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What date do you have set out for yourself to become fluent in Japanese? 1 year? 2 years? Tomorrow?
What are you doing to achieve your goal each and every day? Share your story here to motivate your fellow Fugus! Who knows, maybe you’ll even learn a few tricks!
2-3 years would be good! Realistically though 4 years would be fine to be at least semi-fluent, I want to teach English in Japan but I need a degree first, so it’ll be 4 years before I even maybe get to live in Japan for real. I’ll be living at Tokyo University on placement for a year on my uni course which will be mighty helpful for language learning!
At the moment I tend to do a chapter of Fugu a day, then all my Anki reviews and sometimes I spend 2 or so days just reviewing if I’ve learnt a bunch of new vocab lately. I’m not having too many issues with motivation, but learning lots of vocab makes me feel dumb sometimes, I always beat myself up over not remembering stuff fast enough. I did however get through the nouny adverbs list really fast which was surprising!
I have a Read the Kanji subscription so I’m going to dig deeper into that soon too, and I wrote my first Lang-8 journal last night; I was pretty surprised at how much feedback I got and how quick it came in, will be reviewing all of that later.
…now though I need to play some Battlefield 3, it just finished installing!
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This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by
Luke.
Well tomorrow for sure, that would be FANTASTIC.
But I had been planning on about 2 years or so. It’s the end of my 2nd month of Textfugu soon and I’m going to start on Chapter 3 of Season 3 today. I think If I can keep a consistant, steady pace, and do ALL of my Anki decks regardless of how “old” or useless they may seem as I advance. I’ve been trying to have as much Japanese going on around me as possible. Listening to Japanese radio/ talk. Lots of animes, like… lots. I even changed my FB to Japanese which surprisingly isn’t as difficult as one would think XD. And whenever I learn something new, I have this weird old 70′s manga I bought for a dollar at some thift store, I go and dig through it trying to find everything I know (one day I will understand you~!) Eventually when I transfer to University I would like to visit Japan through an exchange program. I cannot wait!
Was 3 years for me, I started in January 2011. I guess i’m pretty much okay with where I am. I’ll try to focus more and improve reading/writing skill. Listening start to be good and speaking is crappy, no surprise, I don’t practice much ^^
Just trying to learn / practice vocabs/kanji. Listening to movies, anime, music. I’ll start reading and writing on a regular basic after my semester, december. That’s about that
2 years is perhaps a bit too far-fetched, because I work slowly, but I’d like to be able to at least read and understand Japanese fairly well by then. Speaking and writing will take longer, for sure.
I was thinking about going to university to study Japanese phiLOLogy, and if I got fairly good at Japanese by then, it would dramatically decrease my work load (plus I’d impress my lecturers, haha), and I would be able to rely on it to better my Japanese, while also learning about the culture and about how to translate things, since I wanna be a translator…
Well, that’s the plan! Plans may change :p
Define “fluency”. Always the biggest hurdle when trying to ask/answer questions like these.
To everyone else who is saying 2 or 3 years: I don’t mean to be buzz kill but that time period doesn’t seem reasonable for anything you could call “fluency”. Definitely do your best and keep studying every day, but I think 2 years is a little lofty a goal. Life gets in the way. It does. Motivation comes and goes. Most importantly though, anything near “fluency” takes a LOT of practice, experience, dedication and immersion; I can’t see anyone fitting enough of all of that in 2 years with ANY language, let alone Japanese.
Sorry to dampen your spirits! XD I just think you should worry less about things far in the future. Make short-term goals. Make mid-term goals. Try to suck a little less each day ;)
皆さん、頑張って一生懸命・勉強して下さい！＾ー＾ – “Keep at it and study hard everyone!”
