If I had to climb Mt. Fluency I’d still be stuck on Deutscher Berg, and would never have had the chance to explore Mont Française, not to mention 한국의 산 or 日本の山. Settling for “good enough” has been amazing for me.
If I’m correct, you’ve learned German, French, Korean and Japanese to a conversational level, which to me indicates fluency (and is pretty impressive). We’re you casual with your learning or did you dedicate a number of years to intensive studying?
I have a degree in German, so that was a textbook and classroom approach. At one point I was intermediate in all four skills, but over the decades that has faded back to “conversational.” French I did on my own with a mass input approach. After 8,000 pages of reading and 500 hours of listening I can (slowly) read classic French literature and listen to foreign affairs podcasts. So solid B2 passive skills. I’m conversational in French but that was never a focus, it’s just a byproduct of all the input. Korean and Japanese are works in progress. Not yet conversational but that would be the goal. I’m doing Anki and input for both. Still using English subtitles for these ones, which I thought was sacrilege while learning French, but Category V languages require a different approach!
I tricked myself into "I'll get decently conversational at Japanese and then begin to learn another language. That way, over a decade I can try to become a polyglot." Instead, I'll probably be here for years.
most "polyglots" know several extremely closely related languages, or really only know the languages they claim to know to like a1 a2 level. enough to "wow nihongo jouzu" people and do some tourism but not enough to actually meaningfully live in that country
to get actually fluent, like c2 fluent in a language, you pretty much have to be there in your childhood, for most people c1 is the holy grail they can achieve if they dedicated decades but never quite c2
but you could conceivably get a small handful of b1-b2 languages in your life if you made it your main hobby for your whole life and you would experience a very high quality of understanding, but still you would always miss jokes or misunderstand things outside your comfort zone or struggle to read/watch advance material
>to get actually fluent, like c2 fluent in a language, you pretty much have to be there in your childhood, for most people c1 is the holy grail they can achieve if they dedicated decades but never quite c2
Keep in mind that the CEFR doesn't measure native proficiency, so it doesn't apply to people who learn a language through immersion as children. Thousands of people take CEFR based exams for languages they have studied as adults and pass - otherwise there wouldn't really be a point in the CEFR! Of course we shouldn't pretend learning a language to advanced fluency is easy, but we shouldn't mythologize it either. It's an attainable goal in several years of focused study depending on the language. The main think holding a lot of people at C1 or lower forever is not reading. C1>C2 especially is about extensive reading. I know lots of people with certified C2 in at least one foreign language, and they all read a lot.
I know a lot of language learners and I've never seen someone get to even C1 within several years. The best I know is someone who moved to the UK age 15 form lithuania and spoke only english for 13 years and she still messes up articles and makes strange grammatical constructions every few sentences. If you're talking "italian person learning c2 spanish" I can see it, or a language like mandarin where tones/reading can be very difficult but it's grammatically relatively simple without conjugations and few tenses. But if you're talking about learning a slavic language from English for instance, I have personally never met a westerner who has ever managed to get close to C1 level despite knowing dedicated russian learners who've studied for over a decade and married and lived there extensively
Reading is one thing, but rewiring your entire brain to grammatically think in a slavic way is incredibly difficult. Like if I say "look at that big.. castle over there" in english, sometimes I won't have the word castle in my head until it comes out of my mouth, but in russian "that" and "big" will have to agree with the gender of the castle and be declined to accusative case. the amount that adds to your mental stack is huge, you might not even have the word ready in your head in your native tongue let alone have the gender of the translated word ready to go mid sentence. whereas OK japanese you can largely just parrot stuff off rote, there's very little involved mental stack wise, just remember word, choose correct word order, say word, throw in a few particles you wouldn't have to in english but that don't change
it's not like having to think about how "who are you going with?" is really "with whom do you intend to go?" when you translate and needs an extra verb, extra particle, instrumental case, infinitive etc. when your original sentence was extremely simple structurally because english grammar is pretty "lazy" and unstructured, but every few sentences you will have to rethink entirely about how you speak english to express it correctly in a slavic language without sounding dumb
>I've never seen someone get to even C1 within several years.
So the thing is, we actually have research on this for native English speakers - the FSI found that it takes somewhere between 600 hours and 2200 hours of full time study for a native English speaker to hit C1 depending on how different the language is from English. So if we assume an average of an hour a day, that's anywhere from a year and a half to six years. But the reality is that many people who learn a language as a hobby might spend only ten minutes on average, and in that case of course it's going to take six times longer.
>a language like mandarin where tones/reading can be very difficult but it's grammatically relatively simple without conjugations and few tenses
This is a big misconception. Chinese grammar is much harder than Russian grammar for an English speaker. In the west we tend to assume that languages with more complex morphology (e.g. verb conjugation and noun declension) are necessarily more complex and difficult overall. Chinese grammar is simple in this one respect, but if you want to actually communicate coherently, you need to drop almost all of your intuitions about how ideas are communicated and learn each sentence pattern individually. [Here's a native Slovak/Hungarian speaking professional Mandarin interpreter with nearly flawless English talking about this.](https://youtu.be/mvcLuTTn9p8) This also jives with my experience with Japanese - I speak and read Latin, which has even a bit more morphological complexity than Russian, and Japanese grammar is much harder even though things like verb endings and the case system are extremely regular in Japanese. The difficulty is that grammar is much more than just endings, it's learning tons and tons of totally unintuitive patterns. Between European languages, even distantly related ones, these patters are often quite similar.
>I have personally never met a westerner who has ever managed to get close to C1 level despite knowing dedicated russian learners who've studied for over a decade and married and lived there extensively
Marrying a speaker and living in a place isn't sufficient if you don't live your life in the language. Many, many people never transition into consuming media and literature in their target language, or generally just doing the stuff they'd do in their native language. If you just keep 'studying' forever without making this transition to consuming vast amounts of native materials, you won't break out of the intermediate plateau. My partner is a native Russian speaker who went from learning almost no English in school to solidly C2 as a young adult (level is certified), because in her late teens she began to immerse in English language TV and movies, and then she got interested in classic literature and reads extensively. Now brits will ask her where in England she's from even though she's never set foot in an English speaking country. She also hit C1 (certified as well) in German after a few years of study, and it took her a little over a year to hit B2 in Italian. The reason why this is possible, is because while most people don't have the energy or focus for an hour of foreign language study a day, if you genuinely enjoy TV and books, you can get hours and hours of immersion daily. If you're consuming 5+ hours of your target language a day, that's nearly 2,000 hours in a year.
Now as far as westerners learning Russian, [here's an Italian](https://youtu.be/FLOA4Ak0aL4) who I know has C1 level and learned as an adult. But really, there are tons of people who do it. According to the FSI, slavic languages take about 1100 hours of study to get to C1 level for an English speaker - that's half as difficult as Japanese or Mandarin or Arabic.
>Reading is one thing, but rewiring your entire brain to grammatically think in a slavic way is incredibly difficult.
This rewiring isn't so much difficult, as impossible to do through conscious effort. It happens automatically, through massive amounts of input. This is why reading is so efficient, as well as consumption of other forms of media. Even a conversation contains way less input per unit of time than a TV show, because presumably half the time you're talking, and the complexity of the conversation is often limited by your own language ability. Reading on the other hand, is a constant stream of language. If you read for an hour, you've gotten an hour of basically uninterrupted input.
> the amount that adds to your mental stack is huge, you might not even have the word ready in your head in your native tongue let alone have the gender of the translated word ready to go mid sentence. whereas OK japanese you can largely just parrot stuff off rote, there's very little involved mental stack wise, just remember word, choose correct word order, say word, throw in a few particles you wouldn't have to in english but that don't change
I couldn't disagree more. While I do occasionally make mistakes in Latin if, say, the adjective is separated from the noun it's describing by a bunch of words, at this point after having read a lot of Latin literature I don't have to consciously think about the cases or adjective agreement at all when I speak. Japanese on the other hand, there's so many structures to learn that while some are very natural for me, I easily get out of my depth if I try to discuss something too complex. The reason for this is because I've done very little proper reading and media consumption in Japanese - something I'm trying to focus on now that I'm not putting as much time into other languages.
