Read more than a page of a light novel in one sitting. 20 pages actually. Didnt even take an extremely long time. 4-5 dictionary lookups and understood it even without the lookups.

Got to a point where most of the time when JDIC definition isn't enough to understand the meaning and/or usage of a particular word I can just rely on J-J explanation to save me.

Unfortunately it also exposes how imprecise or inaccurate are some JDIC definitions, hopefully by the end of this year I should be confident enough to ditch J-E explanations altogether and go full J-J.

I passed a patent translation company's first stage test

Update on progress and problems I'm experiencing learning Japanese for this long(well not too long but you'll understand when I explain). I've reached 8000+ cards in my vocabulary deck (I used to have something like 20,000 in my old vocabulary deck but I deleted it because it was getting out of hand and I eventually went back and started fresh). This vocabulary deck is working well for me and it's quick to add new cards via Rikaisama (plus adding monolingual is easy with it). I still do JP on the question and reading/english meaning on the Answer side. I'll probably go slowly but it will eventually all be fully monolingual (playing around with how to get this in efficiently to my needs).

My sentence deck/production there isn't much cards in there even (294). It's at a low number because I haven't added cards into that deck for a while now. What I'm going through now is to find ways of speeding up the process of adding cards and fully breaking it down (making monolingual cards/searching up definitions of words I don't understand).  That's my srs "dilemma". I'm also working on ways of adding monolingual cards for production(Written and spoken as well).

I think in terms of Anki the SRS, the best way to go from here is monolingual (in terms of my learning phase now). Note: I can understand monolingual terms but I go on and off with it.

Now onto the last dilemma. Speaking and writing. Now it's not that I'm having difficulty with this, it's more like "Ok I have the basics down and more but I haven't reached the level of which I can easily go into most conversations". Writing well, it just needs more writing but monolingual and some sort of direction for my learning.  I've been doing some language exchanges and most natives are telling me you don't have problems with reading or understanding. Just work on speaking and writing (although most of them say that I don't really need to work on writing unless I want to live in Japan).
Note: I want to get a part-time translation job going but I feel before I can get something going I want to have the skills to back it up.

I've reached that phase where I keep saying "Ok so yea, I can read well (2000+ kanji), news,sites,books and understand most of what comes my way now. But how come my speech is lacking still and my writing isn't getting better?"

I'm not asking to give a "silver bullet" but more just personal experience and some pointers. Any advance learners out there that are in a similar situation. Any help from everyone will help too.

dtcamero wrote:

Ya the eternal dilemma in language study:

The only way to really cross that threshold into the holy grail of comfortable conversation is to talk with people. And yet until you get to a good enough place, nobody wants to talk to you because it's so painful. Even once you do get there, your first language partner needs to be exceptionally patient.

Honesty you're now need a native close friend/gf to get to the next step. You can't srs/listen your way there, in my opinion. Short of this several trips to Japan might do it, but also might not be enough. It could be worth exploring options for somehow arranging a stay of several months.

Thanks for the comment. Yea I agree. I actually recently volunteered at a Japanese Association about 1 hour away from me. So far it's been good. They have classes that are all fully in Japanese which I might join (it's design for production in mind, which is basically what I need). Maybe that could be one way. Or I could just jump the gun and go to Japan but one thing at a time. It definitely does cost a lot to join those classes (we are talking about 300-400 per class(8 weeks but only with 5 students though).

One of my friends gave me some good advice. He said why don't I join as much Japanese groups (because they have weekly meetings and it's full of native speakings and they welcome anyone interesting in Japanese). It would provide me with more native speakers and a good way to keep practicing speaking. He also suggested just getting a JPN gf and get constant speaking practice that way as well.

Last edited by ta12121 (2012 June 08, 12:06 am)

I finished Core6k today, and I am past the half-way point through DoIJG, which I read for the second time. Keeping the schedule I should be done in about three or four days with this one. By next month I should be finished with the JLPT 2 and 1 vocabulary respectively, and maybe also able to finish my first read-through of DOAJG.

Nagareboshi wrote:

I finished Core6k today

I'm thinking of doing Core 6k in the near future.
How did it help your Japanese?

Warp2243 wrote:

ta12121 wrote:

Now onto the last dilemma. Speaking and writing. Now it's not that I'm having difficulty with this, it's more like "Ok I have the basics down and more but I haven't reached the level of which I can easily go into most conversations". Writing well, it just needs more writing but monolingual and some sort of direction for my learning.  I've been doing some language exchanges and most natives are telling me you don't have problems with reading or understanding. Just work on speaking and writing (although most of them say that I don't really need to work on writing unless I want to live in Japan).
Note: I want to get a part-time translation job going but I feel before I can get something going I want to have the skills to back it up.

