掲示板 Forums - How to learn Japanese at a good pace

I’m not sure what complex sentences means to you. If you mean the type of sentences typically found in newspaper articles, you’ll have to work very hard to get there in only one year. Most students require three or more years of study before they feel they can tackle a newspaper.

First of all, there is no "best" study method that fits everybody. "Complex sentences" is also a very loose term. We need to consider: Do you want production (producing the language in spoken and written form)? Or do you want reception (processing the language through listening and reading)?

Your drive is crucial - motivation is the fuel that will carry you through both the good and the ugly parts of learning Japanese. The first few months will be especially difficult; however, this is also when you'll learn the most and lay the groundwork for what's to come.

All the people who quit learning Japanese - and I mean all of them - share the same problem: they have no plan. Learning is a search; you need to have questions you want to answer. Without questions, hence without a plan, you'll end up searching for something that doesn't exist. It's like reading a text and when you are done you do not remember a thing.

How much time do you have? Language learning isn't measured in years, months, or even days - it's measured in hours. So ask yourself: How many hours a day can you dedicate to learning? Can you stay effective throughout that entire time?

Let me introduce the concept of "vocab spheres" - vocabulary that's covered through certain media. Take myself as an example: I used to love reading fantasy novels, so I became well-versed in terms related to magic, mana, dragons, and various military and imperial concepts. When I first started talking to natives about two years ago, I could tell them I was a level 10 fire mage

, but I couldn't handle a basic day-to-day conversation. Did that mean my Japanese was bad? After all, I'd spent well over 500 hours learning it at that point. On the contrary, I was able to pick-up most fantasy novels and read them no problem. What I am saying is that you grow knowledge in the spheres you expose yourself to. While fantasy novels gave me specific technical vocabulary, slice-of-life stories overlap much more with conversational Japanese, making them more practical for everyday communication.

Research strongly suggests that reception is superior to production in many ways, which makes sense - after all, you can't produce what you don't have, just as you can't pour water from an empty bucket. Research also came to the conclusion that you typically need to see a word in context about ten times before your brain can accurately reproduce it. This varies depending on the word's learning burden (how easily you can link it to concepts in your native language for example). The challenge with Japanese is that most words have a relatively high learning burden to begin with - another factor that can lead to people quitting.

As you can see, this isn't a simple question to answer. Let me share something from the bottom of my heart: don't fall into learning traps or believe people claiming they've found the holy grail of study methods. While many methods exist - and maybe they did work for those individuals - there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Watch others, take what you need, and build your own method based on what works for you, but never simply copy. If you don't need Japanese urgently at the level you've described, I highly suggest taking more time to learn it. This will make for a more enjoyable, less stressful, and less frustrating experience.

I wish you the very best. You got this! ;)

If you would like to learn Japanese, first I would figure out how to say the language first because most of times learning how to speak languages are much easier then learning how to write in them, like with Spanish but I would do everything first and focus on the letters/words I need to focus on and learn them until you finally get it . And your pace doesn't matter because most people take time to learn new languages since they are use to their first languages since they were born with learning,writing and speaking it!