Whatever you think you can handle. If you think you can jump over now, I say go for it. If you feel ready at 20, then do it at level 20.
Level 40 is just the “if you’re still telling yourself you can’t handle it at this point then you’ll never be able to handle it so just shut up and do it” point. Of course, if you wanna get 60 for the badge then don’t let me stop you, but just be aware there are quicker paths.
Ahh so maybe 24-25K? I think I remember you saying you were only needing to notate a handful of vocab per novel, so 24K would align with a 99.99% recognition, averaging a lookup needed every 10K~ words or so. At 30K there wouldn’t be much difference between a native college grad. Have you gone through and finished the 人名用漢字? I know you had alluded to some greater goal, but honestly where you are now would probably be my stopping point, personally. You’ve pretty much already won the game and now you’re just doing sidequests 
I honestly just have no clue. It’s also a matter of how much you count expressions and alternate forms. Like if I know 鼻 and 洟 is that two words?
If I know 恣、縦、and 擅 but some other guy only knows ほしいまま in hiragana, do we know the same amount of words? Are ぽつりぽつり and ぽつりと two different words? You could make an argument for either honestly. That’s why it’s really hard to give a count for words, because what even counts as a word is pretty arbitrary. Cards, on the other hand, are fixed and are made under the pretense that there is some “new” information to be learned.
No actually. I probably know a majority of them at this point from what I’ve seen on the kotoba quizzes I’ve done, but there are still a lot I’m not familiar with. I actually probably am vastly more familiar with 1kyuu kanji, honestly. I don’t do kanji study, I do vocab study. If you count the kanken 1 words and stuff I did, then basically for all ~2000 kanji I’ve seen outside of wanikani, I know the English meaning of one of them: 尸. The rest I just get the meaning and reading out of the words. Like 釁る and 瑕釁 for 釁, but for all I know there could be more readings or meanings out there that I’m not getting. Honestly I think there’s some joyo kanji I couldn’t actually read either. If I don’t need them and don’t know a word that contains them, they are a mystery to me.
Well if you put 100 linguistics doctorates in a room and asked them to come to a conclusion on what “vocabulary” entails, you’re going to end up with 17 conflicting theses 
So what are your next steps? What areas specifically are you looking to improve in? I know pitch accent is all the rage for people looking to 100% their playthrough.
Reading is currently a background activity, so some reading will take place during all of this. But my current goal, very generally speaking, is removing any non trivial language barriers when conversing with natives. This means listening and speaking skills.
At first, I got most pitch accent rules and the most common words down. Then I trained myself to be able to reliably hear it. Then I went into hardcore listening by increasingly upping the difficulty.
These past few months went something like
Anime → audiobook → audiobook (115%/120%) speed → 1-2 hour long conversation between japanese people with no visual aids about a wide variety of unknown topics → same as the step before but they have been drinking-> present. And from here on out I want to try things like lowering volume so I have to get a more realistic feel for hearing people and just getting better in general. Of course, listening for pitch as well.
Starting next year, I’m hoping to be at a decent level in listening to where it can become a more leisurely activity. Then, it’s to output. I’ve been doing journals every now and then and having natives correct them and I’m at the point where in 20+ sentence journals I’m not actually getting corrections anymore, so I will need to find a native who can be very harsh with naturalness and not just vocab/grammar usage. The plan is to write a buncha stuff as I would say in real life, and they correct naturalness and usages. Ideally nothing short of something a native would read and assume another native wrote it. I also plan to do speaking practice during this time such as reading books aloud and my journals aloud and recording it. Listening the the playback should help me fix pronunciation. I speak at work every day as well, so it’s a good opportunity to use what I’ve learned. While doing that I also plan to give shadowing another try. Once I become more comfortable with that, it’s back to learning the rest of the words’ pitch accent and the ones I didn’t properly pick up through listening and shadowing. Then, trying into incorporate that knowledge into my speaking. Whether or not I’ll be able to self correct will change if I try to find a native to help with this part.
The future plan is to be taken with a grain of salt. New learners tend to think they know where they are going, but it usually doesn’t end up like that. Despite my level of speaking and listening, I still consider myself a new learner in them. The only reason I came this far so fast was because of my reading ability and not because I’m experienced in improving either one.
Listening to ambient noises of busy areas is a fantastic way to hone in on what a particular person is saying. Play this in the background while you are doing listening practice.
To me this seems a little backwards (although at the time you were drilling pitch accent I’m sure less info was known about the process). If you have read any of my pitch accent spiels (rants), I usually say something to the effect that doing the ear training first lessens overall effort required in memorizing vocab/sentence pitch patterns (and not by an insignificant amount). Since you are all about efficiency and optimization I’m sure you can appreciate that
Well, a newbie in terms of number of hours speaking. Despite our best efforts at balancing, most of us either gain a stronger speaking or reading skill level. No shame in that. Having a high level of reading ability will probably quickly show itself to be useful in speaking practice.
Just out of curiosity, how long have you been on your 日本語 journey now?
No, I could hear it before learning the patterns and was aware of what I was listening for. Being able to reliably hear it means training things like minimal pairs and getting it to ~100% accuracy, is all.
Either way, it took a very short amount of time, so even I was inefficient I lost a day or two at best haha. I also thought memorizing the words and patterns was exceptionally easy, actually. Not sure if my background watching a ton of anime helped, but it was a lot easier than I expected so the thought that it could be easier didn’t even cross my mind.