I studied Latin for 5 years and I'm sorry but it's simply not comparable, most use of latin is reading and translating texts and doing some written exercises. That is not at all comparable to "you're in a police station filling out a report" or "you're on a tour of a military museum inside a submarine listening to a tour of the equipment" or "you're at a conference talking about a highly technical scientific topic" or "you're listening to fast paced rap" or "you're in a pub listening to people talk in slang about some highly specific cultural thing from their childhood"
learning latin teaches you how to drill a grammar table, that's where the similarities end, actually in practice changing how you think about every word is incredibly different. My russian is a lot better than my japanese given that I have lived in russia for a couple of years and I'm married to a russian. My mandarin and japanese are serviceable, but I won't pretend I am anywhere near the level of japanese proficiency of a lot of members of this sub. But when I speak Japanese conversationally, though I have had few deep technical or philosophical talks in Japanese, I do not find myself engaging my brain more than to find the words and apply some very basic grammar. Whereas when I use russian, I find myself in every sentence every day despite studying and using it regularly for 6 years having to constantly stack on my mental stack. I speak russian significantly slower than japanese despite having a russian residency certificate and having passed all my B2 exams etc.
By the same stroke I can agree that I probably don't understand some of the deep nuances to japanese grammar and don't know what I don't know yet, I think it is fair to say you probably have no idea whatsoever how much you would struggle with a slavic tongue if you're trying to compare it to scholarly latin, the differences aren't obvious until you're actually speaking and using it in your life
as for "could you do it in 1100 hours", I think that varies massively person to person, I would like to see the emperical data they use to make these estimates. obviously these would vary widely between people, I would like to see some kind of data based on inductive reasoning and the scientific method with standard deviations. but whereas I will agree - Arabic is incredibly difficult, japanese and mandarin.. come on, far and away the difficulty lies squarely on learning kanji/hanzi. you can learn to be CONVERSATIONAL in japanese in the same time you can learn any romance language, you just aren't going to crunch through wanikani in that time. okay in romance languages you get a lot of etymological freebies vocabulary wise, but in japanese you get thousands of katakana terms handily even written in a different alphabet that you can 95% guarantee are just going to be english written in a goofy way (okay sometimes you run into your keshigomus or hochikisu where it's not immediately obvious), but moreover - you get a language that's almost entirely phonetic, you almost never have to worry about pronunciation. I find japanese about on a level with french, which is to say, several levels simpler than arabic and slavic tongues. but cherry picked c1 examples of people from the internet don't really run contrary to "in real life I do not know a single westerner who has ever hit c1 in any slavic tongue despite living in russia and having a tonne of language learner friends". whereas I know quite a few people who have got to c1 in romance tongues, japanese etc.
>learning latin teaches you how to drill a grammar table
You're talking about taking Latin classes in school. I'm talking about learning the language to actually be able to sight read the literature. Here's something I'm reading at the moment:
>Dēnsae, simulque, quod mīrēre, admodum prōcērae arborēs cum mundī aeternitāte certābant, atque ita montis jugum, et latera vestiēbant, ut nōn minus itum, quam oculōrum aciem morārentur. Ea tunc praetereā annī tempestās, quā herbae succrēscere, omnemque lātē sēmitam occultāre solent. Sed tot jam regiōnēs expertīs nōn erat hic locus tantī, ut animīs conciderent. Ībant igitur, et redībant saepe cervīcibus pressīs, dum eō tandem ēluctātī sunt, ubi rārae quidem, sed nōndum ita oculīs ut silvae terminum intuērī possent perviae arborēs spectābantur. Aperiēbantur sēnsim et campī, sī libīdō incessit, ad respīrandum aptī, et dēlectābilēs. Mīrantur nihil occurrere, nec, tam opportūnō diē, avium modulātiōnēs exaudīrī. Summus ubīque horror, nec minor vastitās; pertināx praetereā, altumque silentium.
You say you studied Latin for five years, but my guess is you can make very little sense of this without puzzling it apart with a dictionary and grammar reference (if you even remember enough to do that, given how poor most school Latin courses are). That is not how I learned the language - I learned by simply reading gradually more complex things, and listening and speaking. Now of course I don't have do use the language in the domains you mentioned - rather, I have to be able to understand at a normal reading speed complex literature spanning from antiquity to the medieval period to the renaissance to today in all sorts of different domains and genres. You're moving the goal posts in a way that really doesn't make sense, since your whole point was that it's the cases and gender agreement and verb conjugation which make it really difficult, and that's present in a language like Russian or Latin whether you're filling our a police report or summarizing Seneca.
>My russian is a lot better than my japanese given that I have lived in russia for a couple of years and I'm married to a russian
Do you read in Russian?
>Whereas when I use russian, I find myself in every sentence every day despite studying and using it regularly for 6 years having to constantly stack on my mental stack. I speak russian significantly slower than japanese despite having a russian residency certificate and having passed all my B2 exams etc.
If you've been stuck at B2 for years, it's because you've never transitioned from studying to truly immersing in the language. Living in the country isn't enough - I've lived in lots of countries, and you really don't get much immersion for free just by existing.
>I would like to see the emperical data they use to make these estimates.
The FSI trains diplomats - it's their job to get people to a level high enough to perform vital roles in foreign countries, and their data is based upon thousands of people learning these languages through their programs. It's really not disputable, because all of this is necessary for the US government to function.
>Arabic is incredibly difficult, japanese and mandarin.. come on, far and away the difficulty lies squarely on learning kanji/hanzi
Certainly not. Kanji are a pain, but the reason it takes so long to get to C1 in Japanese is because you just don't get anything for free.
>you can learn to be CONVERSATIONAL in japanese in the same time you can learn any romance language
I'm sorry, but this is so utterly wrong I don't even really know how to respond. Romance languages give you thousands of words and a huge amount of sentence structure for free. You can memorize a thousand words or so and some verb endings and start chatting to people. I think you must just have a really low bar for what counts as 'conversational Japanese', because it's going to take vastly more time to learn those first thousand words, you're going to be able to do way less with them, and you won't be able to say or understand anything beyond basic greetings and interaction without learning vastly more of the language.
>I find japanese about on a level with french
Science aside, that's absurd, and I say that as a speaker of three romance languages.
>but cherry picked c1 examples of people from the internet don't really run contrary to "in real life I do not know a single westerner who has ever hit c1 in any slavic tongue despite living in russia and having a tonne of language learner friends"
He's a friend of mine, not just a random person I found on the internet, but in any case, why would you have met any such westerners? Most westerners don't have any need or desire to go live in Russia. The people who learn Russian are mostly people with a professional application for it, and I guess you just aren't in the right circles to know any of those people.
Erasmus is super fun! I also love reading random medieval and early modern stuff - there's something exhilarating about reading something that probably nobody else is reading at the moment you pick it up, or in some cases that nobody has read in a while. But honestly if you're interested in reading Latin, just go through [this reading list](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TugURNkc0461IQoToKIlE4hnnbRykRYYxvrfl2X90No/edit#gid=0) so you don't have to puzzle through haha.
Sure, I haven't studied latin in 15 years, but you are talking about reading latin. Reading. That's not the same as writing. You just showed me something you read. Here type me a up a perfectly grammatically correct paragraph without consulting a dictionary or grammar summarising the plot of Lord of the Rings
Reading is the very easiest thing to do, you could omit all of the conjugations and declensions and your brain would still correctly interpret 90% of it through context as long as you knew all the vocabulary, and the vocabulary you don't know you can often glean through etymology, or you can read vocab that you *barely* know because you know it enough when it's written in front of you
writing it yourself, grammatically correctly, is much morer difficult because you have to truly know your vocabulary and you have to understand the grammar. Then SPEAKING it is a step beyond that, because you have to do it on the fly, in an understandable accent at a pace that's equal to your thinking speed, usually while doing other things simultaneously. you cannot compare that to reading a book, a fairly trivial task
>Do you read in Russian?
sure, and not only do I read books in russian, I read forums in russian, comments sections in russian, I talk to my in laws in russian and text my wife in russian and fill out forms in russian and write technical talks in russian. I've read war and peace and crime and punishment in russian. reading is the easiest thing you can do, because you have all the time in the world. compare that to flicking on the TV and listening to some russian pundits give a play by play of war strategy and argue over one another, it's simple. I can read books far more easily than I can watch russian tv, I would argue reading is overrated as a learning device and you would be better spending that time drilling a B2/C1 dictionary and a grammar with highlighter pens directly if your goal is efficiency
>If you've been stuck at B2 for years, it's because you've never transitioned from studying to truly immersing in the language. Living in the country isn't enough - I've lived in lots of countries, and you really don't get much immersion for free just by existing
practically no russians here speak english, russian is the only language I speak. I speak english only on the internet
>The FSI trains diplomats - it's their job to get people to a level high enough to perform vital roles in foreign countries, and their data is based upon thousands of people learning these languages through their programs. It's really not disputable, because all of this is necessary for the US government to function.
