Yeah I’ll be taking the N4 in December. Originally I wanted to do N3 but realized, given the amount of time that I have, I could study for and pass the test, but I would literally just be studying for the test and not really learning the language at that level.
Since there are so very few kanji for the first 2 levels, I can focus a lot more on vocab and grammar, and put any extra time I have into sentence building exercises.
As for the why I believe this particular exercise is immensely beneficial to the learning process, I came to the conclusion that most of communication is just collocations of vocabulary and grammatical words. You necessarily have to put certain words next to each other, and there may be unwritten rules for the natural order of those words (like the priority of adjectives in English). Sentence building exercises hone the intuitive ability to self-correct for collocations (“Wait no, that doesn’t sound right”). This has benefits beyond production, such as better recognizing the types and functions of particles based on their collocations.
Collocations are a much more efficient method of learning grammar than memorizing wordy explanations and trying to summarize and internalize them.
Yeah I should probably explain that my earlier post to @Chocobits wasn’t to say that input alone wasn’t enough for comprehension but to highlight the fact that the output part of it is a separate skill that has to be practiced on it’s own, like your earlier example of friends who could understand English but not speak it very well.
I think the nuance is that production is like solidifying things you already know so it can aid in your learning in that way, but you only broaden your comprehension with input.
One of the advantages of being natively multilingual is that you can intuitively separate meaning and concept from language to some extent.
You have already managed to associate multiple links to a concept, and so adding another is a little bit easier.
But all of that goes towards comprehension. Output is still something that has to be practiced separately.
I agree. And I think that the collocation idea goes along with what I said above about the links between language and meaning. The associations that you make are on an intuitive level.
I just read the first volume of このすば and it was not hard to read as much as it was just hard to imagine what was going on. Re:Zero hasn’t been too hard to do so yet but I felt that way about このすば for the first 2 chapters. For all I know it could totally become gobbly gook in a few pages for me.
“don’t sweat it too much is what I’m trying to say, it will all clear itself up very very quickly”
“… over the course of three years”
I had a good laugh there!
Thanks for the video, I like that you share advice, and also the why things worked or not for you.
There a so many ways of learning Japanese, and the “best” way depends on so many variable, how much time do you have, how much money, what’s your end goal… If only there was an exhaustive infographic to make those decisions xD
But in the end, I agree with your main message, however long it takes, it’s the journey that’s the fun part. I don’t know when I’ll get to your level, but I’m really enjoying it, so that’s good enough for me!
Thank you for the video. It was a great contribution to the community. I think you make a lot of great observations about language learning.
The idea of, -no matter how many words I learn, there always seems to be more- was really a good part of your chat. That’s definitely a struggle, and it’s nice to hear you defeated that beast.
A year later, might as well give a little update on this. Things definitely did not go as I imagined.
Listening
So firstly the listening. I basically did what was outlined in an above post, and then stuck with listening to youtube for the past year for my explicit listening practice. I live in japan for those who don’t know and probably about 95+% of my interactions are in japanese so I also get “listening and output practice” from that, but there’s not much to talk about there. Anyways. My primary form of listening input has been vtuber zatsudan and on occasion gameplay videos. Then whenever I find a good longform video of a regular japanese person talking about something I like, I watch that. So most videos I watch average like 2 hours, and from a relatively early stage I was able to get most of what was said by focusing in. I inputted more and there’s not much to say. I improved. There was one thing I changed up that helped a lot though.
After talking with a friend I gave passive listening a try and it was a game changer. I was always kind of skeptical, but it served a very different purpose than I imagined. Constantly having japanese playing in my ears did 2 things I think. 1, it gave me a lot of opportunities to focus in and listen to japanese. Just training that muscle of tuning into japanese and understanding it. 2, maybe more importantly, it was a jamming signal for me thinking in English. Especially if I had the volume decently loud, it was like really hard for me to think about something in English. Like I tend to think through conversations or questions in my head in English, but that became really awkward when I was listening to japanese for some reason. Thinking through the conversation or whatever in japanese, though? That was doable. So the language that was popping into my head as I went about my day was primarily japanese. My dreams would also tend to be in Japanese.
So what did the above two things result in? Not crazy language gains, actually. I don’t think the term “gains” is accurate here. It felt more like being in “the zone”. Amongst friends who are learning jp I call this a “heightened state” so I’ll just use that term here. In order to better preserve this heightened state, I cut most english out of my life. No more english youtube was the biggest one probably. I even left wk for weeks at a time here and there as I cut myself off from the english side of the internet for brief periods every now and then.