I've reached that phase where I keep saying "Ok so yea, I can read well (2000+ kanji), news,sites,books and understand most of what comes my way now. But how come my speech is lacking still and my writing isn't getting better?"

I'm not asking to give a "silver bullet" but more just personal experience and some pointers. Any advance learners out there that are in a similar situation. Any help from everyone will help too.

I may have very fresh pointers for you about this. I arrived in Japan last Sunday, so that makes it 6 days now. At first I could hardly speak at all, it was painful making sentences, because I had nearly no training at all since I started learning Japanese (except for the first Japanese classes I had, where we talked quite a lot, but it was beginner things back then, up to L15 of Minna no Nihongo). But lucky me, I'm in a host family, and an awesome one to boot. I've got a few 会話 lessons every day (about 2 hours, with Japanese volunteers, they are not teachers and aren't too fond of weird JLPT2 grammar). It's nice, but honestly the best thing is when I get back home. The mother of the host family is always there (only the father works), and since the first day, we've spoken probably 3-5 hours every day (not continuously of course, maybe by chunks of 30 minutes up to 2 hours). My understanding ability, and even more my speaking ability have went through insane progress since then. Everyday I totally feel the difference, right now I can say 40-60% of what I want to express kinda "smoothly". But of course with basic-intermediate grammar mainly. I'm just beginning to use relative sentences and it's looking much better now, but there's still a long way to go.

This should be of interest for you, because I think that just like me, you have a huge foundation of passive comprehension. Especially when it's written and you get the kanjis, it's easy, right? You gotta find something similar to what I'm doing currently. You need one or two Japanese person with who you can speak continuously. IRL, not on the phone or on Skype, because not having the person in front of you really sucks when you're still learning. And do not multiply conversations with different people, coz' they're always gonna ask you the exact same basic questions, and you'll learn your answers by heart (it's also useful to improve, but not as much). You need just one person with who you can always push the conversation deeper. You need that person to help you find the grammar/words/idiomatic structures that you already know passively, so that you will naturally be brought to use them actively (and trust me, you won't need to use them more than once to remember them for a LONG time).

Think seriously about coming to Japan if it's within your financial/social means (by social I mean job, family, girlfriend stuff). Don't waste money on other things, unless you really feel it's improving your Japanese. If you do come to Japan, make sure you have a solid plan to meet Japanese people. In my case quite a lot of things have been arranged nicely, but I have yet to meet Japanese people of my age (~20 years old).

Thanks for replying back. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, I'm 23 years of age been learning Japanese since I was 20. My passive knowledge is solid. I feel that I'm most likely "passively fluent". Meaning I can understand and read the majority of whatever comes my way. My active output is lacking. I feel what I really need to get far is just keep going. People keep telling me if I were just to keep practicing for a months, I'd be conversationally fluent and if I keep going, functional in Japanese.

I am starting to get a lot of language exchange going on. Which is a good thing but I've found that your Japanese has to be good in order for it to get the most out of it (I've experienced this just recently). Thanks for the advice, this is helping me out.

suffah wrote:

Ta12121, what about language exchange?

I only did it 1 hour/week with someone that wanted to learn English, but I just didn't have time for more.  Wish I could have done 1 hr/day.

Also, there are Japanese-language only meetup groups (I guess this would depend on where you lived) that don't permit English, etc.  I was too intimated to try these, but how else will we cross that threshold?

For writing practice you have that old standby lang8 (whatever it's called now).  I bet if you attacked any of these the way you did with vocab, your skill levels will "sync up" in no time.

I can relate, I don't have much time for it too. I'd be happy if I can do it once a week at least (once I get a better job, I'll probably be doing more exchanges). I live in Canada, so there are plenty of meetup groups near me. What I noticed is, the best way to learn Japanese is in Japanese itself. I don't think we can proceed further unless we get past that threshold.

I'm aiming by the end of the year to have my speaking at least functional. I think I just might jump the gun and just go J-J in terms of language exchange/meetups

kaamaru wrote:

I did 1000 kanji. Not that great compared to some people, but I'll catch up !!

In one day!!!!! o.O

Marble101 wrote:

kaamaru wrote:

I did 1000 kanji. Not that great compared to some people, but I'll catch up !!

In one day!!!!! o.O

I wish!

I finished all the entries in Kanjidamage ( I tried to make the switch to rtk but had already done 600 by then and already had a picture of most of the mnemonics radicals used there)

So now, I feel a slight burden is lifted from me now new kanji will solely be learned only as I approach them.

3 years is actually a really good pace for accomplishing what you're accomplishing without completely killing yourself doing do it. When I do the calculation on how much actual time I've spent studying in a really serious way it's been about that long. With your plan laid out there I see no reason you shouldn't pass JLPT1 as long as you practice reading and listening from native sources a lot before the test too.