Oh, and I started Japanese last September, only properly studying since January because of work. My goal for having the language skills to become a normally functioning Japanese adult (if I wanted to) is… roughly… 4/5 more years, longer if I don’t manage to travel to Japan before then (I don’t have the time or willpower to try AJATT’s immersion method just now >.<). Bear in mind when Koichi was writing his Koichi-ben blog in Japanese, he'd been studying for about 8 years already IIRC and was still posting to lang-8 to get natives to check his writing and correct it. Something to think about.
EDIT: Actually, make that 4/5 years (or longer) for “semi-fluency”, whatever *that* is… It’ll take a lot longer to be near the same level as a regular native adult, when you think about it.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by
MisterM2402 [Michael].
You are right, fluency isn’t what I meant with this goal. I was more talking about ” comfortable communication skills ” meaning I can manage any japanese environnement. But yeah like you said, not meaning being actually fluent or not making mistakes. That would be too long on my own, not living in Japan.
Yeah I guess I should have said, “Able to hold a basic conversation and recognize most things comfortably” XD
Tomorrow, I’m going to be completely fluent: my speaking will be amazing, and I’ll know enough kanji to fill the Grand Canyon… and then my alarm clock is going to ring, I’ll wake up, scream, “DAMN IT YANDA,” (because you should blame everything on Yanda) and continue finishing chapter 08 of Season 01.
I don’t have a concrete goal in mind for when I’ll be fluent; I’m just cheering myself on to continue my pace of 2 hours of studying every night (afternoons on weekends). THOUGH, if I could be a bit ambitious, I’d like to be able to understand my Pixiv settings in Japanese by the time I turn 19 next year.
5 years sounds realistic.
Thinking about how long time it has taken to learn to speak English proporly, made me realise that it’ll take quite a bit more than just 2 years. And Japanese is so complex compared to English, and of course you have to learn the kanji as well.
5 years for fluency. Maybe 2 to be able to understand most stuff, but we will see… I have been learning for 4 months, and if I keep my current progress then I should know alot by the time I have studied for 1 year. Only problem is that I will run out of TextFugu material pretty soon :(Honestly, I don’t think Japanese is very complex compared to English. Its grammar is very different, yes. The writing is difficult as heck. But as far as grammar goes, it appears to be way more organized than English, with its… how many tenses was that again… 14? 16? I MIGHT change my mind once I get into the more advanced stuff, but that’s only because I already know English fairly well.
It took me about 9 years to get to this level of English I’m at now, and I still wouldn’t consider myself fully fluent. Still, I would be delirious if I could speak Japanese as well as I can English right now. Those 9 years consisted mostly of classes at school, so with spending some time studying Japanese every day I assume it’ll take a bit less. I think 2 years of studying 1-2 hours every day (well, ALMOST every day, it’s never gonna be every single day) is a realistic goal if we talk about being able to hold a casual conversation, but it’s impossible to set a deadline for complete fluency, I agree :p
Well, Khatzumoto claims to have learned Japanese to fluency in 18 months, but that’s Khatzumoto. Nobody is quite as hardcore as him xD
I know a few Japanese people that would say the exact opposite; English is more complex than Japanese, and if you think about it from a speaking perspective they are 100% correct.
Some of the Asian languages just look incredibly intimidating which is why I think a lot of people look at Japanese and apply a whole other level of difficulty to it. I did the same initially, it’s a lot harder to get started with a language using different character sets than it is to know English then start learning a bit of French.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by
AnonymousJapanese is not “Complex” because it’s Japanese, it’s “Complex” because of learning it from English. Neither English nor Japanese are difficult, it’s the differences between the two that make the transition hard.
Wouldn’t you argue that the writing system is more complex?
I think 5 years is only if you a) do a college course (Sllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww) b) spend less than maybe 1 hour per day or c) work at a very slow pace (not that there’s anything wrong with it btw).
I think that if you aim to spend 1:30 to 2 hours working on Japanese a day, try to have some Japanese in your normal day and either have a native speaker to practice with or something similar, you could do it in 2………ish years?
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This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by
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