Am I stupid/bad at language learning or have unrealistic expectations?

Japanese Language
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Another vote for “normal” - like @simias ’ graph, exponential growth looks like nothing at first, but it’s necessary.

I’m not really one to have an opinion, since I’m still learning pretty slowly myself. But I think WaniKani + BunPro + Irodori (or some other beginner textbook) for a while, and then start iTalki lessons is probably the fastest way. I think the mistake a lot of people make when self-studying a textbook is moving on when they intellectually feel like they get the concept - without practice, practice, practice. The lure of Chapter 2 is too much when you really need to practice Chapter 1 over and over, in many variations, for a while first. A real tutor will make you do that if you ask.

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I should have been more clear that I started WK a little bit later. Late April? And I would skip some days. People told me don’t worry about Kanji and that it was not necessary and that it was gonna be the hardest part of Japanese, so I didn’t do it at first. Ironically this has been the only thing I actually like doing and where I remember and recognize words during listening. I’m beginning to think I should just grind WK to get to more useful vocab so I can start reading light novels and then that can maybe that can help my listening and ultimately my speaking. What is a good WK lvl to start reading actual books or manga?

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Could be true in the short term, depending on what you want to do. It won’t hurt to know them though.

A meaningless statement IMO.

Depends on how motivated you are and how much stamina you have for lookups, but by the time you reach around level 25 you’ll have a very solid foundation. Have look at wkstats for instance:

reading
reading848×1961 286 KB

At level 25 you can hope to have over 80% coverage for your average shounen manga. That doesn’t mean that you will understand 80% of everything without lookups, but that will help a lot.

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Long story short WK won’t be sufficient on it own to start reading in earnest.

A useful link: Joining the Absolute Beginner Book Club: Preparation and First Reading Experience Expectations

Between WK10 and W15 you can definitely start to practice reading but you will have to acquire vocab there is no shortcut for that and the WK vocab is for kanji drilling not general usefulness.

Some choose to go for graded readers like Satori.
Some choose to decipher through something they have personal interest in.

Generally speaking either:

  • you are really motivated to read something specific and then you can decipher it sentence by sentence reallllly slowly but you’re interested in the material.
  • you want to ease will easier material but you may find it boring, reading for the sake of practicing reading.

Disclaimer: Your first hundreds thousand “real” sentences (aka not written toward a learner) will be hell to parse. This is normal. You are not bad.

My personal experience

At 2.2k vocab and 800 kanjis I updated my practice to always read and try to understand the SRS example sentence on jpdb. At this point I could roughly get the gist of maybe 35% of the sentences.
From this point every thousand sentence read has brought a significant aptitude increase.

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Just lurking here but I wanted to say I sighed in relief at your eight years comment. I’m glad timelines are arbitrary and it’s different for every one. Because level 9 and 10 are killing me lol

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Echoing everyone else here, learning languages takes a long time. Especially Japanese (if coming from English). It took me 5 years to get to level 60, which included a 3 year burnout.

As mentioned, it won’t feel too terrible to read at level ~30 ish. However, it’s still a slog and will probably continue to be a slog for a while. For the past year since I got to level 60, I’ve been reading 1 chapter of manga a day and it’s still difficult now.

Language acquisition takes time and often is a unique path per person. Hell, even between languages it probably differs. Japanese took 6 years, but Korean took me 7 years to feel only kind of comfortable watching content without subtitles. Even now, at year 10 for Korean, I still don’t feel like I can watch everything without subs, I can consume the content I like without subs, but when I step out of that world I feel like a beginner again.

Personally, with Japanese, year 1 and 2 felt like I knew no Japanese at all, I could pick out words that I knew from WK (very few) but that was it, nothing useful regarding comprehension. It felt absolutely terrible as I felt like I was just wasting my time as you feel now. Year 3 felt mostly the same, I could maybe understand a little bit more (but it still felt like 0). Only by year 5 and 6 (current) could I say that I can actually read Japanese, however I still rely on translations to check my comprehension every so often and I look up words all the time.

While there will be people that can be fluent in 6 months or a year, those people are the outlier, not the norm. But for regular folks (like me), it just takes time, probably more time than any sane person would expect, especially because life happens and we have to find a way to fit Japanese in there. Sometimes, or rather, oftentimes, we don’t end up fitting it in as much as we’d like.

