I’ve been studying Japanese for almost 3 years now and I feel like I’m not making the progress that I used to. Despite studying for so long I still can’t speak or listen, and my reading comprehension is pretty bad. I practice every day with vocab and grammar lessons but maybe I’m missing something? Has anyone else had this problem? I really do want to learn I’m just not sure how to progress lol.
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Speaking, listening, reading, and writing are all separate skills. So even if you have a good grasp on vocabulary and grammar, you still have to practice them if you want to get better.
For listening, you can try watching Japanese tv/movies or listening to podcasts.
For reading, you can find books and manga you like, or even just go somewhere like Twitter and follow Japanese accounts.
I myself don’t practice writing that much, but if you wanted to you could try keeping a diary in Japanese. I did when I first started.
Speaking’s a bit trickier, especially if you don’t know any native speakers. I’ve heard of a service called iTalki, but haven’t used it myself. Aside from that, you could also try repeating things that you hear when doing listening practice.
All of these things are like any other skill- if you put in the time, you will get better, and if you don’t, you won’t.
I take italki lessons every week. My spoken Japanese is slowly improving with each lesson.
HelloTalk is also a great way to connect with native speakers who are learning English to practice in both target languages, but I’ve found I usually have to ask them for corrections or they won’t correct my mistakes.
You can also try to find a local kaiwa club on MeetUp to get around other Japanese speakers.
Finally, to just get your mouth used to speaking and your ears used to listening, you can try shadowing. You can shadow podcasts, or doramas, or episodes of Terrace House… anything Japanese. There’s a book set called Shadowing日本語を話そう! You can read along with the dialogues and repeat what they are saying in the audio, copying pronunciation and pitch accent as you go. I’ve found them to be super helpful.
All this to say, I still suck at speaking 😅
I can also recommend practicing each skill, reading, listening, speaking, writing, separately from another. They will all need a bit different stratgies, but what I found in common is that usually starting out with very easy resources for a longer amount of time will help you improve faster.
E.g. for reading: Take some [graded readers](https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/) that are below your current level and read a couple for 15/30/60 minutes. Since they are so easy, you won’t need to look things up. Just get used to reading in Japanese, it will tire you out pretty fast at first, but you will build the stamina and the reading practice to then read more difficult texts as well pretty soon.
Just gotta put that practice to use now since it sounds like you got a great grasp on vocab and grammar. Although speaking will be tricky to master