(lemmy.world seemed to be struggling yesterday as my reply didn’t seem to show up here, only on the lemmyworld instance, so I’m trying again with another account on another server, and deleting my old post)

I totally know how you feel. I was stuck in intermediate purgatory hell for a very long time. I could speak somewhat decently and travel on my own in Japan, but conversations remained fairly superficial. My vocab was still limited because I couldn’t consume Japanese media, mainly because I couldn’t read well so I couldn’t read books and manga, and couldn’t use JP subtitle to better understand what I was watching.

Trying to improve also I tried many of the methods you mentioned but it didn’t seem to work.

Revisiting my old college Japanese textbooks would bore me. I got Tobira but I had forgotten most of my kanji I had learned in college, so it was too hard for me to read.

Immersion helped the most, but like you said, I’d forget words too quickly, so I would get demotivated to continue.

I finally had a hallelujah moment when I discovered these three things:

• Discovering mnemonic-based kanji learning systems like Wanikani or RTK (Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig) so I could learn a method to quickly learn any kanji I encountered. Kanji was no longer my mortal enemy.
• Subscribing to Satori Reader so I could improve my reading ability from low-intermediate to a more advanced level, and finally make the transition to reading native materials.
• Using Anki 3rd-party sentence mining tools so I could instantly make cards from my immersion material, so I no longer forgot the words I was learning. Because the words were from things I was interested in, it made the words easier to learn. These tools also added audio and images from the TV show, anime, video, etc, to add context to the word so I was more likely to remember it.

That was it. Basically the key was learning how to read proficiently, so I could easily read novels and newspapers, play videogames and visual novels, and read JP subtitles as I watched TV shows, read transcripts as I listened to podcasts, in order to improve my listening ability.

Also because I could read quickly, I could start shadowing TV shows, YouTube videos, podcasts, repeated what I had heard, which improve my speaking ability.

But I’m not going to lie. It requires a lot of pain at first. It was really really really tough, especially for the first six months, because reading Japanese felt like a billion brain cells exploding over and over, but it slowly became better day by day. Just read everyday and stay consistent. Satori Reader was invaluable in the beginning, and it made the transition to reading native materials much smoother, but my first few novels were still a really big challenge at first.

Once you can use Japanese dictionaries and resources to look up Japanese words and grammar, you’ll improve a lot too. I eventually tried to do everything in Japanese, even when looking things up regarding my own hobbies.

TIP: To find suitable reading material, you can go through learnnatively.com to find books and manga appropriate to your current level. Also try to put a priority on increasing your vocab to get it to around N2 level (around 6k words), when you can start reading non-children books, but at 4k to 6k words, which is N3-ish level, you could still try to read N2 stuff if you don’t mind the challenge.

You mentioned it takes too long to make cards in Anki but only if you do it manually. By using tools like Migaku Tools, Memento, ASBplayer, Yomichan, Language Reactor, I could study and sentence mine from Japanese TV shows on Netflix YouTube videos, downloaded anime, etc.

I know you said it takes too long to make cards, but only if you do it manually. With using these various, I could quickly make multimedia Anki cards with a few button presses so it literally took seconds to make.

For reading Japanese books. I used ttsu-ttsu reader and Yomichan via my web browser, which also let me quickly make Anki cards. On my iOS devices, I used Immersion Reader to do the same thing. If reading manga on my computer, I used Mokuro with Yomichan.

I learned around 10 to 30 new cards per day, depending on my schedule, but my yearly average was around 15 new cards per day.

While reviewing my my cards, whenever I didn’t understand something in the sentence on my card, I’d look it up. If it was a new grammar point, I’d make another card for it. If I had to ask someone else for help, like a native, or in a Japanese language forum, I’d add some notes to my card explaining the difficult section for me.

Since these were sentences taken from my immersion material, it helped me to further enjoy my immersion material so it never felt like work to me.

I think I already knew around 3k-ish words when I started? So after a year and a half I knew around 10k to 12k words and around 2.5k to 2.8k kanji (I think N1 level is around 10k words and 2k kanji), and I could read fairly decently by then but still nowhere as fast as I could read in English. A lot of manga and videogames were easy to read though, as well as slice-of-life TV shows and slice-of-life light novels. A lot of mystery and cop shows were easy to understand as well, but some variety shows could be hard still.

I could read typical adult novels fairly well, like horror, mystery, fantasy, self-help books. I but still needed to keep a dictionary around since a lot of writers like to use a diverse vocab, so I could still get tripped up. I could also listen to audiobooks without reading the the book first, but even now it still depends on the topic and the author.

It was around year three when it became everything became much smoother, once my vocab started going beyond 16k words and over 3k kanji, but I still have room for lots of improvement.

I didn’t speak much during that time, aside from some shadowing practice, so I’m trying to improve my conversational skills now. My writing skills remain really bad though so I’m trying to keep a journal now, and I’ve been trying to email and text more in Japanese now.

I skipped over a lot of stuff, especially on details with learning kanji, or how I looked for sentences to mine, but I hope that gives you an idea of what worked for me.

If you have further questions, feel free to ask!

So if you are struggling with native media, I would recommend bilingual media where you can see both Japanese and English together. I’ve never used this site, but here is just an example I found of what I’m talking about: https://getiago.com/

When watching something, don’t worry about every single word. Once you notice the same word occur two or three times, then focus on making sure you understand it. With bilingual media, you should rarely have to bother looking something up. Even though they are not perfect word for word translations, you can usually get the gist of it. If you use SRS, then pick out those important recurring words and focus on them.

