Assuming we are drawing a curve of Effort vs Time, what do you think the curve looks like for people at different stages of learning?
Do people at N3/N4 put in the same amount of effort/time every day or week as when they were beginners? I’m guessing beginners have to put in the most time/effort because we are learning kana and grammar from scratch. But once they have progressed past N4, do things become easier?
Do you still sit down to review textbooks and do workbook exercises? Or is it more of reading and consuming japanese media at that point?
Putting aside Kanji for now, because I’m ethnically chinese and can read kanij already. I just want to know at what point the studying can transition to more passive immersion and reading instead.
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It depends more on the person than the language. There are people on here who start reading really early because they don’t mind reading while attached to a dictionary and grammar guide. Graded readers are a great resource if you’re interested in getting into reading as early as possible.
For other people, reading that way sounds painful, so they put off doing large amounts of reading practice until farther along in their journey. Personally, though I was doing regular short form reading *practice*, I did sit down and try to read a book until I was around N2 level. I choose to focus my practice more on speaking and verbal interaction.
There’s no one right way to learn a language, so you should do what works best for you and prioritize the things that you find valuable and enjoyable.
It’s hard all the way, but the difficulty you face at each step of the road is not going to be the same.
Effort over time will almost always be variable for everyone. One month I may study intensively and others hardly at all.
However I do think the learning process gets easier by N4 and more streamlined by N3. Since English is my native language it took me awhile to get accustomed to kanji recognition. But if you can already read mandarin, your ability to decipher vocabulary words probably exceeds people in N2 possibly even N1.
The most difficult aspect of starting out for me was grammar. But after a year or two, grammar takes significantly less thought processing to understand daily conversations.
Nowadays, areas of improvement for me that require the most effort are expanding vocabulary and improving my speaking ability.
Starting out feels quite easy but grammar always feels hard.
Once you get to N3 level, things get better. If you decide to read early on with a dictionary; it’ll pay off sooner imo.
Just remember learning Japanese isn’t just reading books and typing sentences. There is also the speaking and listening component. That in itself will take quite some time and it’ll be much more difficult than reading anything.
For reference, I’m comfortable now with speaking and listening but before I had to have subtitles on for everything because I spent all my time reading so I can quickly read and understand what was being said
Well you can’t get good at reading without reading. For me there was no transition period or anything, I just slowly kept getting better until things felt easier.
It’s all pretty much a scribble on a page imo. You start with kana, then you look for several different sources to see which ones work best for learning not just kanji, but all of Japanese. And it’s a _lot_ of dedication. But don’t be too overwhelmed by the websites, apps, and textbooks. That’s just the beginning phase.
And then you find a routine that works well with you, so I’d say it gradually becomes a smooth ride upwards.
I guess it depends on where you’re at in life and what your situation is. I majored in Japanese in uni and went from 0 to N3 in 4 years, so that was with taking 1 university class a semester and a full year abroad in Japan. I guess I found the progress slow but steady for me?
After graduating and moving to Japan for work, I found the expected little bump up in fluency as you’re being immersed again. After a couple months though it definitely evened out, and for the next year I mostly just reviewed my own N3 material. Maybe improved my vocab a bit but nothing crazy.
After that I put a much more serious effort into my studies, spending about an hour a day (maybe 5 days a week) studying, but I’m a slow learner overall. Progress was slow, and it took me another 4 years to get from N3 to N1.
Now it’s been about 1 1/2 years of being I guess N1+, but the progress is painfully slow again, and very difficult to guage improvement anymore. I don’t study as hard as I did when prepping for N2 and N1 for sure. I feel like now if I want to improve into the further advanced studies, I’ll need to put in some serious effort but I’m just taking each day doing what I can.
Sometimes it’s cool to look back and think about things I understand now, that I didn’t a couple years ago. But I don’t think I’ll ever find Japanese easy haha.
I’m N3-N2 rn. Got 150/180 on the N3 in December which is decent. I’m currently putting in some of the most effort I ever have into Japanese rn as I’m preparing for the N2 in July and I’m taking an N2 class which has weekly kanji, vocab, and reading comp quizzes.
If I had the time though, I could read manga pretty easily and read light novels with a few unknown words per page if it’s roughly elementary school level (4th-5th grade). I can also watch anime like Kimetsu no Yaiba with subs and understand the vast majority of it.
It really depends on the person. How much effort do you want to put in? That question will dictate the amount of work you do each week and day. Input gets infinitely easier the more you progress though. I just enjoy the textbook approach.
I think it will vary based on your study methods. For me, the beginning was “easy” in that I saw rapid progress very quickly, because the grammar and vocab you learn in the beginning accounts for a lot more of the coverage of the language than later grammar and vocab does. There’s also way more learning material/infrastructure, so to speak, early on so it’s easier to just stay the path and not get lost. Now I’m done with Tobira and essentially my study plan is “figure it out.” When starting out you have such an easy path: crank through Genki 1, 2, then Tobira, while doing anki decks already set up for you of the core 2k and 2k jouyou kanji.