A Personal Tip for Early Beginners (and those of us in the Intermediate Plateau)

Perhaps this is just obvious, but one thing I did early on in my beginner days of learning Japanese, before the malaise of the deep intermediate plateau set in, was to find some listening material and reading material that were \_way\_ out of my league. Perhaps I was overly ambitious at the time to think I could understand them, but nonetheless I held on to them. One was a manga that used lots of kanji I didn’t know, and was written in a very casual style. The listening material was an interview with no subtitles that I wanted to understand.

When you hit the intermediate plateau it gets harder and harder to recognize progress and it can become discouraging. I’m grateful I held onto to those early difficult materials, because now, from time to time, I can re-visit them and notice that I can read more and hear more than before. I don’t use a dictionary, or pause the audio every 2 secs to process what I heard. I just pick up the manga, try and read and then set it down. Same with the audio: I just listen, try and understand and move on. It’s a nice reminder of the progress I’ve made each time.

I suppose this also works for those already in the plateau. Just pick something way out there, and come back to it every so often. Maybe you’ll also get that warm feeling of progress again.

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