one or two at a time, but they only meet once per week and there’s no homework or grades (or pressure!)
4. I don’t think most thoughts really happen in a language (even a native language), but for stuff where it does, I’m generally influenced by what I’m doing and/or what’s being spoken around me, and I’d say that it takes me about 3 years or so before I feel comfortable enough to easily flip internal language modes. This goes for Japanese as well as another European language that was the first foreign language I studied (with 90% of my learning happening after 20 y/o— our high school instruction was a joke)
I was bored during the first lock down and wanted to see if i could do it
I started at 31, just under 4 years ago.
> What motivated you to start learning ?
I’m an autodidact but I’m also lazy, so I needed a big project to help me develop my study skills and habits. I knew vaguely that I wanted to learn a language someday and I wanted to pick a difficult language so that I’d have to study properly, and Japanese was the one I had the most connection to.
> How long did it take you to be fluent ?
This question is meaningless, everybody has a different meaning of “fluent” and measures it differently.
> What was your roadmap ?
Memorization, kanji practice, and textbook study for about 3.5-4 hours every day for around 2 years. When I was comfortable with the beginner stages I also started mixing in a lot of “learn Japanese in Japanese” style lectures (channels like [日本語の森](https://www.youtube.com/c/nihongonomori2013), [あかね的日本語教室](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh-GhnQ7qDQmS6Bz3pGc1Mw), [ゆみせんせいの日本語](https://www.youtube.com/c/yumiura_yumi_sensei), [Onomappu](https://www.youtube.com/c/Onomappu), and [三本塾](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0ujXryUUwILURRKt9Eh7Nw) ). I can’t recommend these kinds of resources enough. I also worked in a bit of light immersion like manga and [children’s newspapers](https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/).
Then for the intermediate stage I started incorporating the language into my life more. Over the past 2.5-ish years I’ve read about… 45 books? Mostly light novels. I’m still frustratingly slow at reading in Japanese. I watch a good bit of YouTube and anime in Japanese. I’ve watched a few lecture series on semi-familiar topics, especially IT stuff. I read a lot of news in Japanese incidentally just because it pops up in my feed. Basically the only way to improve once you’re in the intermediate stages is to USE the language. As far as conversation goes… I’ve done very little language exchange because the motivation just isn’t there while visiting Japan isn’t possible. I was super motivated to improve conversationally in 2020… to “visit Japan after the Olympics!”, can you guess how that worked out?
Anyway, somewhere around a year ago, when I was settling into the middle of my novel reading kick, the language started properly clicking and now it’s just a part of who I am. I guess some people would could call that stage fluent? I would simply call it the moment when I unconsciously switched from saying “I’m learning Japanese” to “my Japanese is bad.” I’d put this milestone somewhere around 3200-3500 hours of combined study/immersion/practice.
> Most odd and most important to be how long did it take you to actually start thinking in Japanese?
Everybody is going to have a very different answer, not just because they learn differently but because people’s brains perceive their inner monologue differently. I think that you can’t really speak Japanese while thinking in English, so there’s some unconscious stuff that will happen early on.
1) I wanted to watch anime and know what the characters are REALLY saying instead of relying on possibly very bad subtitles
2) The “Gaijin Smash” blog inspired me to want to become an English teacher in Japan
Love, 6 years, basic phrases / RTK/ WK / lots of input & output, 4 years.
I started about 2 years ago. Edit: I’m 24.
>What motivated you to start learning ?
Anime, manga, Haruki Murakami
>How long did it take you to be fluent ?
Uh, still waiting to get there. I am very good at listening, because I watch a lot of anime, play lots of games and listen to podcasts. But I don’t have friends that know Japanese, so, except for reading outloud, I don’t actually practice speaking.
>What was your roadmap ?
It became a mess a long time ago.
>Most odd and most important to be how long did it take you to actually start thinking in Japanese ?
10-ish months
1. I lived there for work, was always fascinated by it even before, but it felt accessible and possible after living there.
2. Still not fluent, nowhere close, by any one’s definition. I’d say I’m lower intermediate on a good day, completely incompetent on a bad day.
3. Use textbooks on my own for the first year or do, then got a tutor (and kept using textbooks). I am using the JLPT and novels an external measure and guide for input; conversations and journal entries with my tutor for output metrics though I’m interested in the new European standard equivalent tests they’re developing for Japanese. Maybe when they’re done I’ll take that one too. Edited to clarify: I don’t really count ingestion of native material as “studying” but I do that regularly also.
4. I sometimes think in Japanese spontaneously now, but I practiced it from the start and still practice it now (this is internal-monologue type thinking, just in case you don’t know or someone else reading gets confused – not everyone has an internal monologue to be in a language). I definitely dreamed in Japanese more when I was living there than I do now, but still have the occasional train dream where JR さん apologizes for one delay or another.