Japanese is hard, much harder that most of the things we learn on our own. So it will suck for a long time (it did for me) but I can tell you that it does get better. The longer you stick with it the better it starts to feel.

Learning languages is like riding an elevator, you can run around, jump, cry, shout, or have a breakdown (me) inside the elevator but it will not speed up how fast it moves. You will get there when you get there, the difficulty is that you don’t know when that might happen (years, decades), but it will happen.

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Actually, imo, listen more, read more, would be a fastest way to get to start reading or start speaking. Nonetheless, fastest way to start reading might not be fastest way to start speaking. Key vocabs are different. In any case, assuming that WK has enough useful vocabs is pretty unrealistic.

Everything will be a grind at first even after preparation. It applies to listening as well. (I still can’t say much about speaking.)

A grind means that you might not exactly like doing. But for some reasons, you don’t really give up after months, after years. But finding the point of n+1 somewhere should help.

It will be slowest if you really give up. It will be less slow if you give up at some point and pick it back up at some point.

Anyway, time scale is long. I would put it at at least 3 years, unless you live in a very supporting environment (definitely not self-studying) and throw in ample effort.

If memory is the issue, look into memorization techniques, like Flashcard - Wikipedia or Mnemonic - Wikipedia

In short, find a peg in context that helps recall the vocab. Basic listening might be developed alongside basic sentence production.

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I’ll be very honest, you have very unrealistic expectations. Is this your first time learning a new language at all? It can take years to be fluent in any language, and you’re just doing it for a few months. Give it time and adjust your expectations and your methods if necessary. Don’t buy into people who are bragging about being fluent in 6 months - in the best circumstance they are extremely dedicated people whose learning consumes their entire life which is not realistic for most people, or they have shortcuts (i.e. a Korean speaker can learn Japanese quite easily due to similarities in grammar), and at worst they are just bragging and falsely advertising intermediate level ability as ‘fluency’ to unaware people.

If you enjoy Wanikani, keep doing it. Vocab is important for overall language acquisition and you’d be thankful for reading ability later on. Listening and speaking on the other hand, needs another method. Honestly, if your main goal is more focused on listening and speaking, if possible financially, get a tutor or sign up to a class specifically for this 2 areas. Listening can be done on your own but you’d have to be realistic with your current and work your way up.

What type of content have you been listening to? If you are listening to 2-3 hours of podcast and not understand anything then you are listening to the wrong content, imo. It will be a waste of time if it just gets you frustrated and unable to learn anything. At the beginning, try to listen to something that is as easy as possible that you could understand at least 50%. Keep doing that until you get the basics and can understand 90% before moving on to more advanced content. Forcing yourself to listen to complicated audio for hours and feeling frustrated is less productive than sticking with simple ones for 30 mins with small consistent progress. Some examples that I think are quite easy for beginners: 1 2

A lot of older/adult learners are frustrated by early language learning because they are forced to feel like a kid again, using very simple vocab and grammar. But it’s necessary to get through the basics to be able to build up the foundation for complex language.

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If you want to give up, then you can. Then later pick it up again, if you want. (I’m 5 years into learning Japanese and only at WK L5 by the way! I can confidently say that I absolutely _AM_ stupid and bad at language learning). Language acquisition is weird as an adult: that feeling of stuff not going in, or just bouncing off your ears - I get the sense that there’s a mechanism at play; to maybe protect the language centre of the brain from overheating. Who knows? Something that might actually be encouraging to hear: it took a while to get a good grasp of “what Japanese sounds like” after which many things clicked nicely into place. I can’t tell you a quick way to get there, just that the path isn’t straight like one might expect. You’re undeniably on the way.

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That’s pretty much the case! When you sleep, your brain blocks new incoming information and consolidates or reconsolidates neural pathways for all the stuff you learned during the day. We have a bunch of studies about how people do simple recall tests better after a nap or full night of sleep, but also have some studies that seem to show people can pick up implicit stuff like pattern recognition during this period as well. Because brains are brains, the mechanisms of this are complicated and we don’t totally 100% understand the what of what is happening, but the practical upside is pretty apparent. If you study, then get sleep, you will have formed stronger memories than if you hadn’t. (LanguageJones talks about it a bit in wrt language learning this video, but it’s a really big topic if you want to go digging for papers or anything)

Anecdotally, I feel this happen with stuff all the time, not just language: Complicated rhythms in piano pieces, hard sequences for tricks in video games, and of course, specific grammar patterns or kanji, or whatever I’ve been studying

As far as original question in the thread, japanese just kinda takes a long time. There is a lot of natural variation in language acquisition based on different learning attributes and your personal motivation and ability to invest time, but hitting that ~n3/n2 range where you’re comfortably engaging with native level content takes most people well over a thousand hours to hit. Can it be done faster? Yeah, depending on who you are, but like most people here have said, getting to your first book or even first manga can easily take over a year.