It depends what you want to learn, just improving your Japanese level overall is a hard thing to do. You have to break it down into reading comprehension, writing, listening and speaking. For reading comprehension and writing I’d say get an intermediate book like Tobira but if you don’t want to do that pick up a relatively easy 小説 and work through that. Note down grammar and vocab you don’t know and make an effort to properly understand everything. It’ll be a lot to get through at first but you’ll speed up quickly.

I like to do listening passively as well as actively. There’s plenty of listening exercises on YouTube and better ones that come with textbooks. There’s also a really good podcast for around your level called にほんごザッツ談 that is great for passive listening. Music and TV even with the subtitles on definitely helps.

For speaking there really only is speaking to native people. You can get teachers online to do video calls with or use the app HelloTalk for free to meet people. I did this for about a year before I came to Japan and it really helps. It gets you used to talking on the phone, texting in a normal way. And some people will want to do proper lesson style calls where you can improve speaking a lot.

I am selective about what shows and movies I watch. They have to be at my language level. It is important that, with my knowledge of the language, I can understand what’s going on. Otherwise, it will just be frustrating. I don’t necessarily have to know all the words and grammar because, over time, I’ll automatically pick things up and improve. For me, the whole point of immersion is that it does not feel like learning. That’s how I stay motivated. So, if a movie is too hard to understand for me, then I just stop watching it and look for something else. As I improve, I will be able to watch more and more movies. That’s how I learned English, and I hope it will work for Japanese as well.

Whenever possible, I avoid looking up words and try to deduce their meaning from the context. If a word is used very frequently and I still don’t understand it, then I look it up with an iPhone app called “Nihongo”. It does have OCR search (it can read Kanji from photos), you can draw Kanji with your finger, use radicals, or write the pronunciation with hiragana or romanji and I almost always find what I am looking for. I am sure there are similar dictionary apps for Android as well.

I don’t use flashcards because they are boring. If a word does not come up frequently enough for me to remember it, then I probably won’t need it anyway.

This is how I do things, and it may not work for you, but I hope that you’ll at least get some ideas of how your learning can become less frustrating.

You can immerse yourself into stuff like online articles, blog posts, or Twitter (yes I know, Japanese people don’t seem willing to leave it). This way you can read at your own pace without having to chase after what you hear. You can install a browser add-on like Yomichan for Firefox, that lets you look up words by just hovering over them while pressing Shift. It makes reading 100x easier.

There are also some websites that offer articles for each reading level, such as https://yomujp.com/n5/ and https://www.nihongoschool.co.uk/nihongoblog .

Finally, what I can really recommend is to find some Japanese friends to chat with. Difficult, I know. Back in my day I searched on Skype, I wouldn’t know what to recommend now, sorry. I first did this when I was around N5 level and totally fell flat on my face, but when I was at N4 I could easily hold a conversation about a variety of topics.

I swear I could have written this post. Here’s my 0.02:

1. I totally understand where you’re coming from. That feeling of not being able to understand even a single sentence without having to look up a word or two is just… the worst. Basically, I’ve just had to come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to 100% understand everything. Heck, man, I live in Japan, and I doubt I truly understand 100% of any given (nontrivial) conversation. So, my advice is to give up. Give up on trying to 完全に understand every sentence, every word. Be okay with ambiguity. And I know, it feels like “I know every word in the sentence except the most important ones!” Sucks, but you’ll enjoy Japanese a lot more if you release yourself from the need to grok every tittle.
2. Tobira was the very next textbook I studied after Genki II. If you’ve finished Genki II and retain most of it, it shouldn’t be too advanced for you. I know the Internet romanticizes the idea of learning languages quickly, but really nothing beats time in the language stretching your skills. If it’s not too frustrating for you, try studying the textbook a little more contemplatively rather than speedrunning it.
3. Believe it or not, you actually have an advantage over me, despite the fact that I live in Japan. Japanese people aren’t exactly warm and forthcoming in casual conversation with foreigners, so I wouldn’t describe living in Japan as a constant state of immersion, especially because I work remotely for an English-speaking software company. Your advantage is in the consumption of Japanese media: I’m not a huge fan of anime/manga, and I don’t have time for video games. I’ve noticed that my friends who do like anime in particular have much better listening skills than I do. Simple exposure will get you used to speaking styles, etc. and you’ll be able to pick out the difficult words in time.
4. Key insight: if a character says a complicated word once, and it’s never used again for the rest of the show, don’t worry about learning it. Media consumption is a natural SRS. If they don’t use the word again, chances are it won’t be worth learning (at this stage in your learning). We’re not targeting 100% comprehension, after all.

Best of luck to you!

I mean, this is kinda the rub. Once you hit intermediate, you’re going to be doing a lot of work.

Looking stuff up too often has turned me off of many books. I instead opted for slice-of-life manga that my wife got me and isn’t so heavy on words/grammar I don’t know. This comes with the obvious downside of learning less quickly in some ways. Other than that, the options are to drill kanji, vocab, and grammar with apps or lessons to make those shows/books/games easier.

I’m not at that high of a level yet (maybe N3) but I personally use a dictionary (Takoboto, on Android) that can easily add words to an anki deck (granted they don’t have audio but that’s fine for me (and I already did a 6K premade deck with audio)).

I find new words through watching shows, listening to music or reading.

I also go to local meetups where I meet with other Japanese learners and I talk to a Japanese person weekly (in exchange for practicing English with them).

For grammar I watched most of Cure Dolly’s Organic Japanese playlist.

For me this is a great combination and I think I’m progressing well.

Hope this helps.

Edit:

I’m also pretty much the sole poster over at lemmy.world’s WriteStreakJapanese. Maybe consider writing something from time to time. I think it can greatly aid you in finding your weak-spots.

I think the diversification of your study methods and making habits out of things that would otherwise be too boring to do really help me stay motivated.

Feel free to ask away if you have any questions.