I never got the opportunity in high school or college even though my mom was born in Japan and I grew up around some of the culture. so once I landed a solid job with enough free time (at 21) I was able to join a school and take lessons weekly. It was fantastic and you still retain a lot – I took two years before the school closed due to the pandemic but I still could get by okay today with basic speaking, all kana and ~100-200 kanji
I started at the age of 20. I had just stopped studying veterinary medicine and was looking for something else to study. I chose Japanese simply because I enjoyed the sounds of the language. That’s not much for motivation, but that’s how it went.
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I didn’t attempt to take my JLPT N1 until I had been studying Japanese for probably 8 or 9 years. I’d say it took me 3 years to become able to have proper email conversations if I took a very long time to compose my messages, and it took me 4 more years to build up speed and confidence until I could just have normal conversations.
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My roadmap was just doing what I enjoy. If I felt like chatting, I searched for people to chat with. If I felt like reading, I would read a novel. If I felt like listening to radio, It was important to do this to keep my motivation up, since it was hard for me to progress. But I did consistently study every day, even after I had graduated.
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During Japanese conversations, I had always thought in Japanese, no matter how poorly or slowly. I think that was important to get a sense for the language, rather than just translating in my head.
I never naturally thought in Japanese outside of Japanese conversations, but I did deliberately practice thinking in Japanese in order to improve. If you can form that habit, I find it a good way to practice.
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Now, 13 years after I started learning Japanese, I switched to a career that is unrelated to Japanese and I am slightly less fluent than I was a 4 years ago, even though I am married to a Japanese person and speak it on the daily. I guess the takeaway is that just casually using it in daily life wasn’t enough for me to keep my level up. It required active effort on my part.
Started at 23. I wanted to learn Japanese since I was in high school but I never got the chance, after 2 years of studying stuff that I didn’t have much interest in I enrolled in university and now I’m studying Asian Cultures with focus on Japan.
I’m nowhere near being fluent but Anki was a great help to learn vocabulary, and also Kanji Study. I can read with little problems the texts on the News Web Easy websites but I still struggle a lot with listening comprehension 😭😭
What motivated me at the beginning was mostly curiosity because of Anime and Manga but now I’ve real interest in learning not only the language but also their culture.
I want to be able to play games in Japanese without the translation, even if the Italian now is usually pretty good 🤔😂
I’m 29, I ‘started’ studying japanese when I was 15
I memorized the the 2 kanas, then I discovered that there was kanji, and didn’t want to continue
I ‘restarted’ studying last November
>What motivated you to start learning ?
what motivated me when I was 15 has probably something to do with animé
what motivates me now, I just have free time, and I want to learn (anything), I just thought of learning another language, since I already have a background on Japanese, I picked Japanese
>How long did it take you to be fluent ?
not fluent yet :/
>What was your roadmap ?
not sure what my goals are tbh, it changes, when I restarted studying my goal was to take N5 and gradually get myself to N1 step by step
but after much consideration, I changed my goal to just directly get N1
then changed again to ‘understand mangas and daily conversation’
>Most odd and most important to be how long did it take you to actually start thinking in Japanese ?
this is an interesting question, my primary Language is Tagalog (Philippines), then English, now I’m studying Japanese (hoping to be a 3rd language)
I rarely (or never) think in Tagalog, I always default to English when I’m thinking (or talking to myself)
I don’t think in Japanese, but there are few words that I think in Japanese instead of English
暑い、寒い、背中、右(but not 左)、ほら、やらしい、ぺろぺろ、ヤバイ
I don’t speak it out in public, peropero slips out a lot though, I find it easier to say than “dinidilaan” (it’s kinda the tagalog form of ぺろぺろ)
the way I say restaurant is also already affected
I started during covid, initially just to learn some basic kanji and understanding to help me get the most out of a vacation originally planned for october 2020, but obviously never happened.
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As I got into it, I found i enjoyed learning the language. that’s about it.
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I’m still like an N5 level sadly- progress is slow, probably because I have no *real* motivation to sit down and study much- it’s just a hobby, if i make it feel like homework I will put myself off.
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But that’s fine, for me anyway.
I studied Japanese from 24-26 and then went back to America, then returned a bit over a year ago, now being 30.
Fluency is kind of arbitrary. I know so many people that call themselves fluent yet have way worse Japanese than I do, and I wouldn’t consider myself fluent in any aspect. What I consider fluent can be very different from what someone else considers to be fluent.
You can absolutely get proficient at Japanese at an older age. If you want to basically sound exactly like a Japanese person to the point where if they can’t see your face they’ll think it’s a native speaker, it can take upwards of 20 years. But nobody aims for that specifically.