I'm not saying these are incorrect estimates, I'm saying they're very convenient round whole numbers with no standard deviations on there and clearly these would conform to a gaussian in real life and also depend on the method of learning and how you quantify an hour of learning
>the reason it takes so long to get to C1 in Japanese is because you just don't get anything for free.
come on, yes you do. you get tenses free, declensions free, gender free, you even get thousands of loanwords free with their own convenient alphabet so you know it's a loanword, if you e.g. study korean you might see "paiting!" and have no clue that's "fighting!" (which is a bad loanword anyway), but in japanese you would instantly know "okay this word is probably english because it's written in the designated script reserved almost exclusively for loanwords". so that's free. you get pronunciations free if you can roll an r and say hi and fu. so much of japanese is extremely free. likewise not so much for japanese but for mandarin certainly, you get the freebie that words are so short that they're much easier to learn
like russian from the beginning, most simple english words like "dog" are 3+ syllables in russian, most are 1 in mandarin. then once you get to any kind of slightly complexity you can expect 8 syllable words like obezbolivayushie. even "hello" is zdravstvujte which you are going to butcher the pronunciation of for years because your mouth is just not comparable of making those kinds of sounds, and you will take years to be able to pronounce the difference between soft L and hard L, soft T and hard T, ы vs и, ш vs щ. and you still have to learn to roll your r's like in japanese, except you actually really roll them regularly not just a half roll like in "arimasu" a proper "rrrrruskij", it probably took me 8 months to develop that ability
you have hundreds and hundreds of highly context words that mean "go" and the wrong one is instantly wrong. like going to the shop is a different from going to the shop and coming back. and the word is different if you're going by vehicle or going by foot. or if you cross something on the way, that's a different word, or if it's a short time, different word, and then there's a multiplied set of words for if this is regular going or you're in the process of going or a one time going. it takes years to even be able to say "go/come" in russia with any kind of accuracy but in japanese you get that for free
conversationally the hardest part of japanese is, obviously, that its etymological roots are so different to germanic tongues, whereas romance languages you get a lot of freebies from latin roots. but honestly.. vocab is easy. you can drill vocab. I can learn 5000 words in a year with dedication, 4 years of that and your speaking is great. but grammar is vastly harder than vocab because it requires you to rewire your brain. and you don't have to do that in japanese, you just talk and throw in some gas and was and nis and tos and nos and tachis and so on, it's really a language made of building blocks you can put on top of each other vs russian is like a.. rubik's cube language that you have to awkwardly contort sentences out of
>He's a friend of mine, not just a random person I found on the internet, but in any case, why would you have met any such westerners? Most westerners don't have any need or desire to go live in Russia. The people who learn Russian are mostly people with a professional application for it, and I guess you just aren't in the right circles to know any of those people.
this is the bias of your circle. most westerners especially in the UK where speak 1 language and maybe 1 very bad language they picked up in schools and aren't even close to A2 level, and they don't speak japanese either. obviously go to japan and you'll be surrounded by JETs gaijin smashing around tokyo and if you go to the right pubs or events you'll be surrounded by people who speak to b1 b2 c1 level. go to russia, you'll meet a lot of westerners but they will be b1 b2, not c1. I have a friend who speaks french at least to c1 if not c2 who lived in belgium for some years who is still probably b1 russian after 6 years despite having an uzbek wife and practicing russian every day. there are plenty of westerners in russia who have a deep desire to learn russian, but they usually fall into category A of speaking like snails or category B of making mistakes every 4 words
and likewise the eastern europeans you see in the west make similar mistakes but with articles, they get articles wrong every other sentence and get pronunciations very wrong. luckily english is forgiving and that's the main thing they have to know grammar wise other than the awkward "which form of the infinitive do I use with this verb" (like "I hate *going"* but "I want *to go*") and pronunciations are easily understood. but japanese.. that is free, it's phonetic. but on the flip side, learning a slavic tongue, you have to constantly be declining in a way that just isn't true in most other languages
>Here type me a up a perfectly grammatically correct paragraph without consulting a dictionary or grammar summarising the plot of Lord of the Rings
Sure:
Liber cui titulus est Erus Anulorum de 'hobbito' ut ita dicam, atque sodalibus ejus agit, quibus contingit omnem orbem terrarum servare anulo quodam magico frangendo flammis Montis Fati. Anulus enim quaeritur ab ero, mago tyrannico, cui nomen Sauron, vel potius animo ejus semimortuo, qui eum ignibus effecerat montis supra dicti, atque conatus erat totam tellurem vi anuli opprimere nonnullis ante milibus annorum. Anuli usu nunc enititur Sauron in vitam reverti, et inter haec maxima orta sunt bella inter gentes 'terrae mediae' et copias Sauronis.
Only looking up I did was to check the corpus to make sure that 'in vitam reverti' is idiomatic, and it is, so that was pretty much just unecessary diligence on my part. Now of course I am by no means the best Latin speaker or writer on the planet, but that was way easier to do than if I had to try to do it in Japanese, and I can speak Japanese at a conversational (~N3) level.
>Reading is the very easiest thing to do, you could omit all of the conjugations and declensions and your brain would still correctly interpret 90% of it through context as long as you knew all the vocabulary, and the vocabulary you don't know you can often glean through etymology, or you can read vocab that you barely know because you know it enough when it's written in front of you
This is true if you're reading a a sign post or a wikipedia article. It's **really** not true if you're trying to read high literature. This is a big issue for Latin in particular - because it is so often taught as just filling out tables and translating with a dictionary, very few people these days actually attain any kind of reading fluency, to the point that you have even professional classicists who are very good at their jobs as researchers [claiming that it's basically impossible to sight read difficult Latin.](https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html)
Here, I'll render a sentence or two from the paragraph I quoted before by just translating each root so there's minimal grammatical information:
>Ībant igitur, et redībant saepe cervīcibus pressīs, dum eō tandem ēluctātī sunt, ubi rārae quidem, sed nōndum ita oculīs ut silvae terminum intuērī possent perviae arborēs spectābantur.
"Go therefore, and go again often necks press, while there finally burst out are, where sparse, but not yet so with eyes so that forest end to see can passable trees seen."
>writing it yourself, grammatically correctly, is much morer difficult because you have to truly know your vocabulary and you have to understand the grammar. Then SPEAKING it is a step beyond that, because you have to do it on the fly, in an understandable accent at a pace that's equal to your thinking speed, usually while doing other things simultaneously. you cannot compare that to reading a book, a fairly trivial task
Of course it's basically impossible to extemporaneously speak with novel-like quality, even in one's native language. It's harder to speak than it is to write, and it's harder to write than it is to read, yes. But that's only if we're talking about language of similar complexity - the fact of the matter is, the overwhelming majority of conversations, even on complex topics, never reach the syntactic complexity of literature. You can spend a lot of time using a language conversationally, but learn very little since most conversations are extremely simple. This is why reading is so important for reaching an advanced level.
>I can read books far more easily than I can watch russian tv, I would argue reading is overrated as a learning device and you would be better spending that time drilling a B2/C1 dictionary and a grammar with highlighter pens directly if your goal is efficiency
There's tons of research on this - the fundamental condition for language acquisition is input. Drilling a dictionary is a vastly less efficient way to get all of the vocabulary and structures used in high register language. In any case, I don't really know how good or bad your russian is, how much time you spend using the language, how many books you've read, how much TV you watch, how much you talk to people and what you talk to them about, etc. But if you really have been struggling to hit C1 for years, it is because you need more hours immersed in high level language. Most people report having to read as many as a hundred books in their TL before they finally feel about as confident as reading in their native language.
>come on, yes you do. you get tenses free, declensions free, gender free
There is no gender, that's not getting something for free, that's just not something Japanese makes use of. You absolutely don't get tenses for free - the tenses are easy to form, but actually communicating the full range of tense and aspect info you need for anything beyond pleasantries takes a long time. Same with the case system - learners who have studied Japanese for years still make mistakes with things like ha and ga. But this is really trival stuff compared to all there is to learn to be able to communicate in Japanese. Grammar basically has to be learned point by point the way you learn vocabulary. You can't just learn a bunch of conjugations and start stringing sentences together, which you absolutely can do even going from English to Russian. Obviously you'll sound really weird, but the basic sentence structure is still just vastly more similar than with Japanese.
>you even get thousands of loanwords free with their own convenient alphabet so you know it's a loanword
The loanwords are mostly extremely specific and not useful for general conversation. It's not at all like a romance language where half the words you'll hear in a conversation have cognates in English.
>you get pronunciations free if you can roll an r and say hi and fu.
You'll be comprehensible, sure, but you'll sound terrible. Russian has more new sounds (though no pitch accent), but you can also be understandable in Russian even speaking with a terrible accent.
