I mean, if you know from the context that it’s a saucepan, and you can describe it, to google because for a person you can just point at it, I feel like you are there. Obviously you haven’t mastered it but at that point there’s no need for systems and methods and studying, it will just naturally happen. For me at least.
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Ok, if your native level is to point at stuff then it should be reachable quite fast. The point I was trying to make is that people severely underestimate their passive vocabulary. There are often number like “everyone knows 40k” words, from my experience that doesn’t add up (or what a word is counted differently than people think).
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Yeah, I don’t really see what the issue with what the OP was saying is.
If you can use a monolingual dictionary, or ask a Japanese person for the meaning in Japanese, you are “at an exclusively Japanese level” even though your total vocab might still be pretty low in reality.
He wasn’t asking about what number you need to be fluent or at a native level or something.
EDIT: Well, I can see how this statement
sounds fairly arrogant, but it’s not proposed topic of the thread.
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Maybe I’m interpreting “About how long(what level/how many months) does it take before I can watch anime or read manga without the need to translate anything to English?” wrong 
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I think the idea was like… say you encounter the word 食う in an anime. A complete beginner has to look it up in an J-E dictionary to understand it, but an intermediate learner can check a Japanese dictionary and see that it’s a cruder way to say 食べる. And they can understand it without the English step.
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if your native level is to point at stuff
That I precisely what I said wasn’t good enough, you have to be able to describe it to a machine meaning that you have to flexible in your description because it isn’t going to be. If you are actively seeking the word out with existing relevant context it will stick orders of magnitude easier than if you used an arbitrary system and a tangential mnemonic.
As for counting passive vocab, how do you even do that? I know a few hundred rocket science terms and passively can recognize probably another 2000, would any of them count? How about blacksmithing terms like “drawing out” or “hardy tool” or “peened” which are words you might recognize but will not know their meanings in context unless you know about blacksmithing? It’s pointless.
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Yeah, OP is talking about two things it seems, but as for the monolingual transition part, I’ve heard of many people doing it in a year or so actually.
I have an dictionary for primary school children and don’t know half of the words (stuff as kana is not helping), I feel like “reading the dictionary” level is not too far below native level.
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But we’re not talking about the total number of words relative to the number in the language… just… can you look at a monolingual definition and read it. You definitely know enough words to read a definition of 食う, unless you’re hiding something from us >_>
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I dont quite agree with that. Definitions use some recurring vocab that you may need to know, but if you dont know a word in the definition, you can always look that word up in the dictionary as well. And rinse and repeat until you can read it.
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It could be between 2 and 4 years… The reason is not so much because of the grammar itself… but mostly because of kanji and how is used with the grammar in several situations. Simply, do the whole wanikani, grab 1 book or sth to study grammar with. And change everything in japanese… phones, computer, youtube… start reading manga a lot… and just read it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the kanji… while you do that once in a while look up for words specially the ones you see 2 or three times on the same volume of the manga it can also in youtube and japanese drama with j-subs. Do that for a long long long time… and then you will start seeing the patterns in japanese and how to use the grammar points easily in any kind of situation, and of course will understand a lot of kanji…
Oh also some grammar points may have more than 1 or 2 uses keep that in mind too… But yeah I calculate exactly between 2 and 4 maybe just 3, taking into account depression, giving a couple times, then coming back you know that stuff… Love you friend you can do it…! Oh and of course make tons of japanese friends online…!!!
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Well this is where I got that from…
I suppose I misinterpreted but I still don’t think you made yourself clear. Some of us also have different ideas of what seems to be meant by “About how long(what level/how many months) does it take before I can watch anime or read manga without the need to translate anything to English?”.
So to bring it back to your question, I don’t think anyone can answer that. I don’t know what you mean by “that milestone”. There isn’t a universal point when things get easy. There’s also that nobody takes the same amount of time when studying a language, especially if you aren’t taking a class. The most common estimate so far is about 2 years but if you mean how long it’ll take to look up words in Japanese then it might take less.
I also wouldn’t assume learning English and learning Japanese will be the same experience. I know someone who is German and speaks English probably better than he speaks German and also speaks Portuguese and French fluently but Japanese and Arabic (languages that some of his family members speak as their first language) didn’t click at all. Maybe you’ll pick up on Japanese as easily as English but I don’t know that you will.
And my final point is that Frank1995f gave some good advice.
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That depends entirely on how much energy you dedicate to this and how you go about it. WaniKani is just one resource. What else are you doing?
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Yeah but that is after I put in the necessary work into building the necessary foundation. And I’m not thinking that that will happen, it already has once. It’s like betting that I can lift a 50kg stone after I already have. It’s hard to get better confirmation than that, I wouldn’t have been so sure otherwise. I can’t know for sure but it is beyond reasonable doubt which is as good as you’re getting in terms of predicting the future.
But that whole thing is just secondary context, that I only need help to that point and beyond that, I’m good to go, don’t need help. If I didn’t provide it, that would have caused misunderstandings. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
I don’t know, it’s just how I communicate. There’s no subtext, if you ask a computer what is 5+3, it won’t get insulted at the simplicity of the problem, it just returns an answer. The tone is hard to get right in text so I just ignore it.
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I already posted it a bit before, don’t know if there’s a link feature so I’ll just copy it:
Are there any sources I should be looking at for vocab? WK does teach a lot of vocab from the looks of it, the 6000 most common should be plenty, people only use 2-4 thousand words in normal daily life. I already started bunpro and kaniwani for supplementing, and houhou for getting the words that I already know to some degree(短刀, 猫, 先生 for example) really nailed down.
It got hostile because people don’t want to consider the possibility you could advance much faster than them.
It’s more about whether you assume subtext.
“I can do 40 push-ups.”
can be understood as
“I am capable of doing 40 push-ups.”
or
“Hey, look at how strong I am, I can do 40 push-ups, I bet you can’t even do 10.”
depending on what tone you choose to associate with the sentence.
a lot of the vocab in Wanikani is not actually vocabulary that occurs commonly. Many words are not even currently even utilized in actual modern Japanese. A lot of what is introduced is introduced solely to help you memorize various kanji readings.
That being said, if you only study via wanikani and through manga/games/anime (which is a really bad idea) you’re gonna have a bad time.
I’m quite certain that is not the reason.
I don’t think most people are taking your posts to mean the latter. The interpretation people are getting from this is more like “I’m capable of swimming a kilometer” after your only admitted past experience was walking a kilometer.
The perceived hostility likely comes from exasperation at the fact that you won’t consider the possibility that it is not as easy as you think.
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The second sentence seems like a bit of an exaggeration to me. I don’t think there’s anything that would be considered… classical Japanese or something. Everything you can learn can be found somewhere nowadays, but it might be in a novel or a news broadcast, and not in chats about anime.
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