Joining the book clubs here can help a lot, the pace is very forgiving and there are more experienced readers around to help you with the hundreds of questions you’ll inevitably have. Unfortunately, looking at only textbook japanese and wanikani will also not actually help you read better. I can’t count the number of people I see hit level 60 on wk and then still be struggling through bbc picks because they were not also building up their actual reading skills on the side. It will be a challenge, but it’s definitely worth trying to jump into that pool early to start getting exposed to it.

I can also share that the two biggest positive predictors of being a successful language learner, before you even look at methods and study materials and time investment or anything like that, are self-efficacy and motivation. That’s the people who believe that they are capable of learning a language, and the people who have a reason that’s powerful enough to get them to sit down and actually do studying every day. As long as you believe it’s possible and stay consistent doing stuff that makes you want to keep at it, eventually you’ll get there.

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I’m wondering about the immersion bit as well. I too understand basically nothing but see advice like “no English subs” and “you just have to get through the first XYZ hours of immersion and you will start to understand”. I also tried with kids shows, but it’s just really hard to sit through.
I get it, English subs can distract you from actual listening but I do feel like they make me understand some Japanese sentences that would’ve went over my head otherwise.

Best is probably to start slowly with something like Genki listening exercises.

And about not progressing, you’re not alone. Many of us are feeling the same, wishing you good luck with your Japanese journey!

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I really don’t get the ‘no English subs’ advice. For beginners honestly it’s not efficient. After maybe, idk N4-N3 level, then that advice starts being viable but even then it’s more like “Put on JP subs” instead of NO Eng sub.

There are probably people who mainly audio based that they can gain some knowledge this way, but it’s not really good general advice imo. And I say this a someone who listened to a ton of audio and consider my listening/speaking better than my reading. I had to have a solid base and then start to immerse. Before I had a solid base, no matter how much anime I watched with JP dub I did not pick up much, if at all.

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That belief can be really hard if it’s the first language you’ve learned, however. Still, my advice is stick with what you’re doing for 3-6 month chunks, even if you doubt it’s working. After 3-6 months, add something to your routine, and stick with that for another 3-6 months. Then reassess and add again.

Also as to English subs: I personally think it’s much more useful, if you want to use English subs, to then listen twice: first with English subs, then with Japanese subs. Especially at the beginning, I don’t think you have to listen without subs. The first is to get context, the second is to try to tie that context to the actual Japanese.

Anyway, good luck! As many have said, if you keep with it, you’ll get somewhere.

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Check to see if any libraries near you have Pimsleur Japanese CDs. You can also get a subscription from their app. Pimsleur is a really good resource to get started speaking immediately and build confidence by repeating simple phrases.

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Very cool!! Maybe this is why I can fly through Anki and Wanikani reviews first thing in the morning, while struggling later in the day?

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Why’d you decide to learn jp in the first place?

Personally I want to watch anime. Now I learn by watching anime (screw textbooks). Keeps me motivated

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I agree, but I think the idea as that you should actively listen and not just slide into just reading the subtitles and not make the effort to parse the Japanese.

I think ideally twin-subs (both JP and EN at the same time) could be best.

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Hopefully I didn’t miss it already being mentioned but for reading, I would recommend to check out yomu yomu. I’ve been using it for about a year and I love the variety of beginner and intermediate level articles and stories. Similar to Satori Reader, you can also listen to each story or article line by line.

I also started with George Trombley back in 2018. Loved the first two books of Japanese From Zero.

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They are lying. It’s Impossible to be fluent at Japanese in Just 6 month. I also Had the Feeling that I don’t know anything after that time frame. Please don’t give Up.

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Trust me, nothing made sense for like a year for me as well! You’re okay. Also, Japanese is, well, a foreign language, but if you speak English predominantly it’s really really foreign.

Do you play Pokemon? The Japanese versions are all in Hiragana, and the dialogue is pretty short and fast.

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