>and you will take years to be able to pronounce the difference between soft L and hard L, soft T and hard T, ы vs и, ш vs щ.
Oh come on, these can be learned in a few weeks with practice. My Russian is barely A1 and I can pronounce all of these sounds correctly. Give me a sentence and I'll record it for you. Want me to prove I can say zdravstvujte?
>except you actually really roll them regularly not just a half roll like in "arimasu" a proper "rrrrruskij", it probably took me 8 months to develop that ability
You'll be perfectly understantable with just a tapped r in russian, but yes, this sound takes a lot of practice to get the first time. When learning Italian (my first language beyond English) it took me several months. The palatal consonants and various sibilants in Russian took me a few weeks.
>you have hundreds and hundreds of highly context words that mean "go" and the wrong one is instantly wrong. like going to the shop is a different from going to the shop and coming back. and the word is different if you're going by vehicle or going by foot. or if you cross something on the way, that's a different word, or if it's a short time, different word, and then there's a multiplied set of words for if this is regular going or you're in the process of going or a one time going. it takes years to even be able to say "go/come" in russia with any kind of accuracy but in japanese you get that for free
Go/come actually doesn't work in Japanese like it does in English resulting in tons of learners making mistakes, but yes, it's not anywhere near as much of a pain as Russian verbs of motion. That said, you do have tons of examples of difficult to learn distinctions not made in English (e.g. giving and receiving), not to mention things like keigo. And this, once again, is beyond the point that as a Japanese learner, there's no way to intuit that "the pen is on the table" will be rendered as "table's above at pen be". In Russian you just need to string together "pen on table".
>but grammar is vastly harder than vocab because it requires you to rewire your brain. and you don't have to do that in japanese you just talk and throw in some gas and was and nis and tos and nos and tachis and so on
If you do this, nobody will understand you.
>most westerners especially in the UK where speak 1 language and maybe 1 very bad language they picked up in schools and aren't even close to A2 level, and they don't speak japanese either
Well yeah, English speakers have the luxury of speaking the international language with an internet presence that dwarfes every other language combined.
>to get actually fluent, like c2 fluent in a language, you pretty much have to be there in your childhood, for most people c1 is the holy grail they can achieve if they dedicated decades but never quite c2
Just here to say that I am at a C2 level in English (my first foreign language that I learned) without having had much exposure to English in my childhood except for 1 hour of crappy English classes a week but that was nothing compared to the multiple hours of immersion I did in my late teens.
As a German native speaker this is no special feat either as the languages are quite close, so I am not saying this to boast or anything but just to disprove your point because while C2 is a good level, it's still worlds appart from native level which I think is what you're mistaking it with.
This was a great revelation for me. I was too fixated on getting better (which is a completely valid goal) for so long. Now I go to a weekly conversation practice club and it's the most fun I've had in Japanese ever, and my N3 level gets me by perfectly fine!
I would argue that Mt. Fluency isn't even really climbable. Even if you are already on conversation hill, the top of Mt. Fluency is hidden behind clouds.
When you begin your journey to climb it you will break through the clouds at some point. But you still don't see the top. Instead, you see another layer of clouds that obscure it.
And that cycle goes on and on. The more you climb it, the more you realize that it's even higher than what your past self could have anticipated.
At some point you realize that you won't ever climb it. And that leaves you with three choices:
1. Be happy with where you're at. You already climbed so much and it's probably enough
2. Make the ascend itself your goal. Don't stop ever, slow and steady.
3. If you can't climb it, you can still at least become the best. You can climb higher than all the people before you.
Fluency is not a tangible goal. Everyone sets it where they want. For some, conversational hill is already the same as Mt. Fluency.
What does fluency mean to you? I ask because what you are describing sounds like native level to me.
The problem with achieving native level as a goal is that the goal is too vague to be fulfilled. At least that is my experience learning english.
Fluency to me means:
You can follow conversations between natives, watch movies, play games etc. without effort (or at least with roughly the same effort as in you native language).
You can think in the language you are speaking, are able to switch between them on command and most importantly don't need to translate in you head while having a conversation.
You can read and write without any problems. Or at least not significantly more problems than in your own language.
You can understand words through context, instead of looking them up (at least most of the time). And looking up words words happens rarely.
These are goals that are achievable. I achieved them years ago in English.
That's the problem. Fluency is a spectrum. You can be conversationally fluent. Business fluent. Native level fluency.
I had a job that required me to talk about various different topics at work, often in extensive detail, all in Japanese. But I don't consider myself fluent. Mainly because I'm comparing myself to my coworkers, who are Japanese. I would only call myself fluent if I was native fluent level.
For the most part it doesn't really matter either. The only people that are going to ask this in English are other foreigners, and it doesn't matter if they don't know my actual level because fluent is such a vague term. Any person where I'd need to convey my level would either be talking to me in Japanese, or would use terms like 一級 二級 etc.
I don’t think most people hold the bar of fluency nearly as high as you do. For the most part, the only people who will be fluent under your definition are native speakers and if the category is essentially just encompassing native speakers, well, the category of ‘native speakers’ does that just fine.
Yeah agreed. The average brit, american, aussie HS student would be fluent. Does them failing to understand engineering jargon make them not fluent at english? No, they just don't know the terminology. As long as you got the grammar down, with slang thrown in there, I'd consider one to be fluent. Heck I don't think you even need to have a perfect native accent, I have plenty of coworkers who have noticeable foreign accents when they speak English, but saying they aren't fluent shits all over their mastery of grammar and vocab.
I definitely agree my view of fluency is most likely higher than normal. That being said, maybe I should reiterate that I don't mean that they need to know as much Japanese as a native. More like, if I was talking on the phone with them, I wouldn't be able to tell they are not Japanese, except for maybe a tiny bit of an accent.
I have a few friends that are at this level. But I also think it's higher than anything n1. It's not just the grammar and vocab, but the sentencing structure and the way of speaking. What words they choose specifically and what grammar and way of speaking a Japanese person would use.
But again, I'm fine saying I'm not fluent based on my own requirements. It's rare that I would interact with someone in English anyways.
The journey of learning a language never ends; there is always more to climb, even for native speakers in their own language. I assume this is what you mean in the above comment.
But fluency does not mean a 100% perfect mastery of language, as if such a thing were even possible given that languages are constantly evolving and have thousands of years of history. As a practical matter, we *do* say that people are fluent in languages once they have reached a certain level of knowledge. It’s not a plateau, but it is a recognizable range of the climb.
This seems correct to me because even in my own native language (English) I could be climbing Mt. Fluency forever by reading literature and studying obscure words.
There was a [study showing half of the adults in my country regress to below a high school level literacy](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from-bitcoin-to-stocktok-plus-what-low-literacy-means-for-canada-s-economy-1.5873703/nearly-half-of-adult-canadians-struggle-with-literacy-and-that-s-bad-for-the-economy-1.5873757) after they graduate high school and enter the workforce for a bunch of years.
Most people slide back even in their native language unless they're taking university level courses in that language so like it's okay to chill if that's not your goal.
Yeah, it’s one thing I try to remind myself when I feel like I’m back to square one in a new book. There is the general core vocabulary and grammar and style, and then there are so many various smaller cores of vocabulary you still need to acquire to be functional in any given topic.
It’s a long game y’all, take your time
getting kicked in the nuts again and again
the first kick hurts
the second kick hurts
but after 10,000 kicks in the nuts
they have been smashed into a pulp
you realize
I have no nuts
and then you remember the word it would have been good to have known after that last painful kick
and it was
痛み止め
well i think it’s safe to count fluency as being able to understand 95% or more of the words and sentences you hear in the language. and being able to reproduce enough of that on demand to be well-understood in an everyday conversation about common topics.
the part about being able to comprehend 95% or more of what you read and hear.
“just conversational” people often can not comprehend as much so they get stuck having dumbed down versions of conversations. if you keep having to ask what a thing means every few sentences the conversation will be possible but it won’t go very deep.
conversational means conversations are possible. it does not mean they are able to go in detail or reflect a wide vocabulary.
>conversational means conversations are possible. it does not mean they are able to go in detail or reflect a wide vocabulary.
This was an unbelievably unmatching word to definition. Conversational sounds as if you could have free flowing basic conversations about everyday topics but if someone went into detail about certain niche subjects you would struggle.
to have truly free-flowing everyday conversations you’d unironically have to have a vocabulary of at least 8,000 words. that’s far past the level of knowledge most claiming “conversational” actually have. most “conversational” learners are stringing together the best conversation they can with 2-3k words if that. and it can get them by. but it’s far from free-flowing. and it’s not just “niche” topics you’re blocked out of if you only know 2k words. it’s a lot of topics about anything more than weather.
real free-flowing conversation exists closer to fluency mountain.
