I’ve been studying Japanese for about a year and half with a private tutor utilizing Genki 1 while working full time and now attending med-school. We are almost finished with the textbook and will probably move on to Genki 2 in the coming months. Even though we are almost finished there is still so much I need to improve on, because I get the general gist of how Japanese works and the utilization of the grammar points. Due to my busy schedule, I can only study about a couple hours a week. This year I want to increase my proficiency in Japanese a bit more than where I am at (which is around pre-intermediate). My main goal, is to try and reach at least N3 proficiency by the end of this year, if I can.
1. Reading: At this point in time I can only ever read Kana as my tutor said to learn Kanji later on and focus more on the Grammar points in the book. Even though this is fine, I’ve been wanting to do more reading, but trying to start reading some Japanese novels is rather difficult since of course it utilizes all Katana, Hiragana, and Kanji. I’ve even purchased some simple Children’s story books, but is pretty much the same problem. How can I improve my reading skills as a pre-intermediate learner?
2. Speaking: The only time I can ever practice speaking is with my tutor, which is only once a week. I’ve looked into places I can try speaking more on a daily with people more proficient in Japanese, such as ITALKI and Hellotalk, but since they utilize a paywall I didn’t really want to spend the extra money. So how else can I practice daily conversation by myself? Are there any places I can meet with people (preferably face-to-face) and befriend them while having daily conversation?
3. Kanji: I’ve seen on here that *Learning the Kanji,* with Anki is a good way to start learning Kanji. I’ve bought all three volumes and sort of started doing this type of learning technique. It seems fine, but I was wondering what else I could do to further learn Kanji?
4. Writing: I get the general gist of the grammar points in the textbook. I haven’t mastered 100% conjugation on the verbs, and adjectives. I also tend to forget particles. I’m not confident in my writing. I try to do the practice questions in the textbook with the current grammar point lesson ahead of time before my next tutor session and whenever we go over them I’m still making grammar mistakes, which ends up discouraging me. Is there anything I could do to improve more in my writing?
5. Also, I’d want to add in that since I can only meet with my tutor once a week, Self-studying is pretty difficult since I’m not sure if what I am doing is correct or not. Which evidently causes me to be discouraged. Does anyone have any study techniques that could be useful?
5 comments
> Due to my busy schedule, I can only study about a couple hours a week.
Unfortunately, there’s your problem. Props to you for what you’re doing with your limited time, but a couple of hours a week means any improvement is going to be slow and drawn out for you.
As another poster said, time is your issue. Genki I only takes you to roughly N5, Genki II to roughly N4. If it took you 1.5 years to get through Genki I, you are not going to achieve N3 by 2024 if you continue at the same pace. (If you only used Genki, then you are likely not pre-intermediate, but still a beginner.)
The only way to improve all the skills is to use them and try to improve on them. For example, with reading, you’re not just going to know how to read a kanji by staring at it, you have to take steps to understand it, like looking it up in a dictionary. That’s also how you acquire vocabulary, you find a word you don’t know and you learn the definition.
Reading is going to be very difficult without a lot of grammar under your belt, which again takes time to learn. If you want fast progress, you have to do intensive study. There is no free lunch, as they say.
I don’t know what your tutor is playing at, but you need to know kanji to read properly – aside from children’s books of course, which you don’t want to be stuck reading.
The easiest way to learn kanji is to learn it in vocabulary – i.e. learn words that contain kanji. Kanji are just characters and no-one speaks in characters, they speak in words, so learn words. You’ll get all the kanji readings you need to know from the pronunciation of the words you learn.
Here’s [a simple plan](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) for getting started with reading. You’ll have done some of these steps, but maybe the resources for grammar and reading will help. There are plenty of other free grammar resources on the internet as well, so don’t be afraid to explore on your own.
Aside from changing your goals so you’re not setting yourself up to fail, you might try gamification apps like Duolingo and Wanikani. I have learned a lot more and a lot faster through them than I ever did in the two years of clases I took in school. It’s convenient because any time you have 10min to spare you can get in a lesson and know what your mistakes are. Doing a little bit each day might be more helpful than waiting for a once a week lesson. SRS are pretty darn effective. Do you have a reason to be rushing, despite not having time for it? Or is this just a hobby?
>How can I improve my reading skills as a pre-intermediate learner?
Just read more. Not children’s books, but things written for native people that you may enjoy, like manga, novels. visual novels, news, etc. Use sites like [Natively](https://learnnatively.com/) or [JPDB](https://jpdb.io/) to find material that’s appropriate to your level. Digital is best, because pop-up dictionaries like Yomichan allow you to look up words and even grammar points very easily. Don’t be afraid to read because you might not understand everything; perfect comprehension as a beginner is downright impossible. The more you accept that fact, the more fun and less stressful reading will become. The more you read, the better you get. And while your reading skill doesn’t necessarily convert to listening, speaking and writings skill one-on-one, reading will provide you with a solid foundation of language intuition upon which you can start building those skills.
>Self-studying is pretty difficult since I’m not sure if what I am doing is correct or not. Which evidently causes me to be discouraged
You can go to a discord server dedicated to learning Japanese and just ask questions about things you don’t know there. You can use this [one](https://discord.com/invite/japanese) which is promoted by this subreddit. I’ve been in it and people are really helpful there.