Japanese 🇯🇵

8 comments

1. [deleted]

2. Got to basic conversational level in about 6 months, going out drinking alone 4-6 hours a night, most nights. Never used a textbook or went to classes, and I deliberately avoided ex-pat circles or making friends with Japanese English-speakers. I forget now, but it probably took about 2 years to become basically literate, though I still can’t write by hand very well after 18 years, because I never need to in daily life. I didn’t find it particularly difficult. It just required patience and dedication and occasional frustration, but being able to go to the tax-office, or negotiate a contract, or call a customer-service helpline by yourself makes life much easier, so it was worth the effort. I don’t speak English in daily life anymore, and haven’t for a few years. My children also don’t speak English with me (the younger one can’t). You improve a lot under those sorts of circumstances, though I realise most people won’t have the taste for that sort of extreme level of immersion.

3. I became quite competent after grinding a few thousand hours of listening and reading via a immersion learning approach. I also have hundreds of hours speaking in full conversations on virtually every topic.

   Unfortunately, its not enough for the near native like level I aim for but I have a solid foundation in the language.

   The thing I find difficult atm is articulating complex thoughts as precisely as I can in English. In general, language learning is actually pretty easy since its mostly a function of time exposed more so than it is skill-building like say mathematics.

4. Took me 3-4 years of mostly daily study while practicing with friends/part-time job to pass the JLPT N1 and be able to work on a company where only Japanese is used. Study alone wasn’t enough for me, actually using and making mistakes helped me a lot.

5. I got N1 in 2005 and am still learning new things everyday.

6. Too subjective a question to result in any kind of general answer. People learn in billions of different ways, and different speeds, and “learn Japanese” itself also has a billion different ways to define.

7. Been learning off and on for 20 years.

   But to get to my current level took a good 12 years of serious effort. I also lived in Japan for 5 of those years. It was still pretty tough though. Immersion alone isn’t enough. I still had to grind thousands of hours of podcasts, WaniKani, audiobooks, and videos. It’s difficult if you think of it as having to “study” the language. If you are happy making small progress (even just one new character or word in a day) you’ll find it much more enjoyable. There’s no rushing the process.

   It’s hard to get rid of the school mentality though.

8. This is a ridiculous question because there are so many variables…

   1. Do you know Chinese? You already have a huge leg up.

   2. Know Korean? Grammar is the same and a lot of vocab is same/similar

   3. How dedicated are you? How much time to dedicate per day every single day?

   4. What’s your ultimate goal? Native level fluency? Able to converse? Order food? Need reading skill? Writing?

   Basically we need a lot more information than you wanting to learn Japanese. But a quick answer assuming you don’t know Chinese/Korean is N3 will probably take you a year or more depending on dedication and free time. N1 would probably take you an additional year.