I think, secretly, part of this is also how much you like manga, and what you consider 'reading manga'.

I was reading Doraemon after a couple of years of study and I understood it fairly well... but it's really not what I wanted to read. I appreciated as a big piece of Japanese modern culture, but it wasn't exactly a riveting story line for a 24 year old American. So in a sense I didn't consider that really reading manga--it felt more like reading a graded reader.

I also am just not a particularly big manga fan, so reading manga at a relatively low Japanese level was boring to me. Reading something like 20th Century Boys after even four years of study was really boring to me because it has a complex plot and I didn't know the story going in. There was too much that was difficult to understand. Now I've been at it almost eight years and I can pretty much just read through it, and now I can appreciate it. However, I did play through FF10 and stuff like that pretty early on, and I enjoyed it because I was a big Final Fantasy fan in my youth. What you enjoy can determine how much difficulty you're willing to tolerate (but I'm not sure that means you actually have the Japanese to handle that material).

I think people on this forum usually are underestimating how long it takes the average person to learn Japanese. I've met more than a thousand Japanese learners, easily, just because I've lived in Japan seven years and I'm fairly social. From talking to those people, it seems to me that it generally takes people a very very long time to get to, say, N2 level. Five years maybe. Here I'm often accused of being pessimistic, but I think it's the reality. Also, it took me something like six years to pass N1. The reaction of other Japanese learners upon hearing that is usually "How the hell did you do that? I've been studying for years and I seem to get nowhere..." (That's certainly not the reaction you get on this forum!) But, I know I'm a bit better at studying than most people, and I think others on this forum are similarly above-average. I think it's because people here are very motivated, and many consider learning Japanese as one of their primary goals. In the real world there's a greater variety of types of learners.

(Another really odd thing is the extent to which people lie about or exaggerate how fast they made progress in Japanese... I don't really see the point myself, haha.)

I don't think we can really compare people on this forum to people not on this forum though. Most people take ages to learn Japanese because they have poor motivation and shitty methodology - but given that OP is here he probably has good motivation and at least access to the tools to work out a good methodology. When talking about this little bubble of Japanese learners it's worth being a bit more optimistic.

There's plenty of manga out there that's not difficult but still has (dare I say it) literary merit. It's not a binary between Doraemon on one hand and 20th Century Boys on the other. After learning a few thousand words there's plenty of worthwhile manga out there that's properly readable - the only challenge is finding it.

Tzadeck Wrote:From talking to those people, it seems to me that it generally takes people a very very long time to get to, say, N2 level. Five years maybe. Here I'm often accused of being pessimistic, but I think it's the reality. Also, it took me something like six years to pass N1. The reaction of other Japanese learners upon hearing that is usually "How the hell did you do that? I've been studying for years and I seem to get nowhere..." (That's certainly not the reaction you get on this forum!) But, I know I'm a bit better at studying than most people, and I think others on this forum are similarly above-average. I think it's because people here are very motivated, and many consider learning Japanese as one of their primary goals. In the real world there's a greater variety of types of learners.

(Another really odd thing is the extent to which people lie about or exaggerate how fast they made progress in Japanese... I don't really see the point myself, haha.)

At the point when I took the N2 and nearly passed it, a few years ago. I had been studying for about 4-5 years my self, more if you consider my stupid attempts in high school. But I question how fast I could have reached that level had I actually studied mass vocab many years earlier. Living in Japan also had a huge affect but having a larger vocab simplified things greatly.

Honestly though, I think 4-7 years is the most reasonable/likely time frame for all of this, but the forum has a tendency to say 'reaching N1 is possible in a short time because look at these handful of people that did it!'

I don't know, I think people in general underestimate how hard it is to learn a language and freak out when people say it takes years to even get to a Junior high level. But I think what you've said here is fairly accurate.

Aikynaro Wrote:I don't think we can really compare people on this forum to people not on this forum though. Most people take ages to learn Japanese because they have poor motivation and shitty methodology - but given that OP is here he probably has good motivation and at least access to the tools to work out a good methodology. When talking about this little bubble of Japanese learners it's worth being a bit more optimistic.

There's plenty of manga out there that's not difficult but still has (dare I say it) literary merit. It's not a binary between Doraemon on one hand and 20th Century Boys on the other. After learning a few thousand words there's plenty of worthwhile manga out there that's properly readable - the only challenge is finding it.

I don't think the comparison is that bad. A lot of people have posted on this forum expressing interest in learning Japanese or asking questions. How many of them have actually developed a high level of Japanese proficiency?