After a certain point, I think what a lot of people end up failing to do is read. You need to read a ton of material to progress in a quick manner. For me, even though I speak Japanese the entire day, all it does is solidify what I already know. Reading and actively studying the material seems the best way to go from N2 to N1+.
I think it took about a year before I stopped thinking of the English sentence and then translating it, to just saying what I’m thinking, but it varies per person (how much Japanese you’re using per day etc.). I’m very bad at learning languages, but at about 4 years (2 years of active study, 2 years of just working) I’m able to work in a business environment and more or less communicate with my colleagues. Grammar isn’t too terrible of an issue (though there are some grammar that I’ll think I’ll know, but when combined together mean something completely else), but my main issue is vocab. Reading has helped me tremendously because just speaking Japanese doesn’t help me learn new words unless I stop the conversation to look a word up, which is very rare that I have the opportunity.
My friends are all much more talented at learning languages. They all started at roughly the same age, and have gone well above N1. Even so, they don’t consider themselves fluent. N1 is kind of a lie. It’s not even 上級 really. It’s more of an in-between. You need to know about twice the amount of vocab, and 1000 more kanji to keep up with Japanese people. However, what a lot of people don’t understand is that most Japanese people really dumb down their Japanese when they talk to foreigners. All because you can have a 4 hour conversation with someone doesn’t mean your Japanese is good.
But at any rate, don’t be discouraged because of your age. It just takes time and dedication. That’s it.
1. No real motivation; I just wanted a new hobby.
2. That depends on what you mean by fluent. It took me roughly two and a half years to have conversations with people without struggling on most topics and about three and a half years to sound somewhat educated while having those conversations.
3. I wrote a post [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/n2fran/reflections_on_four_years_of_learning_japanese/) on my progress after four years. The first two years, I studied, on average, for about 2-3 hours a day of active study and then continued talking to people, reading books/the news/articles, listening to TV shows and [doing writing exercises](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s9zz3d/i_wrote_146_writing_samples_in_2021/) alongside textbooks aimed at native Japanese speakers.
4. About a year and a half
I started learning because I wanted to watch anime without subtitles
i like the language and there is nothing to do with anime
and I like kanji !
Started at 30, with the intent of moving to Japan. Ended up living in Osaka, but not fluent.
I gained a lot of comfort with what I did know, and I had a few dreams in Japanese after 5-6 weeks there – that’s when I realised I was heading in the right direction.
I’m studying again now at 46 for the fun of it, and it’s amusing as I have a fairly strong memory for words I recognise by sound but had no comprehension of. I’m going “oooh, so THAT’S what that meant!” somewhat regularly as I study.
My wife’s Japanese and I want to be able to understand and speak it. At first I set my goal pretty low and just wanted to learn some basic stuff but now I want to get fluent.
It surprises me how most people with a Japanese partner (or someone from another country not just Japan) never bother to learn their language. With Japanese it’s kind of a no-brainer for me since it’s a cool one to learn.
I started relatively recently at 21 and the reason was so I could read manga and light novels and web novels that I was interested in in the original Japanese cause the ones I like often don’t end up getting popular enough in japan and then may not get translated officially. So I want to support them. Also it’s just a beautiful language.
Spite
I am german and I had an irish boyfriend for about 1.5 years. I knew englisch before but was completely fluent at the end of our relationship. Thats when I started to think in english. I guess you have to fully know the language to think in it. I had tons of conversations in english due to my gaming hobby.
I started japanese about 2 months ago. I am 38. Started with Duolingo. Took me 2 weeks and some Instagram posts to figure out, Duolingo ain’t that good. I am using Busuu. Membership aswell. It is really nice. It won’t even forgive you a typo.
I am barely able to learn since 3 weeks. I am at 36 hiragana now. I just keep repeating stuff.
I always wanted ro learn another language but could never figure it out. Tried spanish and italian. While these languages would make sense, they didn’ t want to work with me.
I have a friend, who is learning japanese since quite some time. We played a video game together. And then it hit me. Genhsin Impact was the game.
Japanese is a beautiful language and it is fun to learn akd I wish I had more time to get to it.
Since I only know 36 hiragana I am really reeeaaalllyy far away from being fluent.
I had dropped out of college halfway through my sophomore year and went to Japan with my girlfriend because why not. Planned to stay a month or two, but ended up going up to Sapporo, split up with her, was homeless my first winter, made friends with a neighborhood bar owner on the northside of town, found an apartment nearby, and absorbed the language over the next couple of years I lived there. Yeah, spending a couple of Hokkaido winters in a 6-stool bar gives you a chance to learn the vernacular. Took Classical Japanese and Business Japanese at SF State U after I came back in 1975. I still dream in Japanese sometimes.
I wanted to be able to have a conversation with my Obachan. Not fluent like I was as a child (<1 year focused practice), but getting there slowly.