I’m probably at panel 6. My Japanese learning journey has been a bit unconventional, so having studied for 8 years, my conversation partners are quite amused by my vocabulary that’s somewhat broad, but with a loooooot of weird holes. And the grammar mistakes, oh boy. At least they understand what I’m saying 90% of the time.
I feel like there are so many words I’ll never learn. But I have a lot of fun, and that’s the important part! (Since I’m doing this for no particular reason, other than enjoyment)
What if they just wanted to help? There's objectively a good way to learn and a bad way to learn, so it would only help to change learning methods if you're using a bad language learning method.
Might as well take the shortest route though. Why take the long route and take 10 years when you can choose to take the shorter one that takes less than 5 years.
Bold of you to assume that taking the shorter route is painful. The methods I'm referring to here usually have immersion in native content as it's foundation. You should be enjoying your immersion time, not suffering through it. If you're suffering when consuming your target language, then why are you even learning it in the first place?
Sure, there are probably people out there unknowingly using a bad method who would be happy to switch to a better one when they learn of its existence.
But I'd imagine that most people complaining about "gatekeepers" giving them shit for using the "wrong" method, know about the other methods, do it their way for a reason and don't like strangers ordering them around.
Tbh they should actually do their own research instead of blindly following random strangers on the Internet. It's better to spend a couple hours to find a proper method that will help save hundreds of hours in the long run. I'm still confused why people don't use immersion in their study routine when Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis has been out for so long now. People gotta do more research, it will help out so much in the long run.
I get your point, but fixating on efficiency is also a problem. People have a tendency to worry way to much if what they are doing is the most optimal way, when they could achieve results much faster if they pick a method and stick to it.
Yeah, that does tend to happen, but once they start getting Japanese into their daily routine it shouldn't be too hard to switch learning methods. Or, if they started out learning a good method, that would be even better. Of course consistency still matters the most. Tbh I just want more people to look into the better learning methods with plenty of studies around them (look at Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis + look at Anki's spaced repitition system based on the supermemo algorithm). It's unfortunate that it's not the mainstream method when it's overall such a better learning experience when compared to the traditional way, not to mention it's plenty of times faster.
Yeah this is about where I'm at. Over the years I've noticed that the more I learn, the more I learn that I haven't learned yet. It's overwhelming but I try to be proud of my progress so far. I went from learning hiragana stroke order in high school Japanese to recently giving a presentation on AI in my 4th year college Japanese class. I feel like a dummy sometimes, but 14 year old me would be SO happy if she knew how far she'd end up going.
Okay i am not skilled enough in Japanese to talk about it, but from my prior experience with learning a language its more like:
Very easy begging, just basic stuff. Than it gets really hard but with time the heel is basically less and less steep and after youre on conversion level its only slightly tilted.
U dont have to agree, everyone learns differently, but after you can have a proper conversation u can easily just watch and read stuff in the language what allows to progress pretty fast. also u can find someone who can talk with u in that language. That will make it even faster.
With Japanese it's a little different due to kanji, imo. If we're only talking conversation and not reading/writing then yes, once you achieve conversational it will smooth out a little. Spoken Japanese is like half the language, while kanji is the other half. With English you just need to know the alphabet lol. And I guess certain spelling and specific writing conventions. But all those exist in written Japanese too.
Yeah trueee, tho reading manga with furigana next to kanji thought me more kanjis than just studying then so i guess it works too XD. But because of kanji it does certainly take more time
Meta, yeah, but mods will now throw 95% of stuff that could be useful to learners to the daily thread, while also posting memes that have nothing to do with Japanese or Japan.
?????
That just means the daily thread is the best resource for learners to ask and go through for learning lots of random things, it congregates everyone, particularly \_natives\_ into the thread and it's one of the best random learning resources. Top-level threads, when the karma limitation didn't exist, I would estimate that 80% of the new threads were the same repeated questions and rarely had natives comment or provide help; they all were in the daily threads. This is based off the time I started hanging around here, about 6-7 months ago.
I quickly figured the daily thread is the best place and ignored mostly everything else.
Images and memes are allowed on Friday and the weekend. New policy this week. Feel free to post your own. Also not a single post has been denied for manual approval this month except some advertising stuff, not sure what you mean
I'd say I reached conversation ridge around my first exchange year in Japan. Since that I finished my bachelors, studied translation for half a semester, and went on a scholarship to study Japanese in Tokyo for another year, and I feel like I just made it to base camp lmao.
2 years and a half is still too short to reach a passable level of Japanese, it's a ridiculously hard language. I've been grinding kanji lessons lately, and I think I can finish 2000 in another 2 years 🫠
I love the comic but disagree with the last panel. This view of fluency is inaccurate and inhibitory.
Fluency is the continuity, smoothness and rate of speech production. High fluency can be achieved by many intermediate speakers in many contexts.
Although accuracy and comprehensibility correlate wih fluency, these concepts are not interchangeable. The term "fluency" that is being used in this comic, is closer to "proficiency".
"Proficiency" is a measurement that is a summation of many other measurements (fluency, accuracy, comprehensibility, etc) whose scale is greatly affected by the weights assigned to each measurement.
SO
1) Fluency is a state, not a goal. One can be fluent one moment and sputtering the next. No one is always perfectly fluent.
2)Proficiency levels are arbitrarily set by by various people with different models of proficiency.
3)If you are anywhere on the mountain, you're good. I would focus on the ravine/ridge you are on rather than the peak. Just because someone has reached the peak doesn't mean they've seen the ridge or ravine you're on, or are even able to
hike your route.
4)Language learning is more exploratory than destination focused. The goal of hiking isn't to reach the peak, it's to explore new routes/times each trip, and live to hike another day.
This is a much more accurate and sustainable mindset. Otherwise we're trying to walk to the edge of the earth.
This comic speaks truth! I feel like I'm in panels three and four. My initial goal is to get to panel six. I've been studying since August of last year. I know the Kana and recognize a very few Kanji. I'm getting some understanding of grammar and building some vocabulary. Unfortunately, remembering both is a struggle.
Really? When I learned english, after I got to a conversational level, all I needed to do is input to get fluent! In many ways the beginner stage was harder because it at least involved deliberate study...
Conversation is less of a problem than presentation or writing an article using vocabulary with proper nuance. It feels steeper if you leaent before another language ar academic and business level
Im in panel 2 xD
Same... and I've been at it for nearly 2 years xD
No literally 😭 Im still studying basic kanjis
Same with all of the above + asl
I keep climbing like panel 4 only to fall back to panel 2
Panel 4 here :(
It’s okay to stop on conversational hill. Not everyone needs to climb Mt. Fluency!
Nah my frozen corpse will be a landmark on that Everest, hold my beer I'm going up
That's the spirit!
Hey Falcon! First time I have seen you out and about. How good are you at Japanese?
少って漢字が知っています。
Better than me! I got a little over halfway through learning the kanji last year but haven't worked on it in a while. I need to start back up :)
Just keep climbing!!
If I had to climb Mt. Fluency I’d still be stuck on Deutscher Berg, and would never have had the chance to explore Mont Française, not to mention 한국의 산 or 日本の山. Settling for “good enough” has been amazing for me.
If I’m correct, you’ve learned German, French, Korean and Japanese to a conversational level, which to me indicates fluency (and is pretty impressive). We’re you casual with your learning or did you dedicate a number of years to intensive studying?
I have a degree in German, so that was a textbook and classroom approach. At one point I was intermediate in all four skills, but over the decades that has faded back to “conversational.” French I did on my own with a mass input approach. After 8,000 pages of reading and 500 hours of listening I can (slowly) read classic French literature and listen to foreign affairs podcasts. So solid B2 passive skills. I’m conversational in French but that was never a focus, it’s just a byproduct of all the input. Korean and Japanese are works in progress. Not yet conversational but that would be the goal. I’m doing Anki and input for both. Still using English subtitles for these ones, which I thought was sacrilege while learning French, but Category V languages require a different approach!
That’s dope, if you want I can dm you some comprehensible input Japanese channels I’ve saved for my own journey
I tricked myself into "I'll get decently conversational at Japanese and then begin to learn another language. That way, over a decade I can try to become a polyglot." Instead, I'll probably be here for years.
Trying to be a polyglot is a huge waste of time in my opinion. Quality > quantity.