So why did I go to such lengths to preserve that heightened state? When in that state, its not like I suddenly knew more japanese, which was why don’t want to call it “gains”. But the japanese I had learned became much more effortless and quick to access. This made listening to random videos a lot more enjoyable because it took less effort to understand and my comprehension increased. So the rate at which I could get comprehensible input skyrocketed. More enjoyment + less effort + more comprehension = More content and im understanding it at higher rates. So the idea was that I’ll get a bunch of input in this highly efficient state, strengthen those connections in my brain way faster than I would otherwise be able to do, and then one day they will be so strong that I won’t need the heightened state and can perform at a high level even if I’m dead tired (like I can for reading).
結論から言うと, it went great. I couldn’t preserve it at all times since I didn’t want to neglect friends who wanted to hang out, call my parents every weekend because I’m a good son, and occasionally would just get caught up in other stuff. But, for the most part I was very happy. Upon talking about this whole heightened state thing with a friend, he tried it himself and had what seemed like pretty similar results. Both of us are decently high level in japanese so trying it at a lower level may not work out as well, but that was my experience. I’m still not at a level that I am happy with for listening, but making very nice progress. For Japanese, I am really interested more in native-like level than just…well…anything less than that. And I think one thing I’ve come to think recently is that without taking these drastic measures and really just minimizing the english in my life, that probably won’t happen. At least not for a very long time. Some people might say it will never happen. But at this point I’m not really phased by much anymore. Maybe I just enjoy this more than most, but the more I see how monumental of a task native level is the more exciting I feel it is lol. I’ll be continuing along.
Output
So after doing listening for a few months exclusively (apart from my output at work and stuff), I started integrating output into my study routine. So I had done some output practice here and there, and I was already kinda at a level that surpassed a vast majority of foreigners (according to people around me). I’m not trying to flex or anything, but I just want to make it clear that when I say I started output practice that doesn’t mean I was at a comparatively low level. I had a large advantage over other foreigners thanks to my heavy reading background and comprehension level, and living in japan gave me (semi-mandatory) opportunities to speak. I was uploading diary entries to get corrections and around this time I really wasn’t making any grammatical errors already iirc. My biggest issue was natural speech and wording, and the speed/effort at which I was producing it. The problem was that the natives I found would tend to not grade on those things and would just be like “oh wow perfect, good job!!!” and leave my writing as the hot steaming pile of unnatural shit that it was just because I used all the grammar and words correctly.
So I found a person on hello talk who was willing to exchange lengthy diaries daily and give very harsh corrections on anything that would tip her off that I wasn’t a native. I got corrections, which were often alternative ways of saying things, and thanks to my background in reading and high comprehension level, it was often very apparent to me when the alternatives sounded better or were what I was going for. Thanks to this, explanation was very rarely needed and I was pretty quickly able to incorporate the corrections into my everyday speech since it was all language I had already acquired. I cut down on a lot of the unnatural or literary expressions I was using, and got faster at outputting. I would also on occasion output and not show it to her, just to get some extra practice. What I found to be very beneficial was taking it very slow and deliberately, never compromising what I want to say for what I can say. I would stop and look up stuff in the books I read and on google until I found the phrase that gave me that “aha!” moment any time I had something on the tip of my tongue. Very effective. One single lookup was typically all it would take for that piece of knowledge to switch over from being in my passive vocabulary to my active. And it was something I wanted to say at one point in time, so chances are I would use it again.
And yeah, thats…it? Output was actually incredibly easy to improve. I’ve got like some permanent exp-boost for improving output since all of this stuff is already acquired language for me basically and its just a matter of moving it into my active output and using things naturally. So my output actually very quickly passed up my listening which means listening now gets my attention. I think all the listening also really helped with output. Something about hearing it makes it easier to repeat for some reason. You’ll also notice I didn’t do any spoken output practice. I found it completely unnecessary for getting to where I am now. I speak every day already so my mouth is used to the movements, and I feel like the rest is no different from typed output. Output is just about generating a specific stream of thought in a certain language. If you are able to generate that stream on command at high speed, then speaking is just a matter of…pronouncing the things in that stream in the order they appear. If you can read aloud fine but cant speak Japanese well, the issue isn’t the actual speaking with your mouth part, its the creation of Japanese part in your head imo. So yeah, very anticlimactic on the output side of things. Maybe one day I will hit a wall, but at this point output isn’t getting too much attention from me anyways as listening is the bigger problem.