I consider myself to have been learning for 5 years. Roughly august 2017 iirc. However, I did pick up japanese for a brief period in 2015 where I got like 10 levels on wk and learned hiragana. I dropped it entirely for like a year and a half or so, tho.
Im down to try this, but the people I listen to usually play their own bgm so it might be really cancerous lol.
No, years (decades in my case) of watching anime does have a subconscious benefit. I have to be careful in Clozemaster because I will “know” the missing word despite not knowing the kanji or the meaning because of phonetic memory. I also “remember” the pitch accent of hundreds of words, but that memory defies active recall
This simple statement carries so much f*cking meaning. I have “studied” Japanese in brief spurts for years, but all of my cumulative knowledge before this year sadly would only account for 15 days of concerted study with what I know now about how to study (minus the decades of English subtitled anime and the decades of subconscious Japanese knowledge that defies active recall). I “consider” myself to have begun learning Japanese in March of this year when I started WK lessons. I curse subtitles now because had I spent even a fraction of those 2.5 decades watching any amount of non-English subtitled anime, I would be fluent today.
Yeah these 5 years have flown by honestly. If you asked me back in 2017 if I was willing to dedicate nearly 3+ hours a day average to japanese, I probably would have told you to screw off. But, well here we are. And…realistically, that average is probably only gonna go up as the line between “just doing stuff” and “doing japanese” becomes even more blurred.
Of course, anyone who wants to hop on this train is free to get off at any point they are happy with. I’m personally interested in where it leads, however. I actually feel like ive been experiencing the opposite of diminishing returns personally, so I’m happy to keep on trucking along.
I know you don’t really push or recommend any specific textbooks, but which textbooks did you use, how difficult was the transition to N2+ where textbooks dwindle off, and what helped you overcome that barrier the most?
none. I read a bit of tae kim, but as I said in the video, I couldn’t have even told you how to make te form, past form, or maybe even masu form for all the verbs by the time I jumped into reading. I also didnt learn katakana.
I didn’t use a textbook, but I have seen what people (or the testmakers) consider “n1 content”, and honestly I think there isn’t really a transition at all from a reading perspective. Like the collective knowledge in say…5 volumes of some romcom I read like かのウワ will have a ton of n1 stuff. Probably enough knowledge in them to make for a comfortable pass of those sections of the n1. Its just a matter of getting all that stuff into your head.
The reality is, in any given book or vn, there is going to be a wide range of vocab and grammar frequency wise. The n1 stuff is generalllllly speaking more likely to be on the infrequent end, but reading the right stuff nearly none of it is actually rare. Like ive seen people on here refer to stuff like ざるを得ない as obscure, but I would consider it a staple piece of grammar that all light novel readers will and should learn very early.
The only barrier really is a vocab one right before you are able to learn every single word, and its really hard to compare that to any jlpt level since you’ll need to learn so much vocab and so many kanji that won’t appear on the n1 in the first place. For that, the only way to overcome it is to just power through it. Theres just an insane amount of words to learn. In any given book, theres often thousands of words that you wont even see in your next book. And hundreds you still wont see in the next book after that. Getting all those “not rare but also not common” words down just takes time. Reading stuff you enjoy is basically the only thing you can do to make it more pleasant.
Yeah I just rewatched the first 20 minutes of your video and a lot of that was actually covered (sorry, been awhile since I watched it).
I think the biggest takeaways from all of this for me specifically is that I am going to focus on finishing off my graded readers/Miller-san, delve into visual novels and use text extraction for lookups to get in my reading hours. I am a man of culture and visual novels are one of the best formats to experience content of culture. Once I write the N4 exam in December, I’m going to start doing iTalki every week to get in my conversation hours.
Best of luck! I would consider something like the anime card Anki setup and tools to make your process smoother for vns
Great minds think alike, I just downloaded the anime deck last week and bookmarked a couple sites that have compiled lists of common anime vocab.
Hm? No the animecards setup is an Anki mining thing.
And
animecards.site
Should have info
Gotcha, I read that as a specific anki deck. You’re talking about mining. Yeah I am definitely going to get a text dumper and build cards with it. I’m not at the intermediate level anyway, so I have time to decide on what other resources I may need.
I have definitely learned my lesson about textbooks and that if one does decide to go the textbook route, they should be very few in number, each addressing a specific area to improve in. I do plan on going through the majority of beginner material I bought in haste, and I knew before buying them that it wasn’t really necessary to get so many, but I was under the honeymoon impression at the time that I really enjoyed textbook study and that I just wanted to get a ton of books to enjoy working through them.
And to be fair, I am slowly working through them, and gleaning a lot of insight from having such a large collection, but I’ll be the first to tell anyone else: DON’T DO WHAT I DID!
When I’m done with them I was thinking about asking the mods here if we could facilitate a giveaway to a few dozen people (yes, it really is that many books).
Yeah, I think I gave maybe…30+ books and manga away to a user on here awhile back so I don’t think they would mind, but I’m not sure if they would help you with anything.
Sounds you like you may need an actual editor rather than the general public.
There are some natives out there who will more harshly correct anything that doesn’t sound exactly how a native would say it, but from what it looks like the people who are most active in helping just set the bar at “correct japanese”.
I just have to find someone like that I can reliably exchange with