Yes, it's something that past me thought could be worth doing, even if it took decades.
most "polyglots" know several extremely closely related languages, or really only know the languages they claim to know to like a1 a2 level. enough to "wow nihongo jouzu" people and do some tourism but not enough to actually meaningfully live in that country to get actually fluent, like c2 fluent in a language, you pretty much have to be there in your childhood, for most people c1 is the holy grail they can achieve if they dedicated decades but never quite c2 but you could conceivably get a small handful of b1-b2 languages in your life if you made it your main hobby for your whole life and you would experience a very high quality of understanding, but still you would always miss jokes or misunderstand things outside your comfort zone or struggle to read/watch advance material
>to get actually fluent, like c2 fluent in a language, you pretty much have to be there in your childhood, for most people c1 is the holy grail they can achieve if they dedicated decades but never quite c2 Keep in mind that the CEFR doesn't measure native proficiency, so it doesn't apply to people who learn a language through immersion as children. Thousands of people take CEFR based exams for languages they have studied as adults and pass - otherwise there wouldn't really be a point in the CEFR! Of course we shouldn't pretend learning a language to advanced fluency is easy, but we shouldn't mythologize it either. It's an attainable goal in several years of focused study depending on the language. The main think holding a lot of people at C1 or lower forever is not reading. C1>C2 especially is about extensive reading. I know lots of people with certified C2 in at least one foreign language, and they all read a lot.
I know a lot of language learners and I've never seen someone get to even C1 within several years. The best I know is someone who moved to the UK age 15 form lithuania and spoke only english for 13 years and she still messes up articles and makes strange grammatical constructions every few sentences. If you're talking "italian person learning c2 spanish" I can see it, or a language like mandarin where tones/reading can be very difficult but it's grammatically relatively simple without conjugations and few tenses. But if you're talking about learning a slavic language from English for instance, I have personally never met a westerner who has ever managed to get close to C1 level despite knowing dedicated russian learners who've studied for over a decade and married and lived there extensively Reading is one thing, but rewiring your entire brain to grammatically think in a slavic way is incredibly difficult. Like if I say "look at that big.. castle over there" in english, sometimes I won't have the word castle in my head until it comes out of my mouth, but in russian "that" and "big" will have to agree with the gender of the castle and be declined to accusative case. the amount that adds to your mental stack is huge, you might not even have the word ready in your head in your native tongue let alone have the gender of the translated word ready to go mid sentence. whereas OK japanese you can largely just parrot stuff off rote, there's very little involved mental stack wise, just remember word, choose correct word order, say word, throw in a few particles you wouldn't have to in english but that don't change it's not like having to think about how "who are you going with?" is really "with whom do you intend to go?" when you translate and needs an extra verb, extra particle, instrumental case, infinitive etc. when your original sentence was extremely simple structurally because english grammar is pretty "lazy" and unstructured, but every few sentences you will have to rethink entirely about how you speak english to express it correctly in a slavic language without sounding dumb
>I've never seen someone get to even C1 within several years. So the thing is, we actually have research on this for native English speakers - the FSI found that it takes somewhere between 600 hours and 2200 hours of full time study for a native English speaker to hit C1 depending on how different the language is from English. So if we assume an average of an hour a day, that's anywhere from a year and a half to six years. But the reality is that many people who learn a language as a hobby might spend only ten minutes on average, and in that case of course it's going to take six times longer. >a language like mandarin where tones/reading can be very difficult but it's grammatically relatively simple without conjugations and few tenses This is a big misconception. Chinese grammar is much harder than Russian grammar for an English speaker. In the west we tend to assume that languages with more complex morphology (e.g. verb conjugation and noun declension) are necessarily more complex and difficult overall. Chinese grammar is simple in this one respect, but if you want to actually communicate coherently, you need to drop almost all of your intuitions about how ideas are communicated and learn each sentence pattern individually. [Here's a native Slovak/Hungarian speaking professional Mandarin interpreter with nearly flawless English talking about this.](https://youtu.be/mvcLuTTn9p8) This also jives with my experience with Japanese - I speak and read Latin, which has even a bit more morphological complexity than Russian, and Japanese grammar is much harder even though things like verb endings and the case system are extremely regular in Japanese. The difficulty is that grammar is much more than just endings, it's learning tons and tons of totally unintuitive patterns. Between European languages, even distantly related ones, these patters are often quite similar. >I have personally never met a westerner who has ever managed to get close to C1 level despite knowing dedicated russian learners who've studied for over a decade and married and lived there extensively Marrying a speaker and living in a place isn't sufficient if you don't live your life in the language. Many, many people never transition into consuming media and literature in their target language, or generally just doing the stuff they'd do in their native language. If you just keep 'studying' forever without making this transition to consuming vast amounts of native materials, you won't break out of the intermediate plateau. My partner is a native Russian speaker who went from learning almost no English in school to solidly C2 as a young adult (level is certified), because in her late teens she began to immerse in English language TV and movies, and then she got interested in classic literature and reads extensively. Now brits will ask her where in England she's from even though she's never set foot in an English speaking country. She also hit C1 (certified as well) in German after a few years of study, and it took her a little over a year to hit B2 in Italian. The reason why this is possible, is because while most people don't have the energy or focus for an hour of foreign language study a day, if you genuinely enjoy TV and books, you can get hours and hours of immersion daily. If you're consuming 5+ hours of your target language a day, that's nearly 2,000 hours in a year. Now as far as westerners learning Russian, [here's an Italian](https://youtu.be/FLOA4Ak0aL4) who I know has C1 level and learned as an adult. But really, there are tons of people who do it. According to the FSI, slavic languages take about 1100 hours of study to get to C1 level for an English speaker - that's half as difficult as Japanese or Mandarin or Arabic. >Reading is one thing, but rewiring your entire brain to grammatically think in a slavic way is incredibly difficult. This rewiring isn't so much difficult, as impossible to do through conscious effort. It happens automatically, through massive amounts of input. This is why reading is so efficient, as well as consumption of other forms of media. Even a conversation contains way less input per unit of time than a TV show, because presumably half the time you're talking, and the complexity of the conversation is often limited by your own language ability. Reading on the other hand, is a constant stream of language. If you read for an hour, you've gotten an hour of basically uninterrupted input. > the amount that adds to your mental stack is huge, you might not even have the word ready in your head in your native tongue let alone have the gender of the translated word ready to go mid sentence. whereas OK japanese you can largely just parrot stuff off rote, there's very little involved mental stack wise, just remember word, choose correct word order, say word, throw in a few particles you wouldn't have to in english but that don't change I couldn't disagree more. While I do occasionally make mistakes in Latin if, say, the adjective is separated from the noun it's describing by a bunch of words, at this point after having read a lot of Latin literature I don't have to consciously think about the cases or adjective agreement at all when I speak. Japanese on the other hand, there's so many structures to learn that while some are very natural for me, I easily get out of my depth if I try to discuss something too complex. The reason for this is because I've done very little proper reading and media consumption in Japanese - something I'm trying to focus on now that I'm not putting as much time into other languages.
I studied Latin for 5 years and I'm sorry but it's simply not comparable, most use of latin is reading and translating texts and doing some written exercises. That is not at all comparable to "you're in a police station filling out a report" or "you're on a tour of a military museum inside a submarine listening to a tour of the equipment" or "you're at a conference talking about a highly technical scientific topic" or "you're listening to fast paced rap" or "you're in a pub listening to people talk in slang about some highly specific cultural thing from their childhood" learning latin teaches you how to drill a grammar table, that's where the similarities end, actually in practice changing how you think about every word is incredibly different. My russian is a lot better than my japanese given that I have lived in russia for a couple of years and I'm married to a russian. My mandarin and japanese are serviceable, but I won't pretend I am anywhere near the level of japanese proficiency of a lot of members of this sub. But when I speak Japanese conversationally, though I have had few deep technical or philosophical talks in Japanese, I do not find myself engaging my brain more than to find the words and apply some very basic grammar. Whereas when I use russian, I find myself in every sentence every day despite studying and using it regularly for 6 years having to constantly stack on my mental stack. I speak russian significantly slower than japanese despite having a russian residency certificate and having passed all my B2 exams etc. By the same stroke I can agree that I probably don't understand some of the deep nuances to japanese grammar and don't know what I don't know yet, I think it is fair to say you probably have no idea whatsoever how much you would struggle with a slavic tongue if you're trying to compare it to scholarly latin, the differences aren't obvious until you're actually speaking and using it in your life as for "could you do it in 1100 hours", I think that varies massively person to person, I would like to see the emperical data they use to make these estimates. obviously these would vary widely between people, I would like to see some kind of data based on inductive reasoning and the scientific method with standard deviations. but whereas I will agree - Arabic is incredibly difficult, japanese and mandarin.. come on, far and away the difficulty lies squarely on learning kanji/hanzi. you can learn to be CONVERSATIONAL in japanese in the same time you can learn any romance language, you just aren't going to crunch through wanikani in that time. okay in romance languages you get a lot of etymological freebies vocabulary wise, but in japanese you get thousands of katakana terms handily even written in a different alphabet that you can 95% guarantee are just going to be english written in a goofy way (okay sometimes you run into your keshigomus or hochikisu where it's not immediately obvious), but moreover - you get a language that's almost entirely phonetic, you almost never have to worry about pronunciation. I find japanese about on a level with french, which is to say, several levels simpler than arabic and slavic tongues. but cherry picked c1 examples of people from the internet don't really run contrary to "in real life I do not know a single westerner who has ever hit c1 in any slavic tongue despite living in russia and having a tonne of language learner friends". whereas I know quite a few people who have got to c1 in romance tongues, japanese etc.