Pitch accent
So the reason I say output doesn’t get “too much” attention is because it does actually get some. I am currently going through pitch accent as well. When I say I want to be native-like level, that of course also means saying words right. And saying words right means knowing the pitch accent for my dialect, which is 標準語 like 99%+ of learners.
So pitch accent has been interesting. I remember not really being able to tell what the pitch of words was at all and feeling like I got it for the first time. I also remember doing the コツ tests for minimal pairs a long ass time ago and feeling like I was finally able to hear it because I was getting like 90% on that test. At the time, I couldn’t get any of the sentence ones right. I now kinda realize how stupid I was lol. I kinda thought that hearing pitch was like some switch. Like you couldn’t hear it until it “clicked” for you and then you got it! You can now hear pitch! And then I went on and studied some stuff regarding pitch for grammar like verb conjugations and particles. I was getting into listening at the time, so the idea was to listen a bunch and try to hear for pitch where I could. But in reality I was very preoccupied with listening for words in general and didn’t do great. I would also look up words’ pitch when I didn’t know them or came to mind. So I had decent knowledge about pitch and the pitch for many words, but almost all of it felt like it came from study and like I wasn’t really noticing it well in my listening. But, again, output wasn’t the focus anyways so I wasn’t sure I wanted to worry about changing it up anyways.
Then, about 2.5 months ago, there was a bit of a shift in that attitude. I was talking with my girlfriend when I asked her “What area of Japanese do you think would make the biggest difference if I improved in it?” her response was…you guessed it, pitch accent. She said it made her confused sometimes when I pronounced words differently (citing when I said 援助 as 平板 rather than 頭高 the other day) and said that it would make it a lot easier to listen to if I said all the words with the right accent.
Say no more. I got back on pitch accent and quickly realized how stupid my past self was.
After hearing thoughts and advice of people with good pitch who came before me, I started to think that my original thoughts towards the コツ minimal pairs tests were flawed. 90% is good? I can hear pitch? That test is a controlled environment where an NHK announcer clearly says a single word in isolation and I am given a multiple choice question (typically 2 answers) on what pitch it is. Why would anything less than 100% be acceptable if my goal is to go on to hear it in messy native speech? So I started nailing those quizzes again, listening to a bunch of different stuff on youglish, and getting my brain really tuned in. After just a couple days, 50 questions at 100% was no problem and I moved on to the next level quiz. A bit harder, but ironed out the difficulties after a day or two. Then the sentence level quiz. Oof it was hard at first. Went and listened to other stuff really trying to pay attention to pitch, and it was getting more and more clear. After maybe 7 days from when I first started, I was able to do the sentence quiz and get 10/10 right.
Crazy, really just applying myself and a week of effort…maybe an hour a day? of practice was enough to get me all the way there. And then this is where things got kinda weird. Also where I realized how wrong I was at the start.
It really felt like pitch accent was starting to “pop” to me. Like it was just a completely different pronunciation if the pitch would change, and it was very apparent where the accent was at in words as I was listening. I also started to start to notice more the way I was pronouncing things and noticing patterns in things I heard. Like damn you say りょ↓うり but if its 料理部 then you say りょうり↓ぶ when I heard it. And then the final nail in the coffin was くれる. This one had somehow slipped through the cracks. I was playing a visual novel, and in a sentence there was something like 「～てくれるんだけど～」and I remember hearing it and being like “what the f**k she just said くれる￣ and not くれ＼る…is that actually right?” and searching it up and realizing that くれる is indeed heiban. A word I had probably heard 1000s of times, and I couldn’t have even properly told you how it was pronounced up until that moment. And whats more, is in that moment it was just so absolutely distinctly heiban to me that I couldn’t even understand how past me wouldn’t realize it.
Made me truly realize just how good the brain is at making you hear what you expect to hear. Theres some science behind that, even, but not gonna go into it. It made me realize that hearing pitch is really a spectrum and not just some switch that you can flip. But once you’re at the point of being able to hear it in regular speed speech consistently, things take a big change. Picking up pitch for words is easier than ever and I am a lot more aware of my own pitch while speaking. It feels like a much more distinct property of the word, so once you learn it it feels pretty hard to forget it. Like if you learned a new word in english and heard it, you wouldn’t mess up the stress accent, would you? It kinda moves closer to being like that.