Motivation is a slippery thing. It's one thing to have initial motivation, usually fueled by a desire to watch anime, read a novel, or whatever else got you interested in Japanese. However, this does not necessarily equal the motivation necessary to actually do the many hundreds of hours of studying necessary to gain real proficiency.

vix86 Wrote:Honestly though, I think 4-7 years is the most reasonable/likely time frame for all of this, but the forum has a tendency to say 'reaching N1 is possible in a short time because look at these handful of people that did it!'

I don't know, I think people in general underestimate how hard it is to learn a language and freak out when people say it takes years to even get to a Junior high level. But I think what you've said here is fairly accurate.

I'd concur with this. I remember thinking I'd spend three years hunkering down learning Japanese and would come out the other end a Japanese genius. After my first two run-ins with the N2 exam, I began to realize how naive that was. I obtained N2 in about 2 and a half years, but it required intense, daily study. Even with all the effort I put into it, I don't expect to obtain N1 until at least end of 2016. The amount I still don't understand after three years of daily study is occasionally frustrating.

I think most people think, theoretically, that they'd love to know a second language, but when they start studying, the reality of how monumental a task it is starts to set in.

I'm the last person that must give suggestions but if it's true that japanese needs a lot of study, isn't the act of reading a required study activity? It's true that reading for pure enjoyment requires time but this doesn't mean you must not read native material until you have 15k mature cards on anki... there are light novels which are not so hard in term of vocabulary and grammar... like zero no tsukaima which is much suggested on this forum as a first novel. Honestly I find manga way harder to read... so even if the op asked specifically about manga I suggest him to give a try to zero no tsukaima but clearly 500 vocabs are not enough but this doesn't mean you need to be N2 before you start to read... But at least the n5 and n4 and maybe a shallow knowledge of n3 grammar is needed... But especially a lot of words and they must be the right words... it makes no sense to know 5000 words if they are from a list based on newspapers... but remember reading is part of vocabulary acquisition so pick up a manga and a good vocabulary and read, even if it's no fun and deadly slow and you end up reading only two pages a day :p

Sorry if I went a little off-topic!

@cophnia61

Yes. Absolutely. You will learn more useful stuff from context and context actually aids your memory. There are some phrases I just will never forget because of how I learnt them in context. Obviously, use anki to stop you for getting them though. Unless its words from a song, in which case you'll probably listen to it enough anyway. Seriously, who in the world outside this forum thinks you are supposed to learn anything from flashcards. Flashcards are for review after real life encounter. Nobody sits in Biology class making flashcards every lesson, that's for later. Now is time to actually dissect the frog.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:I think most people think, theoretically, that they'd love to know a second language, but when they start studying, the reality of how monumental a task it is starts to set in.

The thing that bummed me out the most was when I made the realization that language is pragmatic. Thats a word I use a lot on here. There is a lot of vocabulary that is cut and dry; lots of nouns are this way. But then there are a lot of words where the meaning seems synonymous with many other things, or where some words "fit" syntactically but just don't "feel" right. This is the case in English as well and I saw ESL learners struggle with this a lot.

Some of this stuff you just have to be exposed to over and over in context, or have it pointed out to you. Phrasing stuff natively is another one of those things. You can say something completely right and then learn that natives tend to say it another way.

Phrasing won't bite you in the butt on N1/N2 most likely, but they definitely test your understanding of synonyms on the N2 (and probably N1). All of these are things on the road to "fluency" and they seem sometimes insurmountable. I guess the thing people need to keep in mind is that language learning has no 'finish line;' only checkpoints.

To me, picking out the odd word while looking at the pictures doesn't count as 'reading', and I suspect that it doesn't to maxwell777 either, otherwise he would be doing just that and congratulating himself for it in this forum

Any manga (Yotsubato included) is harder than most of the stuff on hukumusume.com and way, way harder than anything on NHK News Easy if your criterion for 'reading' means comprehension of the text with some degree of confidence, rather than just vaguely guessing.

And Zero no Tsukaima is *relatively* easy for a light novel, but it is still way harder than all but the hardest manga.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that as a self-taught beginner you just have to suck it up and take what you can get for a while.

I read NHK News Easy and Hukumusume exclusively for a month or two after finishing the Core6k as they were still the only things I found readily accessible. I tried Yotsubato and various ... less reputable manga but was left with so many unanswered questions in virtually every sentence that I felt the need to take a step back. The problem is not so much in the vocabulary, but in learning to comprehend without the need to subvocalise in (translated) English. This is what the more beginner-friendly materials can give you.

After 'sucking it up' for a month or two I stumbled upon a manga entitled Devil Ecstasy, which was the most popular manga download for a while on nyaa. I thought it sounded smutty so had a look and discovered to my astonishment that I was able to read it.