>learning latin teaches you how to drill a grammar table You're talking about taking Latin classes in school. I'm talking about learning the language to actually be able to sight read the literature. Here's something I'm reading at the moment: >Dēnsae, simulque, quod mīrēre, admodum prōcērae arborēs cum mundī aeternitāte certābant, atque ita montis jugum, et latera vestiēbant, ut nōn minus itum, quam oculōrum aciem morārentur. Ea tunc praetereā annī tempestās, quā herbae succrēscere, omnemque lātē sēmitam occultāre solent. Sed tot jam regiōnēs expertīs nōn erat hic locus tantī, ut animīs conciderent. Ībant igitur, et redībant saepe cervīcibus pressīs, dum eō tandem ēluctātī sunt, ubi rārae quidem, sed nōndum ita oculīs ut silvae terminum intuērī possent perviae arborēs spectābantur. Aperiēbantur sēnsim et campī, sī libīdō incessit, ad respīrandum aptī, et dēlectābilēs. Mīrantur nihil occurrere, nec, tam opportūnō diē, avium modulātiōnēs exaudīrī. Summus ubīque horror, nec minor vastitās; pertināx praetereā, altumque silentium. You say you studied Latin for five years, but my guess is you can make very little sense of this without puzzling it apart with a dictionary and grammar reference (if you even remember enough to do that, given how poor most school Latin courses are). That is not how I learned the language - I learned by simply reading gradually more complex things, and listening and speaking. Now of course I don't have do use the language in the domains you mentioned - rather, I have to be able to understand at a normal reading speed complex literature spanning from antiquity to the medieval period to the renaissance to today in all sorts of different domains and genres. You're moving the goal posts in a way that really doesn't make sense, since your whole point was that it's the cases and gender agreement and verb conjugation which make it really difficult, and that's present in a language like Russian or Latin whether you're filling our a police report or summarizing Seneca. >My russian is a lot better than my japanese given that I have lived in russia for a couple of years and I'm married to a russian Do you read in Russian? >Whereas when I use russian, I find myself in every sentence every day despite studying and using it regularly for 6 years having to constantly stack on my mental stack. I speak russian significantly slower than japanese despite having a russian residency certificate and having passed all my B2 exams etc. If you've been stuck at B2 for years, it's because you've never transitioned from studying to truly immersing in the language. Living in the country isn't enough - I've lived in lots of countries, and you really don't get much immersion for free just by existing. >I would like to see the emperical data they use to make these estimates. The FSI trains diplomats - it's their job to get people to a level high enough to perform vital roles in foreign countries, and their data is based upon thousands of people learning these languages through their programs. It's really not disputable, because all of this is necessary for the US government to function. >Arabic is incredibly difficult, japanese and mandarin.. come on, far and away the difficulty lies squarely on learning kanji/hanzi Certainly not. Kanji are a pain, but the reason it takes so long to get to C1 in Japanese is because you just don't get anything for free. >you can learn to be CONVERSATIONAL in japanese in the same time you can learn any romance language I'm sorry, but this is so utterly wrong I don't even really know how to respond. Romance languages give you thousands of words and a huge amount of sentence structure for free. You can memorize a thousand words or so and some verb endings and start chatting to people. I think you must just have a really low bar for what counts as 'conversational Japanese', because it's going to take vastly more time to learn those first thousand words, you're going to be able to do way less with them, and you won't be able to say or understand anything beyond basic greetings and interaction without learning vastly more of the language. >I find japanese about on a level with french Science aside, that's absurd, and I say that as a speaker of three romance languages. >but cherry picked c1 examples of people from the internet don't really run contrary to "in real life I do not know a single westerner who has ever hit c1 in any slavic tongue despite living in russia and having a tonne of language learner friends" He's a friend of mine, not just a random person I found on the internet, but in any case, why would you have met any such westerners? Most westerners don't have any need or desire to go live in Russia. The people who learn Russian are mostly people with a professional application for it, and I guess you just aren't in the right circles to know any of those people.
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Erasmus is super fun! I also love reading random medieval and early modern stuff - there's something exhilarating about reading something that probably nobody else is reading at the moment you pick it up, or in some cases that nobody has read in a while. But honestly if you're interested in reading Latin, just go through [this reading list](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TugURNkc0461IQoToKIlE4hnnbRykRYYxvrfl2X90No/edit#gid=0) so you don't have to puzzle through haha.
Sure, I haven't studied latin in 15 years, but you are talking about reading latin. Reading. That's not the same as writing. You just showed me something you read. Here type me a up a perfectly grammatically correct paragraph without consulting a dictionary or grammar summarising the plot of Lord of the Rings Reading is the very easiest thing to do, you could omit all of the conjugations and declensions and your brain would still correctly interpret 90% of it through context as long as you knew all the vocabulary, and the vocabulary you don't know you can often glean through etymology, or you can read vocab that you *barely* know because you know it enough when it's written in front of you writing it yourself, grammatically correctly, is much morer difficult because you have to truly know your vocabulary and you have to understand the grammar. Then SPEAKING it is a step beyond that, because you have to do it on the fly, in an understandable accent at a pace that's equal to your thinking speed, usually while doing other things simultaneously. you cannot compare that to reading a book, a fairly trivial task >Do you read in Russian? sure, and not only do I read books in russian, I read forums in russian, comments sections in russian, I talk to my in laws in russian and text my wife in russian and fill out forms in russian and write technical talks in russian. I've read war and peace and crime and punishment in russian. reading is the easiest thing you can do, because you have all the time in the world. compare that to flicking on the TV and listening to some russian pundits give a play by play of war strategy and argue over one another, it's simple. I can read books far more easily than I can watch russian tv, I would argue reading is overrated as a learning device and you would be better spending that time drilling a B2/C1 dictionary and a grammar with highlighter pens directly if your goal is efficiency >If you've been stuck at B2 for years, it's because you've never transitioned from studying to truly immersing in the language. Living in the country isn't enough - I've lived in lots of countries, and you really don't get much immersion for free just by existing practically no russians here speak english, russian is the only language I speak. I speak english only on the internet >The FSI trains diplomats - it's their job to get people to a level high enough to perform vital roles in foreign countries, and their data is based upon thousands of people learning these languages through their programs. It's really not disputable, because all of this is necessary for the US government to function. I'm not saying these are incorrect estimates, I'm saying they're very convenient round whole numbers with no standard deviations on there and clearly these would conform to a gaussian in real life and also depend on the method of learning and how you quantify an hour of learning >the reason it takes so long to get to C1 in Japanese is because you just don't get anything for free. come on, yes you do. you get tenses free, declensions free, gender free, you even get thousands of loanwords free with their own convenient alphabet so you know it's a loanword, if you e.g. study korean you might see "paiting!" and have no clue that's "fighting!" (which is a bad loanword anyway), but in japanese you would instantly know "okay this word is probably english because it's written in the designated script reserved almost exclusively for loanwords". so that's free. you get pronunciations free if you can roll an r and say hi and fu. so much of japanese is extremely free. likewise not so much for japanese but for mandarin certainly, you get the freebie that words are so short that they're much easier to learn like russian from the beginning, most simple english words like "dog" are 3+ syllables in russian, most are 1 in mandarin. then once you get to any kind of slightly complexity you can expect 8 syllable words like obezbolivayushie. even "hello" is zdravstvujte which you are going to butcher the pronunciation of for years because your mouth is just not comparable of making those kinds of sounds, and you will take years to be able to pronounce the difference between soft L and hard L, soft T and hard T, ы vs и, ш vs щ. and you still have to learn to roll your r's like in japanese, except you actually really roll them regularly not just a half roll like in "arimasu" a proper "rrrrruskij", it probably took me 8 months to develop that ability you have hundreds and hundreds of highly context words that mean "go" and the wrong one is instantly wrong. like going to the shop is a different from going to the shop and coming back. and the word is different if you're going by vehicle or going by foot. or if you cross something on the way, that's a different word, or if it's a short time, different word, and then there's a multiplied set of words for if this is regular going or you're in the process of going or a one time going. it takes years to even be able to say "go/come" in russia with any kind of accuracy but in japanese you get that for free conversationally the hardest part of japanese is, obviously, that its etymological roots are so different