I'd say I could do it but not easily? Though consulting a dictionary where needed I can read academic stuff. I often read Wikipedia, though it can be quite challenging. I can read scientific text books and plan on using a japanese physics textbook next year for physics, also I sometimes used Japanese materials to study biology and maths. In terms of writing, I don't do any writing by hand so that's not a skill I have to any useful degree though in terms of composing written works I would feel fairly comfortable doing that on the computer of course. A year at a university in Japan doing that sort of stuff would really take me to the next level.

I alway benchmark myself against natives so no matter how far I get I always gotta push further and try reach my goal. So it's always a work in progress you know? Best thing to improve in one area is to study that area lots...

vileru wrote:

Thanks for the replies, dizmox and mezbup. I suppose, then, I should set newspapers as my initial long-term goal, and then begin with some simple academic texts once I feel comfortable with newspapers. Fortunately, it was easy to learn how to write academically in English. Once I became familiar with the structure and conventions of academic writing, it all became formulaic.

Now, I should ask: how long did it take you both to be able to read newspapers comfortably?

Well I can't speak on there behalf, for me it took me around full year to get comfortable reading news articles/news in general. Anything beyond newspapers would require just increasing vocabulary. Which isn't hard with anki, I'm noticing the more one puts in the time to srs vocab, the less time it will take to gain all that vocab(via reading). Since I'm at the 2 year mark, my reading is advanced but there is still an extra step that I want to get to. It's being able to read a vast amount of material(specialized literature,traditional text, full katakana,hiragana, specialized font that is traditional). But this is just me.

mezbup wrote:

I have excellent computer skills and learned to use the computer as a tool to help me accomplish whatever I set out to do. This has been my single biggest advantage to date. Why? Well, I turned to the computer to help me right from the get go. This means I had Anki/AJATT/Media from the start. I also believed in the power of good software so I knew that to use and trust in Anki would be the best way. Also, being a hunter/gatherer of the digital world, I was never short on resources to learn the language.

I always marvel at what a difference my computers make to my language acquisition ability. it's amazing. from the SRS, to Anki specifically which I sync on 4 computers, one virtualized OS, and my iphone... to ATOK with pop-up kokugo dictionaries, to Rikaisama with kokugo epwing dictionaries. we have bittorrent for any media you can imagine for free... and Subs2SRS to help you suck everything useful out of it. just turning your OS japanese teaches one an awful lot.

can you imagine how different it would be to try to learn this language just 25 years ago?? the old adage of "you have to live in the country" might actually have been true, simply for lack of enough immersive material.

we're also very fortunate that we are focused on the most technologically advanced country on the planet, and everything japanese nowadays has a digital version... which we can use for our purposes. this seems like it might be a bit more of a problem for those learning mandarin perhaps...

I have a question for those of you who are fluent in writing.

Are you able to hand write most of the kanji you can read? I have a friend who achieved speaking/reading fluency and he's fine when typing on his computer but forgets over 50% of kanji when writing them on paper. Is this a common situation since most written Japanese used in daily life would be typed these days?

I'm not really fluent in writing, but it's completely normal (even for native speakers) to have trouble handwriting characters.  There's no studies to know for sure, but I have a feeling that even being able to write 50% of the characters you can read would be above average (by which I mean writing them in context, and being able to know which character to write for each word).

vileru wrote:

@mezbup, Tzadeck, yudantaiteki, and other advanced learners

Are academic or highly literary works accessible to you? For example, can you read scientific journal articles (not popular science, but real academic journal articles) or books like Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in Japanese? Likewise, can you write and speak at a university level? Anyway, I'm just hoping to get a realistic timeframe for how much effort it takes to attain a high level of academic proficiency in Japanese.

I'm by no means an advanced learner but i can fairly easily read academic works in my field (electrical engineering). Engineering vocab and concepts line up far more 1:1 than the rest of the language. If you already know the concepts, then matching up the words is fairly easy: just read a lot of stuff explaining concepts you already understand to build your vocab. I can also write at a level that is passable to explain technical concepts, although it takes me ages and i'm still not game to send it to natives without getting it proofread first (although mistakes are getting rare). My technical speaking is as crap as my speaking in general is (although i'd probably be more comfortable talking about something technical than anything else, it's where most of my practice is).

But no amount of learning the general language will enable you to read technical stuff. Just like your average english speaker couldn't pick up an engineering journal paper in english and actually understand the content. If you want to be able to read stuff with specialised vocab, you have to try to read it and learn the words. And other than making sure you have the required grammar, that doesn't necessary have to be a step after learning the general language. I could read a technical specification long before i could read a manga for 10 year olds (necessity forced this).

We actually did an interesting experiment at work. We took the entire contents of our file server, ran it through mecab and generated a word frequency list. IIRC, N2 was good for about 50%, N1 was good for more like 75%. But there were many very frequent words that weren't on any JLPT list (N2 didn't get you the 50% most common words... just 50% overall).

Jarvik7 wrote:

Not even Japanese people can write most of the kanji they can read.

I guess due to my intense investion of time into writing I do not have any problems writing any of the kanji covered in Heisig by hand instantly once I learnt the compound in Anki. I wonder.. my hand-writing skills are so far better than my listening skills, but unfortunately, especially by listening we learn a language: we start copying words/phrasings natives use and that sound normal and get used commonly perhaps..

i do it because it's fun and looks pretty. also for some reason writing things out by hand helps them stick in my brain better... it's like a really easy mnemonic.

thurd wrote:

a completely useless skill would just be stupid.

i have found that girls from countries using kanji are super impressed when i trot out those bad boys... so i wouldn't say completely useless ;D

Dammit, ta, you still haven't posted your new study plan. =p

It's very convenient for those of you that don't need to know how to write by hand! As an academic, I have to write on a whiteboard (or, god forbid, a blackboard) sometime or another. Therefore, it's an important skill for me to have. At any rate, I practice by writing letters/postcards using a 筆ペン and by jotting notes on my whiteboard next to my desk.

mezbup wrote:

I get this comment a lot an I'm not always comfortable receiving it. I say this because I don't think what I've done is so extraordinary, I feel like anyone did the same thing they would get the same results. I remember my first year of learning Japanese was almost pure grind work. Several hours a day straight Anki combined with copious amounts of native media...

Well, I would readily call myself gifted for languages (studied a dozen, learned half to fluency), and -- at least on paper -- you have made more progress than I, so perhaps you shouldn't be so reluctant to say so yourself!

Then again, we probably have different lifestyles -- I'm married with kids and a full-time job...