Post 60/JLPT3 Wall

Japanese Language Questions
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I passed the JLPT3 last year, and recently hit level 60 here. I try (work schedule permitting) to translate one NHK article a day, and try and work through various romantic comedy manga. I take two one hour classes a week, one private tutoring where we sometimes work through lessons, but mostly work through questions I have, and another class that follows a set curriculum. I also try and keep up with seasonal anime.

With all that said, I feel like I’m starting to plateau. I live in California, and am unlikely to move to Japan, and don’t feel like I’m organically finding reasons to speak/listen to Japanese, or write in Japanese. I have a strong desire to become fluent, and so I’m trying to figure out how to overcome these hurdles, and was wondering how others have navigated this or similar situations.

Thanks!

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Congratulations on N3 and level 60!

I feel like I was stuck on that plateau for more than 10 years. What finally rocked me off of it was starting to read novels. It’s been about 2 years and 40 books later, but I’m finally feeling like I’m out of the slog.

I read a lot of manga before I got into novels, but in retrospect I don’t think that they’re nearly as linguistically dense, and you have to read way too many to make a lot of progress. On the plus side, I think reading novels really helps supercharge your manga reading, esp if you have a number already read.

I’m just a sample size of one, but this was my experience.

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I’m not WK 60 and I’ve never taken a real JLPT exam. That being said, placement tests have put me at around (low) N2.

I’m going to second reading novels. When I came back to Japanese a bit over a year ago I was definitely in the N4 range grammar wise. Doing my regular grammar studies (on NativShark and JapanesePod101) and reading novels in book clubs alongside it meant I got a lot of “wait, I saw this grammar point last week on X site” while I was going through N3 and early N2 content. So I could actually feel myself improving because novels use a lot of literary language.

Right now the book club I’m in (not a WK book club) is reading an easier intermediate book:

Which was recommended by one of our members who didn’t read many novels before, and I actually think it’s a great choice as a starter intermediate novel.

Otherwise I would recommend

This is the book that helped me get past my plateau.

Then I read some more books that were higher in difficulty, with the highest one being the first book of the Ascendance of a Bookworm series.

That one definitely was more of a N2 book and it was hard at first but by the end of it was getting like 70% of it (I probably would have understood more if I was higher WK, unknown and forgotten vocab was an issue, but thanks to SRS I learned/relearned a few while I was reading this so I also got moments of “wait, I think I know this vocab, I think I reviewed this a few days ago, let me try harder to remember it”.

And I’ve heard from someone who’s read more of the series that the language gets even more complicated later on, so it seems like a good series to level up with.

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Yeah, it seems like novels may be a good next step. I have a few light novels I picked up, so maybe I’ll give those a shot. Thanks for the advice!

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Thanks for taking the time to write all of that, out and for the specific recommendations! I’m going to go ahead and try reading novels and see how that feels.

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I think the “plateau” is a very normal thing when you reach intermediate level in a language, but also it’s probably mostly an illusion. It’s just that when you’re a beginner you get milestone after milestone, you learn important basic things all the time, but once you’re past all that you hit diminishing returns.

Going from knowing 100 words to 200 words makes a world of difference, but going from 5000 to 5100 doesn’t even register. The absolute rate of progress is the same, but in relative terms it feels insignificant.

Reflect on the path you have taken and how far you’ve come, you’ve reached a level most people on these forums dream of achieving one day.

As for the path forward, just find things you want to do in Japanese and do them! That’s fun part.

I’m definitely in that position now, I’ve read a few novels but for the past year or so it’s just videogames and manga. It’s so much easier (on average). But it’s true that novels are much more dense in pretty much every respect and therefore a more powerful study tool.

That was read in the IMC a little while ago, very fun. I have bought the sequel, I need to read that eventually.

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Right, I meant that the club I’m reading it with isn’t a WK book club, but I didn’t go and check if there is/was a WK club for it at any point. I probably should have checked though, might have been nice for some vocab lists if any were made

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Echoing the sentiments of everyone else, I feel like the plateau you feel could possibly be reframed as the Japanese language learning journey itself (i.e. the Japanese language journey of a Japanese native). I feel like when we can get into the world of actual immersion and start consuming native content, we’ve “made” it.

However this really means that we’ve “made” it into the world of the native Japanese person who’s been immersing ever since they were born and away from the Japanese learner that can’t comprehend native content. I find that this jump is huge and as simias says, the wins are far a few in between, as we have to catch up to decades on decades of immersion.

Consider how much native language immersion we get in our daily lives, its basically 24/7 (so much so that we don’t even consider it immersion), similar to a Japanese person living in Japan, its Japanese 24/7. I feel that in order to bridge that gap we have to work quite hard to match the level of immersion they get, which really just means immersing a lot, a lot.

When we take a look at our own encyclopedic knowledge of the world, we know a ton of stuff from economics, to politics, to the sciences, to poetry, etc. But how did we get there? We had a ton of time (decades) to take in all that content, learn, and absorb it in our native language. So I feel that it isn’t a plateau/wall but more that we’re just a decade or so behind in immersion.

Therefore, I might recommend just significantly increasing your immersion. We simply need to catch up to the average Japanese native’s amount of immersion. Thankfully we are also more motivated to read Japanese books compared to the average (Japanese) person. This spreadsheet has a ton of good recommendations for all forms of media.

