As far as I know understanding a language is far easier than speaking it, and honestly my goal right now to speak a little bit of Japanese but mostly to just understand it and I’m wondering how long it would take
Depends on the person, interests, study methods, what material they want to understand (understanding a manga is much easier than understanding a scientific paper), and how much time they put into Japanese and Japanese-related activities every day.
Personally speaking I’ve seen people get to a somewhat decent[*] level of understanding for Japanese media (manga, anime, games, etc) in approximately 6 months to 2 years. The range is **very** large because there’s just so much variation depending on the person.
[This](https://morg.systems/58465ab9) is my general advice on what to do if you want to achieve something like that.
[*]NOTE: “decent” means that they can enjoy Japanese with a minimal amount of lookups and just independently structure their own media consumption without being a beginner anymore
Do you intend to learn how to read at all, or do you really just want to understand the spoken language?
You need to keep mind that pretty much all learning materials and useful resources past the absolute beginner level rely on written Japanese. Even if you never plan on doing any reading, something as simple as looking up the meaning of a word you heard somewhere can be an immense pain in the ass if you can’t read any Japanese at all.
That’s a very broad and ill-defined question. Can you be a bit more clear on what it is you want to understand? What sort of material and just reading or reading and listening?
As an equally vague answer I’d say it’ll take **years**. One of the biggest obstacles is the amount of words you’ll need to learn. To be able to understand basic common daily stuff you’ll need at least 10000 words – and the more the better.
Have any of you ever spoken Japanese on the phone? I’m decent when it comes to listening, speaking, and reading but let me tell you. Trying to hold a conversation on the phone is not trivial.
For me it was around 500-600 learning hours, so that I could read books and understand ~9 out of 10 situations. Completely problematic situations were rather rare, usually it was simply that I could reread later and find out something new, that I missed before.
But it varies a lot.
I find Japanese very difficult to understand but very much easier to speak. I can communicate complicated and difficult things but find understanding almost everything very hard work. So this is different for everyone. I am atypical in this respect I think.
My recollection is that I had very similar problems in my native language as a child.
Sounds like you want to try taking the immersion route, A LOT of youtubers perscribe to this method of the “input hypothesis” (you should be heavily listening and reading for at least a year before speaking and writing).
However even in this method basic study is required, to give your ears and eyes SOMETHING to catch on to.
General wisdom is first the alphabet (hira / kana)
Then minimum you should get yourself an Anki deck or SOME type of SRS (timed flashcards) for at least the 1000 most common words, but dont just look at the word, read those words in simple sentences.
After that basic grammar (Cure Dolly, Tae Kim etc.)
After 3 months of that you CAN just hammer down on immersion on youtube or tv and make your own cards. But in this method they say if you’re not listening / watching native content for 4 hours a day minimum there’s probably no point.
It’s a pretty big choice and one that a lot of lifestyles may not be able to accomodate. I took my time first 3 months of enjoying the process only started reading and watching native material 6 months in.
Understanding the language became the hardest thing for me. All I wanted to learn to do was speak and listen. I had ZERO interest in things like reading… I failed so hard that I ended up learning how to read thousands of kanji before I could understand anything spoken.
How long it’s going to take really varies person-to-person and hinges on what tools your brain needs to learn, and what tools are accessible to you.
Between 2006 and 2020 I maybe caught and understood 2 full sentences in the hundreds of hours of Japanese that I listened to, despite studying heavily and daily.
In 2020 I discovered Netflix Originals had Japanese subtitles.
In about 6 months I went from not understanding ANYTHING in spoken Japanese to being able to follow some shows WITHOUT subtitles.
Most people don’t have my ridiculous auditory hang up though, nor do they have to wait 16 years for Japanese subtitles to become easy access.
Besides that, phrasing is going to take some getting used to. If you jump straight into trying to follow native material you may find yourself struggling with trying to learn so much at once.
If you learn from traditional learning material, you’ll get pretty good pretty quick, until you start handling native material. Then it feels like it all goes out the window. You may find yourself knowing all the words, but still not understanding the sentence, and that ALSO takes some time to adjust to.
Again, took me about 6 months, and every so often I have to google translate a sentence because I can’t make heads or tails of it.
And of course when I say these things took me about 6 months, that’s on top of 7 years of study. (I took a 7 year hiatus as well BTW). If I had had the tools I needed, I probably could have been understanding things MUCH sooner.
**TL:DR** Again, it’s going to vary person-to-person and depend on how your brain learns, how well it can pick up on Japanese, and whether or not you have the right tools FOR YOU, and if you’re using them correctly.
a long long time…I have been learning Japanese for 3 years and I have read 44 novels so far but its still difficult to understand ppl when I listen The reason is that there are so so so many words to learn no matter how many words you learn its not enough…my experience anyway
9 comments
Depends on the person, interests, study methods, what material they want to understand (understanding a manga is much easier than understanding a scientific paper), and how much time they put into Japanese and Japanese-related activities every day.