So I definitely don’t think old me made the right choice thinking I was good for having 90% on that one test. In hindsight its obvious, but 100% for hearing it in sentences should have been the goal I feel like. This was the kinda feeling I was hoping for. Being able to notice pitch much easier and have it pop out. Its especially easy picking up pitch for words reading a visual novel since I can hear them all and even repeat if I want, since its all very clear and voiced. Maybe a good idea to do that and go through hearing all the common words again “correctly” for the first time. For the time being, I’m still adding words to srs as I go and hear them, and its been going well.
When it comes to srsing pitch, its a lot easier to use those words in a sentence than I think some people believe. Its hard to explain but the way you end up thinking about pitch, knowing the base pitch is all you need. Like all the rules of conjugation or whatever melt down into this just idea of pronunciation and things naturally take their proper shape when put into sentences. Its kinda like how if you teach me a new word like…買う per se and tell me that it means “to buy”, I don’t get tripped up even if I see it as 買わない. The idea of negating う ending verbs is already like a set process in my mind so its automatic integration. Same thing for if you tell me that 呼ぶ is [0]. I don’t get tripped up on how to pronounce 呼んだら、呼ばない、呼ぶ前に、or anything else you throw at me. The way those conjugations work or having something after it works is a set process in my mind that automatically takes place. So learning the pitch in isolation feels like it really doesn’t matter.
Anyways, thanks for reading. I will be continuing to study as always. Best of luck to everyone in their own studies, regardless of what level you aim for.
I’m nowhere near your level yet; I’m still a beginner (upper beginner at best), but having my Japanese teacher correct us a lot on pronunciation and pitch accent early (and for free) is a blessing in disguise.
But seriously, Heiban is my greatest weakness, as weird as that sounds. Maybe it’s because my native language has lots of “ups and downs in speech,” and IMO, English doesn’t seem have a lot of “flat” pronunciations, with a lot of stress to sound more natural, or one would potentially sound robotic or emotionless? Anyway, I still have a long way to go, and I thank you for your detailed thoughts and story.
For verbs and i-adjectives I think a lot of learners might be in a similar boat, myself included. They are always gonna be [-2] or [0] basically (ignoring very few cases where the accent slides back due to vowel sound reasons like 入る) which means its heiban or it falls on the second to last mora. The latter is more common by a very large margin, so learners tend to pronounce and hear all verbs and i adjectives as ／￣＼ with the fall right before the end. But be careful, or else we might not know if you won something or if you bought something
Heiban definitely feels robotic if you say it in english and it kinda felt forced for me at the start. Probably the first area it became natural though is for 4 mora 2 kanji compounds, though (like 学校) since those are most often heiban.
Anyways, enjoy the ride. It’s a long one, but the good news is that its 95% what you make of it. The other 5% is having to explain to family and friends why you are still not fluent at japanese despite spending so much time studying it. 桃栗三年柿八年.
This one got me too lol. I had always been pronouncing it もちろ\ん in my head while reading and was pretty sure of it, but I looked it up one day and was like “damn”.
尾高 is a pretty hard one to get I feel like. Maybe because in some situations it can become heiban.
Lmao, I was actually thinking something similar. Not so much an exercise, but I was going to have my next video be either entirely in japanese or partially. When I think of all the people that would have to watch subtitles for potentially hours I lean towards partially lol.
I was thinking of making a sort of update video talking about transitioning to other things after reading a bunch, life in japan being able to speak and read japanese well, and just other random stuff I feel like rambling about for an unholy amount of time. I figured if I’m going to talk about output its only fair that I show where I’m at with it. Maybe at the end of the year I’ll end up making something since it’ll be the two year anniversary.
Nice, I would definitely be interested in watching it super curious of both the language aspect and the life in Japan. Maybe also on how people see you / interact with you as a 外国人.
@Vanilla : having finally watched the video, I noticed at the end you said you were thinking about working on your reading speed. Did you ever have any luck with that? (I feel like mine has been stuck at a plateau of about 25 pages an hour forever, which isn’t awful but also is way below both native speaker level and my own English reading speed…)
Sorry for butting in, but I am really curious about this. Do you have an idea what it is that’s slowing you down? E.g. for me (being at a much lower reading speed) sometimes I need to reread a sentence if I did not pay enough attention while reading it, and so the sentence (as I read it) does not fit the story, and I need to reread it to find the defect. Or I need to look up vocab. Or I need to think about a vocab or kanji in order to recall it (I also recall kanji readings when reading books in order to practice them). If you know what slows you down, maybe you can find ways of improving that aspect?
