I never felt I was close to fluent, and I always had trouble with listening comprehension, but it was a very comprehensive and effective program. 5 days a week, hands on, spoken Japanese only every day. We got through Genki 1 and 2 and a good chunk of Tobira.
Right now I still feel like I have an intuition for the grammatical flow and pronunciation, but my vocabulary is toast. Kanji is super toast. Kana is still mostly there.
Has anyone been in a similar situation before trying to relearn like this, and how long do people think it would take to get back to where I was? It’s gotta be easier relearning, right?
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I mean, no one can peek inside your brain, so no one here can give you a precise answer.
Generally speaking, the better you learned something, the more deeply you internalized it, the more slowly you forget it. If you internalize something enough, you’ll likely forget it so slowly that you won’t live long enough to ever truely forget it. So rather being how many hours of class you had, or what textbooks you studied, the important variable here is how well you internalized the information.
I think the only way for you to find the answer is to dive right in. Once you do that, you can find out what you do and don’t remember. Identify what specifically you can and can’t do. From there, people will likely be able to give you advice on how to best review material and fill in any holes in your knowledge.
Happened to me. I have now spent 50 years to recover all I had forgotten. Good luck friend.
It comes back. It’s way, way easier relearning. It’s one reason I hate people saying “I learned Spanish in 6 months” except they had learned it in school years ago. I’m sure you *can* forget, but it’s very rare.
i took japanese for 3 years in college. after graduation i forgot about it for 20 years. when i picked it back up again, i remembered all the grammar, i just needed to refresh my kanji and vocab. took at most 3 months to get back up to where i was.
Had a similar experience. Studied for 4 years, but stopped for 2. Though, these were just classes I took in highschool and weren’t really intense or effective.
Though, if your skills are at the level you feel they’re at, you should be able to go over basic material and just assess yourself where you’re at.
You haven’t lost much. Probably even close to 0, because all your memories are still intact, but simply became less reactive as a natural process of how our brain works.
I had a similar situation, but on smaller scale. I had some course, which I did for a while, but not much, like only several repetitions and then I dropped it. 1-1.5 years later I returned to it and couldn’t recall almost all words, it looked completely unfamiliar for me, but for some reason doing multioption exercise (1 out of 4) I had 10-30 correct streaks. It was quite interesting experience how you have no idea about the word, but still have a feeling that maybe it’s this one and it’s right.
I’m pretty sure your situation is about the same. You still know it, even if it looks unfamiliar, and recovery period is very short.