Critique my Japanese learning plan for reaching B2

9 comments

1. The only thing I would say is that doing NHK easy news for that long will be kinda annoying. It gets incredibly easy after an N3 level of Japanese, but that’s not bad. Satori reader is probably good to start around N3 level too. So, nice.

2. It’s kind of impossible to tell where this plan will get you, but anyways just based on what you wrote here are some things that stood out to me:

   – NHK easy news is nice, but assuming that your “stages” are about the same length, it doesn’t make sense for you to read NHK easy news up to stage 3, because by then it should already be too easy.

   – if you start reading light novels at stage 4, you’re probably gonna be behind in terms of reading progress, depending on the light novels you’re gonna read I guess.

   – if you want to reach B2, then it feels like you are most likely gonna struggle with speaking with your current plan. Think about getting an italki tutor or finding some way to increase how much you talk to people, especially in the later stages. Some people can reach an okay/good level of speaking by just consuming media and shadowing or something like that, but chances are that your speaking will be awkward. I’m mentioning this because you specifically wrote that you wanted to reach B2, and in the CEFR speaking is also important.

   – it’s okay to have a plan, but I feel like your plan is probably a bit “rigid”. Focus on putting in the daily hours and being consistent, but also pushing yourself to learn new things, without burning out. Don’t be afraid to make adjustments to your plan along the way.

3. Not super relevant, but I have passed the N1 and also took some mock test stuff while thinking about a C1 Spanish test. Kind of extrapolating based on my subjective experience, I felt like the N1 was more like a solid B1. (High passing scores, like 160/180+, might be closer to B2).

   Just reading a bunch of light novels is probably not enough for anything close to a B2 level, but if you just want read light novels, you probably don’t need that leve anyway.

4. For me doing so much beginner content would be to boring (though yuyu is fun).

   If you want to watch vtuber that badly why not learn from clips?

   Alot of jp clips have subs. Channels with dual subs like https://www.youtube.com/@hololivetranslatetoenglish9887/videos or even en clips with jp subs https://www.youtube.com/@Garzen/videos are good too.

5. I want to agree with some comments here. N1 does not feel very close to B2 for me (I have taken CEFR standards tests in other European languages so I have some ideas)

   I think you stay with learner’s/easy materials for too long and too concentrated! NHK Easy News, LingQ, Satori Reader, YUYU’s podcast, Comprehensible Japanese, graded readers. It seems like overkill. What if you just concentrate on less do them quicker and move towards native media sooner if you really want to achieve your big goal? What about stopping LingQ at least to focus on Satori Reader?

   In any case it doesn’t make sense to do these things while listening to HikiBiki and 飯田浩司のOK! Cozy up! because if you can understand these things then you are far past the point of needing to read easy news articles for children or Satori Reader.

   I think move quickly through learner’s materials and start real reading and listening soon. B2 is very high level. Maybe higher than you realise. You can’t stay with easy news for too long if you really feel your schedule is short.

6. You’re falling into a trap by giving yourself all kinds of different things to finish to completion. The idea that you need to ease into everything is overrated. Realistically, if you’re a2 now, you should be jumping to your stage 4 and working with that until it stops being a challenge.

   Like the other poster said, it’s way too rigid. You’re misjudging the overlap in your materials. Once you finish all the tadoku readers, I doubt picking up satori reader is going to be helpful. I doubt listening to learner podcasts is going to be more helpful than just watching YouTube videos and mining new words.

   If you want to do any of those things, they’re great resources, but don’t tell yourself you have to do them before you can move onto X or that you have to finish them or you won’t get fluent. The whole process of language learning is a lot more dynamic than you can plan this far for.

7. At around your level i started reading Satori Reader, finishing everything they had back then in 3 Months, while doing Anki with Premade Decks + Sentence Mining from Satori on the Side. Then i went into Anime, i think its easier than going straight into novels because of the ease of access to instant eng subtitles when you are stuck. Then after another 3 Months i started to read Books.

   This learning method was really efficient for me and i made very fast improvments in my comprehension. The most important thing is, to read intensly. Look up every word you don’t know, if theres a grammar point you don’t know look it up aswell. If you still don’t get it, look at a translation. If it still doesn’t make sense, let it go and keep going, then it is too far above your level.

8. Since you specifically said you’re looking to reach B2, I think your output practice is really lacking. CEFR levels, unlike the JLPT, very explicitly include standards for speaking and writing, so if you want to reach a B2 level you can’t slack on output. You seem to have very little speaking practice that you’re not starting until quite late, and you appear to have no writing practice.

   Going off what I had to do for my B2 exam in Spanish, you should be able to:

   – write a letter to your local neighborhood association explaining why you agree/disagree with their latest proposal

   – Write a data analysis based off graphs provided

   – Be able to comprehend information and opinions about a social issue, and based off that information give an explanation of the issue and your opinion of it. You should also be able to engage in dialogue about the topic

   – Be able to describe a picture in detail, including your opinions and inferences about the scene and the people in it

9. If you went through with this plan, I’m sure you’d do okay depending on your goals, but these are my first impressions:

   * Input should be more diverse; if you care about real world situations, get used to listening to content closer to native level (youtube vlogs, kids shows) rather than purely graded material. The main benefit is getting used to not understanding everything, as well as learning from the input itself, rather than simply practicing understanding things you’ve learned in textbooks.
   * Studying grammar is fine, but ultimately it’s “acquiring” the grammar from listening and reading that will allow you to communicate, rather than understanding how it works in theory. In other words, I wouldn’t recommend studying up to JLPT N1 grammar just for the sake of it (especially given how uncommon some of those grammar points are). Instead, focus on being able to very easily understand, and ultimately output, structures up to around an N3 level, which comprise most daily conversations and texts. Obviously, if you want to take JLPT that’s a different situation, as it has very specific criteria and doesn’t necessarily reflect one’s Japanese ability as a whole.
   * There’s no output here, and while many argue output should wait ’til much later in the learning process (and I mostly agree with this), A2 level +24 months of no output would be quite extreme IMO. If done properly, output can help consolidate some of the constructs and vocabulary you’ve acquired from input. What’s more, having your output corrected by a tutor (eg. italki) can be seriously transformative for your language skills.

   Obviously I don’t know what your goals are, but if you ultimately want to be able to converse and watch things in Japanese, this is my advice!