I haven't read NHK News Easy since

What?!! Nhk news easy and such is way harder than an easy manga. Maybe its because I don't use core decks much so lack that newspaper vocab.

[Zgarbas]

The advantage of NHK news easy is that it matches well with the core decks and that it's really repetitive. If you read NHK for a few weeks/months (depending on your leven when you start/time dedicated to it, whatnot) you start reading it without any problems since though the content varies the set phrases, grammar, etc. are identical. It's a great resource to practice reading since it's constant. Bonus since you learn a bit about the world as you do so.
Manga, on the other hand, varies a lot between genres, styles, artists, age, etc., so you can read manga for years and still get stuck when you pick up something that's unfamiliar. Bonus since maybe you have fun as you do so (I don't enjoy myself if I struggle to understand the meaning, but that's a personal preference)

Anyone recommending Zero no Tsukaima as a first novel has either skipped a step, or is talking from the point of view of continuous dictionary lookups. That is far from the easiest stuff you can read - it's jut the most readily available.

Personally, I don't think Yotsuba is the easiest manga out there either and I think it's not really the best recommendation as the first reading material you run into.

Learning Japanese is an enormous task, but reading basic manga is not. I think if anyone studied efficiently (which in my book is studying vocabulary in sentences with Anki at a decent number of new words per day, but whatever gets you there...) they could read basic manga within a few months.
People talk up how difficult it is to achieve anything real, but y'know - rubbish. You can be reading basic manga with a couple of thousand words and chapter books with a couple thousand more. I think the reason most people think it was difficult is because they skipped the intermediate steps and went for things well above what they were capable of. Or if they didn't, they think that simple things are boring because they read shit that was of no interest to them. But really - I'm pretty sure - if you have a few thousand words and a clue about how the sentence structure works you can find something that works for you. Even if it's not ideal - there's a lot of stuff out there - if you can't find something you're interested in at least a bit then that's really your problem, not a problem with your Japanese level or with the difficulty of the language. You're just not looking hard enough.

Sure -if you've got 500 words, there's not much out there. But it really doesn't take that much to be able to get through some basic manga. And each month you study you'll be able to read more and more. Once the ball is rolling and if you build up the difficulty of what you're trying to read in stages it's not such a bit wall to overcome.

Reading doesn't start at N2 level or when you've finished Core or whatever. And if you're not interested anything at your level that that's really your problem - be a bit more flexible and develop a taste for it or something.

Quote:I don't think the comparison is that bad. A lot of people have posted on this forum expressing interest in learning Japanese or asking questions. How many of them have actually developed a high level of Japanese proficiency?

Motivation is a slippery thing. It's one thing to have initial motivation, usually fueled by a desire to watch anime, read a novel, or whatever else got you interested in Japanese. However, this does not necessarily equal the motivation necessary to actually do the many hundreds of hours of studying necessary to gain real proficiency.

Fair enough. But most people who keep posting here make progress, yeah? OP seems to have continued for five months - let's give the benefit of the doubt here. The only problem is that he was focused on RTK, which is useless for reading beginner manga, which seems to be what he's hung up on. It doesn't seem to be a matter of motivation here but of wrong expectations - five months of studying kanji doesn't lead to reading ability.

But sure - in general, motivation is fleeting and most people who pick up Japanese get nowhere because it's a ridiculously huge project. I don't think this applies to the OP though.

Just adding my 2 cents, I think as some have already said it varies from person to person.

My own experience I found myself suddenly able to enjoy reading manga soon after I finished JLPT4, a little way into JLPT3. I say suddenly because that's how it felt. I had stocked on mangas since the beginning, at first I couldn't read anything, then a few words, then had to struggle to read 3 pages in a row. I woud remain in this state for some [long] months, study some more, try again, study some more and suddenly found myself reading 20 pages a day, then 50 the next day, 200 over the week-end. Now I find myself buying some old mangas in complete 20/40 volume sets (thank you amazon marketplace!) to feed the beast.

My point is don't feel too bad that you seem to make no progress, studying pays off eventually, only it may not be a gradual process for everyone.

Also getting free dictionary JED on android really helped at first (still does). Plus it's free and I haven't found any better app (my own opinion) even though I tried a lot of paying ones.

Aikynaro Wrote:Anyone recommending Zero no Tsukaima as a first novel has either skipped a step, or is talking from the point of view of continuous dictionary lookups. That is far from the easiest stuff you can read - it's jut the most readily available.

Personally, I don't think Yotsuba is the easiest manga out there either and I think it's not really the best recommendation as the first reading material you run into.

Can you recommend some other LNs and manga? Perhaps in this thread: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=10869