Also, is your speed constant across all books? Or do you have slower and faster books? And what is the difference between those categories of books?
Yeah, I ought really to try to analyse why I seem to be at the speed I’m at. I do definitely have slower books, where the language is more complex and where I have to spend time doing lookups (eg “私小説―from left to right” was a bit slower because the author’s vocabulary is huge, and 吾輩は猫である was super slow for vocab, convoluted sentences and a ton of obscure references that I had to consult the end of book notes about) but I’m talking more about “average” books that I can happily read without really needing to consult a dictionary (which doesn’t mean I know all the words). My subjective impression is that in Japanese I kind of have to read linearly through the text, occasionally dodging back if something was confusing or stumbling over a reading; whereas with English I feel like I comprehend the text in larger chunks and can simultaneously move forward with what I’m currently reading and glance back and reconfirm something from a previous line. My French is pretty poor so I get the grammar and vocabulary stumbling blocks but the overall experience of reading the text is much closer to English because it’s alphabet based. I feel like improving my French vocab would easily increase my reading fluency, whereas I don’t read super fast even when I know all the words in a piece of Japanese text.
Yes, I had a l good deal of success. I was at or below 15,000ch/hr for familiar works. Which would be maybe around 30-40 pages an hour typically. Its hard to say since I always read digital and don’t know pages, only characters, but doing a couple calculations based off of amazon and jpdb data it seems 15k is roughly in that range. I was able to get that up to 25,000 characters for familiar things, and even got to 29,000ch/r for works that I found easy. That was the highest recorded speed I had (which takes place over 30 minutes of reading). Whats worth noting though is that fsat reading speed was not a default mode of mind or anything. At the start I would get worn out trying to read fast for 15 minutes, but then about a year or so later I was able to get the numbers above and maintain it for an hour or two before I start to noticably slow down. I haven’t done much in the past year as I’ve been doing more output and listening focused stuff (along with programming), but the results were steadily coming in so I have no doubt that time duration and speed could still improve.
Before I say all the stuff I did in that ~1 year of improving my speed, I want to make it very clear that I do not suggest worrying about reading speed unless you are able to read with more or less 100% comprehension without a dictionary. I know you can, PM, but just for the people who are reading this who cant. Your speed will naturally increase the more you understand and the more you acquire (thus faster recall). But, if you focus on speed before you have comprehension down I feel like you will just be hurting your growth or wasting your time. Take things slower and focus on comprehension if you aren’t in the same position as PM.
Reading Environment Changes
These may not be viable for you if you read paper books, but I did them so will include them:
Reading 横書き: My visual novels, work documents, and websites I read are all 横書き so I decided to make my novels yoko as well. I had read all my novels tate up until this point, and my speed actually got slower when I switched. Nonetheless I stuck with it because I thought having all my reading (including english) be in the same format would help in the long run.
Text as small as comfortable: I would make my text as small as reasonably comfortable and my line width was about 40 characters which is the same as books vertical char length typically. Not a magic number, but the point is more just making it more comfortable to you.
Proportional font: This was my favorite one (thought its not really possible without yokogaki). So I use proportional fonts wherever I can now. I personally use Yu Gothic UI and one more that I forget the name of because it was the first one I found that I liked, but if you look you may find one you like more. Proportional fonts, if you dont know, made the width of each character variable. So compared to the typical monospace, some character will look smushed. I LOVE these fonts for japanese now and still use them. Heres an example of a normal font followed by Yu Gothic UI of the same size and then a shrunken size more like what I would use.
I will go into why I like these in the next section
Practicing Reading Fast
So the first thing I did was trying to eliminate subvocalization. But even in english I still subvocalize a lot and its more like this mashup of clear reading in my head followed by mumbling. I gave up on eliminating subvocalization because it felt unnatural and just stuck with that.