Personally speaking I’ve seen people get to a somewhat decent[*] level of understanding for Japanese media (manga, anime, games, etc) in approximately 6 months to 2 years. The range is **very** large because there’s just so much variation depending on the person.
[This](https://morg.systems/58465ab9) is my general advice on what to do if you want to achieve something like that.
[*]NOTE: “decent” means that they can enjoy Japanese with a minimal amount of lookups and just independently structure their own media consumption without being a beginner anymore
Do you intend to learn how to read at all, or do you really just want to understand the spoken language?
You need to keep mind that pretty much all learning materials and useful resources past the absolute beginner level rely on written Japanese. Even if you never plan on doing any reading, something as simple as looking up the meaning of a word you heard somewhere can be an immense pain in the ass if you can’t read any Japanese at all.
That’s a very broad and ill-defined question. Can you be a bit more clear on what it is you want to understand? What sort of material and just reading or reading and listening?
As an equally vague answer I’d say it’ll take **years**. One of the biggest obstacles is the amount of words you’ll need to learn. To be able to understand basic common daily stuff you’ll need at least 10000 words – and the more the better.
Have any of you ever spoken Japanese on the phone? I’m decent when it comes to listening, speaking, and reading but let me tell you. Trying to hold a conversation on the phone is not trivial.
For me it was around 500-600 learning hours, so that I could read books and understand ~9 out of 10 situations. Completely problematic situations were rather rare, usually it was simply that I could reread later and find out something new, that I missed before.
But it varies a lot.
I find Japanese very difficult to understand but very much easier to speak. I can communicate complicated and difficult things but find understanding almost everything very hard work. So this is different for everyone. I am atypical in this respect I think.
My recollection is that I had very similar problems in my native language as a child.
Sounds like you want to try taking the immersion route, A LOT of youtubers perscribe to this method of the “input hypothesis” (you should be heavily listening and reading for at least a year before speaking and writing).
However even in this method basic study is required, to give your ears and eyes SOMETHING to catch on to.
General wisdom is first the alphabet (hira / kana)
Then minimum you should get yourself an Anki deck or SOME type of SRS (timed flashcards) for at least the 1000 most common words, but dont just look at the word, read those words in simple sentences.
After that basic grammar (Cure Dolly, Tae Kim etc.)
After 3 months of that you CAN just hammer down on immersion on youtube or tv and make your own cards. But in this method they say if you’re not listening / watching native content for 4 hours a day minimum there’s probably no point.
It’s a pretty big choice and one that a lot of lifestyles may not be able to accomodate. I took my time first 3 months of enjoying the process only started reading and watching native material 6 months in.
Understanding the language became the hardest thing for me. All I wanted to learn to do was speak and listen. I had ZERO interest in things like reading… I failed so hard that I ended up learning how to read thousands of kanji before I could understand anything spoken.
How long it’s going to take really varies person-to-person and hinges on what tools your brain needs to learn, and what tools are accessible to you.
Between 2006 and 2020 I maybe caught and understood 2 full sentences in the hundreds of hours of Japanese that I listened to, despite studying heavily and daily.
In 2020 I discovered Netflix Originals had Japanese subtitles.
In about 6 months I went from not understanding ANYTHING in spoken Japanese to being able to follow some shows WITHOUT subtitles.
Most people don’t have my ridiculous auditory hang up though, nor do they have to wait 16 years for Japanese subtitles to become easy access.
Besides that, phrasing is going to take some getting used to. If you jump straight into trying to follow native material you may find yourself struggling with trying to learn so much at once.
If you learn from traditional learning material, you’ll get pretty good pretty quick, until you start handling native material. Then it feels like it all goes out the window. You may find yourself knowing all the words, but still not understanding the sentence, and that ALSO takes some time to adjust to.
Again, took me about 6 months, and every so often I have to google translate a sentence because I can’t make heads or tails of it.
And of course when I say these things took me about 6 months, that’s on top of 7 years of study. (I took a 7 year hiatus as well BTW). If I had had the tools I needed, I probably could have been understanding things MUCH sooner.
**TL:DR** Again, it’s going to vary person-to-person and depend on how your brain learns, how well it can pick up on Japanese, and whether or not you have the right tools FOR YOU, and if you’re using them correctly.
a long long time…I have been learning Japanese for 3 years and I have read 44 novels so far but its still difficult to understand ppl when I listen The reason is that there are so so so many words to learn no matter how many words you learn its not enough…my experience anyway