I also highly recommend Bunpro for grammar (N2, N1), as they have a ton of sentence examples per grammar point with SRS, and take up much less time for memorization compared to a book since the SRS does that for you. It also helps sharpen your reading since you need to read the example sentences for every item.

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Until you get there, look around and realize everything is middle/high school romance/slice of life and then move those goalposts again :sweat_smile:

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Then you start to move into books like 街とその不確かな壁, then find your way to authors like 太宰治 or 安部公房 and wonder what the hell you’re even reading about (definitely not me).

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And we don’t think of that as learning vocab, but it was also that. And now to learn all of that specialty vocab in a new language it feels like we need to go through decades just to pick up the words for topics we already know. Sometimes I wonder if I should be reading textbooks in Japanese (more than the one I’ve already read.)

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Absolutely, I also think back to when I was in middle school or so, where it was such a slog to work through a book that was aimed at kids my age (and had to manually look up words in the dictionary), but now read “difficult” books with ease. We take for granted how much we actually have to read in our daily lives every day.

I wonder the same, I feel like no matter how much I read it’s never enough and I’m somehow still looking up words more often than I would like to admit.

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What you’re missing could be the joy of communicating itself. Input, reading interesting content is great and all, but in my opinion the most rewarding and motivating part of learning a language is using it. Even if it’s not likely you’d move to Japan, there are still plenty of ways to achieve this, it’s just a bit less accessible than NHK or manga. I’m not sure if it’s your thing but there’s always Japanese livestreamers, especially small streamers with few viewers are often very eager to engage with viewers, even over a language barrier (and if gaming’s not your thing, cooking, art, music, if it’s interesting someone’s probably livestreaming it).

Otherwise you could try looking into Japanese online spaces for whatever interests you. It can be intimidating for sure but if you’re able to break in, that’s some much higher quality experience than reading alone.

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I passed N3 December 2022 then decided to take a break from the exam, though not from Japanese. I continued to read, but also around that time started speaking classes (I had my first visit to Japan soon after the exam and realised I basically could y speak much at all :woman_facepalming:).

I made real progress with finding a teacher on Italki who happened to be someone I could happily just chat to. That was the biggest breakthrough for me. I’m lucky in that I live in Australia so can go to Japan about once a year, but continuing to read has kept my progress on track too.

Planning to sit N2 in December this year!

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I admire all of you for your persistence!

My personal challenge is much sillier. I’m nowhere near the level you folks describe, but what I would really like to do is work on conversation. The reason this is silly, is that I have terrible social anxiety. I like talking to people, but I’m so bad at it! It took much of my adult life to learn how to have a pleasant and comfortable conversation with a stranger in my mother tongue of English, and I’m incredibly intimidated by the dual challenge of language and cultural differences.

Anyone have advice?

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Hi PapaYti. I know how you feel. I have the same problem.

But I think you just have to ‘bite the bullet’ and jump right in there. Find someone who is about your same level in Japanese and start making up conversations. Yes, I know it will be difficult, but you just have to give it a shot. Feel free to ask for activities you can do in these conversations.

Would you like to find a ‘study buddy’ that you can practice Japanese with?

In the beginning, you may want to let everyone that you are ‘shy’ and that you are looking for a similar partner. This may help to put you at ease.

Of course, if your being intimidated is too much of a problem, you may need to work with someone who will give you confidence and help you build success as you make progress (like a counselor).

Give it a try, and let us know how it is coming along.

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I have this problem also. My way of solving it was to simply wait to speak until I felt I could express basic ideas relatively easily. Not perfectly, by any means, but when all I could say was my name and country, I didn’t bother to practice speaking.

Of course, then I moved to Japan and I spent the first 3 months in a state of constant panic, so maybe the way I actually solved it was to feel so scared that I eventually just couldn’t be scared anymore, and now I feel no embarrassment or shame even when I make mistakes. (Although sometimes interactions with people still send me into a spiral, but it’s usually because of other things, not my language ability.)

Edit to add: talking to yourself and writing are good ways to practice without social anxiety. I am still trying to do those things more, so that would be my first recommendation.

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I totally get you! Social anxiety all my life even in my native language, and speaking Japanese all these processes of communication are so different. Sadly you really have no choice but to jump into it- I think a lot of people make the mistake of saying that they’ll start having conversations once their Japanese gets to a certain point, but really conversation is such a different skill than reading or listening or grammar. You cannot develop your conversation skills without speaking. And making mistakes. And maybe even getting laughed at a little bit.

My biggest hurdle was learning that there are times when in English I feel I’m being laughed at, but from the perspective of the Japanese people around me, they’re laughing with me*.* My first time I ever spoke Japanese to some of my Japanese friends in college (whom I’d known for a few months already) I used the honorific -san because that’s what I’d always used in class. I kid you not, they were on their knees laughing at me for 2 minutes. I wanted to jump out the window. But after chatting with them more, I realized they’re not bullying me or making fun of my Japanese, we’re connecting. We’re having a good time. And if you wanna have a good time, you can’t be worried about doing everything right. If every sentence has to be perfect, if you feel like you need to articulate just right so things don’t come off wrong, you’ll end up saying nothing at all.

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