So, practicing. I read some stuff in english and would reflect on how my eyes felt like they were moving and used that to decide how I would tackle japanese. So what did I end up focusing on? The keyword here is “chunks” of japanese text. Rather than reading one unit of japanese text at a time (like a word), I would read some arbitrary chunk of information that I thought I could get all at once. Now, its worth noting that as I practiced this, my first path through a sentence would sometimes be very awkward and slow. When that happened, I would read back through the sentence and think of how I could better break it up into chunks for smooth processing. I can’t tell you exactly how I break up sentences now because even I don’t know. My brain has seemingly settled in to (for the most part) a pattern that it just unconsciously does and I can’t explain. One thing I do notice though, is that it seems like for the start of sentences my eyes always go towards the word after the first particle. So I take in everything before the first particle as one chunk to the left if I can along with what particle is being used on it, and then whatever is to the right. But anyways, to show an example for the sentence I showed above on how I do and don’t break it down ストア派・は・知られてない・か・誤解・されてる
〇ストア派は知られてないか・誤解されてる
And heres another 実際、英語の中でも「ストイック」という語ほど理不尽な汚名を着せられているものはあるまい。
So yeah, I group stuff and try to process that as one thing. I believe this happens with very set structures like 〇〇しなくてはいけない naturally for even beginner or intermediate learners. Its just taking that one step further and applying it for general patterns and whatever particles can attach to them.
This is where the proportional font and small size came in handy. Smushing the text together made it a lot more natural to start thinking in terms of these patterns and groupings. I was able to get a lot more in my peripheral vision, and it felt a lot more unnatural to split things up. So I think it made it easier to start getting in the habit of grouping things. As for why I kept it? Well its very readable to me, for starters. But look at the second to last group for my last sentence. 理不尽な汚名を着せられているものは is a pretty long one. Unless you make it small and compact then it will be very hard to get the edges with peripheral vision.
I also used reading speed pacer. I found this would keep me focused and help me with pacing. It would also save me from feeling like I needed to go faster then I really did and rushing myself. Using this, I noticed something very peculiar though. The pacer speed for 20,000ch/hr did not seem fast at all to me. It actually seemed like a very leisurely pace. And yet, thats the pace that could finish a typical light novel in about 5 hours. Why were there so few people who could read a light novel in 5 hours or less if it was such a comfortable pace? Using this pacer I pretty quickly found the answer.
20,000 characters per hour is 5.5 characters per second. In other words, thats 180ms per character. So when you take an extra 500ms to recall the meaning of some jukugo compound, if a kanji gets rendakud, or think about a piece of grammar…thats actually a pretty big deal, and yet you would never think twice about 500ms from the perspective of smooth reading. Using this pacer made it very clear how much the speed of my reading would fluctuate. There were certain things I was getting stuck on way longer than I realized I had been because it made me more aware of how much time I was spending on each word. Whenever there was a word that wasn’t instant recall, it was much clearer to me. And for those words I would go back and reread the sentence, commit them to memory, look at them in my periherpal vision, and think of other times I saw it. There was a lot of words that I knew, but didn’t know them good enough to understand them without thinking. Getting the most common words into the “no thinking” pile was also very helpful.
Also, just forcing yourself to read fast. By reading fast, you get to see the things that you missed and reflect on that. Overall, thats what a lot of the practice was. I would just try to read fast and that would make it more apparent what wasnt making me read fast. Like theres a VN setting for autoplay speed and I would set it to a speed that I could just barely read at, and then soon enough a sentence would come at me I couldn’t read in time. But then it would always be very apparent why I couldn’t make it in time and could tell what was tripping me up so it was easier to practice to make sure it didn’t happen again. But if I was just reading normally, I wouldn’t have ever thought twice about if that sentence took me 4s rather than the 3s it would have taken me if I was reading at the speed I read other sentences at. That noticing part is very important to the feedback loop. Putting yourself in that situation is a great way to notice imo, so thats worth keeping in mind.
I just started doing this and had the exact same skepticism because I thought the idea of “not paying attention” was dumb, BUT like you said I noticed I know what’s being said in the moments I do focus and am less likely to be in my head in English when I do that.
Thanks very much for writing that out. I suspect you’re right that all the little things that I know but which still cause slight hesitations are cumulatively a pretty big deal. I’ll have a look at what parts of these I can adapt to my paper based reading.
No problem. I suspect in your case, effort towards trying to read faster will probably be sufficient to make pretty significant gains. The hardest part is that while trying to read fast and practice chunking, you read significantly slower so its constantly fighting a feeling of “ugh i could just read this faster if I read it normally” lol.
super curious of both the language aspect and the life in Japan. Maybe also on how people see you / interact with you as a 外国人.
ストア派・は・知られてない・か・誤解・されてる