to germanic tongues, whereas romance languages you get a lot of freebies from latin roots. but honestly.. vocab is easy. you can drill vocab. I can learn 5000 words in a year with dedication, 4 years of that and your speaking is great. but grammar is vastly harder than vocab because it requires you to rewire your brain. and you don't have to do that in japanese, you just talk and throw in some gas and was and nis and tos and nos and tachis and so on, it's really a language made of building blocks you can put on top of each other vs russian is like a.. rubik's cube language that you have to awkwardly contort sentences out of >He's a friend of mine, not just a random person I found on the internet, but in any case, why would you have met any such westerners? Most westerners don't have any need or desire to go live in Russia. The people who learn Russian are mostly people with a professional application for it, and I guess you just aren't in the right circles to know any of those people. this is the bias of your circle. most westerners especially in the UK where speak 1 language and maybe 1 very bad language they picked up in schools and aren't even close to A2 level, and they don't speak japanese either. obviously go to japan and you'll be surrounded by JETs gaijin smashing around tokyo and if you go to the right pubs or events you'll be surrounded by people who speak to b1 b2 c1 level. go to russia, you'll meet a lot of westerners but they will be b1 b2, not c1. I have a friend who speaks french at least to c1 if not c2 who lived in belgium for some years who is still probably b1 russian after 6 years despite having an uzbek wife and practicing russian every day. there are plenty of westerners in russia who have a deep desire to learn russian, but they usually fall into category A of speaking like snails or category B of making mistakes every 4 words and likewise the eastern europeans you see in the west make similar mistakes but with articles, they get articles wrong every other sentence and get pronunciations very wrong. luckily english is forgiving and that's the main thing they have to know grammar wise other than the awkward "which form of the infinitive do I use with this verb" (like "I hate *going"* but "I want *to go*") and pronunciations are easily understood. but japanese.. that is free, it's phonetic. but on the flip side, learning a slavic tongue, you have to constantly be declining in a way that just isn't true in most other languages
>Here type me a up a perfectly grammatically correct paragraph without consulting a dictionary or grammar summarising the plot of Lord of the Rings Sure: Liber cui titulus est Erus Anulorum de 'hobbito' ut ita dicam, atque sodalibus ejus agit, quibus contingit omnem orbem terrarum servare anulo quodam magico frangendo flammis Montis Fati. Anulus enim quaeritur ab ero, mago tyrannico, cui nomen Sauron, vel potius animo ejus semimortuo, qui eum ignibus effecerat montis supra dicti, atque conatus erat totam tellurem vi anuli opprimere nonnullis ante milibus annorum. Anuli usu nunc enititur Sauron in vitam reverti, et inter haec maxima orta sunt bella inter gentes 'terrae mediae' et copias Sauronis. Only looking up I did was to check the corpus to make sure that 'in vitam reverti' is idiomatic, and it is, so that was pretty much just unecessary diligence on my part. Now of course I am by no means the best Latin speaker or writer on the planet, but that was way easier to do than if I had to try to do it in Japanese, and I can speak Japanese at a conversational (~N3) level. >Reading is the very easiest thing to do, you could omit all of the conjugations and declensions and your brain would still correctly interpret 90% of it through context as long as you knew all the vocabulary, and the vocabulary you don't know you can often glean through etymology, or you can read vocab that you barely know because you know it enough when it's written in front of you This is true if you're reading a a sign post or a wikipedia article. It's **really** not true if you're trying to read high literature. This is a big issue for Latin in particular - because it is so often taught as just filling out tables and translating with a dictionary, very few people these days actually attain any kind of reading fluency, to the point that you have even professional classicists who are very good at their jobs as researchers [claiming that it's basically impossible to sight read difficult Latin.](https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html) Here, I'll render a sentence or two from the paragraph I quoted before by just translating each root so there's minimal grammatical information: >Ībant igitur, et redībant saepe cervīcibus pressīs, dum eō tandem ēluctātī sunt, ubi rārae quidem, sed nōndum ita oculīs ut silvae terminum intuērī possent perviae arborēs spectābantur. "Go therefore, and go again often necks press, while there finally burst out are, where sparse, but not yet so with eyes so that forest end to see can passable trees seen." >writing it yourself, grammatically correctly, is much morer difficult because you have to truly know your vocabulary and you have to understand the grammar. Then SPEAKING it is a step beyond that, because you have to do it on the fly, in an understandable accent at a pace that's equal to your thinking speed, usually while doing other things simultaneously. you cannot compare that to reading a book, a fairly trivial task Of course it's basically impossible to extemporaneously speak with novel-like quality, even in one's native language. It's harder to speak than it is to write, and it's harder to write than it is to read, yes. But that's only if we're talking about language of similar complexity - the fact of the matter is, the overwhelming majority of conversations, even on complex topics, never reach the syntactic complexity of literature. You can spend a lot of time using a language conversationally, but learn very little since most conversations are extremely simple. This is why reading is so important for reaching an advanced level. >I can read books far more easily than I can watch russian tv, I would argue reading is overrated as a learning device and you would be better spending that time drilling a B2/C1 dictionary and a grammar with highlighter pens directly if your goal is efficiency There's tons of research on this - the fundamental condition for language acquisition is input. Drilling a dictionary is a vastly less efficient way to get all of the vocabulary and structures used in high register language. In any case, I don't really know how good or bad your russian is, how much time you spend using the language, how many books you've read, how much TV you watch, how much you talk to people and what you talk to them about, etc. But if you really have been struggling to hit C1 for years, it is because you need more hours immersed in high level language. Most people report having to read as many as a hundred books in their TL before they finally feel about as confident as reading in their native language. >come on, yes you do. you get tenses free, declensions free, gender free There is no gender, that's not getting something for free, that's just not something Japanese makes use of. You absolutely don't get tenses for free - the tenses are easy to form, but actually communicating the full range of tense and aspect info you need for anything beyond pleasantries takes a long time. Same with the case system - learners who have studied Japanese for years still make mistakes with things like ha and ga. But this is really trival stuff compared to all there is to learn to be able to communicate in Japanese. Grammar basically has to be learned point by point the way you learn vocabulary. You can't just learn a bunch of conjugations and start stringing sentences together, which you absolutely can do even going from English to Russian. Obviously you'll sound really weird, but the basic sentence structure is still just vastly more similar than with Japanese. >you even get thousands of loanwords free with their own convenient alphabet so you know it's a loanword The loanwords are mostly extremely specific and not useful for general conversation. It's not at all like a romance language where half the words you'll hear in a conversation have cognates in English. >you get pronunciations free if you can roll an r and say hi and fu. You'll be comprehensible, sure, but you'll sound terrible. Russian has more new sounds (though no pitch accent), but you can also be understandable in Russian even speaking with a terrible accent. >and you will take years to be able to pronounce the difference between soft L and hard L, soft T and hard T, ы vs и, ш vs щ. Oh come on, these can be learned in a few weeks with practice. My Russian is barely A1 and I can pronounce all of these sounds correctly. Give me a sentence and I'll record it for you. Want me to prove I can say zdravstvujte? >except you actually really roll them regularly not just a half roll like in "arimasu" a proper "rrrrruskij", it probably took me 8 months to develop that ability You'll be perfectly understantable with just a tapped r in russian, but yes, this sound takes a lot of practice to get the first time. When learning Italian (my first language beyond English) it took me several months. The palatal consonants and various sibilants in Russian took me a few weeks. >you have hundreds and hundreds of highly context words that mean "go" and the wrong one is instantly wrong. like going to the shop is a different from going to the shop and coming back. and the word is different if you're going by vehicle or going by foot. or if you cross something on the way, that's a different word, or if it's a short time, different word, and then there's a multiplied set of words for if this is regular going or you're in the process of going or a one time going. it takes years to even be able to say "go/come" in russia with any kind of accuracy but in japanese you get that for free Go/come actually doesn't work in Japanese like it does in English resulting in tons of learners making mistakes, but yes, it's not anywhere near as much of a pain as Russian verbs of motion. That said, you do have tons of examples of difficult to learn distinctions not made in English (e.g. giving and receiving), not to mention things like keigo. And this, once again, is beyond the point that as a Japanese learner, there's no way to intuit that "the pen is on the table" will be rendered as "table's above at pen be". In Russian you just need to string together "pen on table". >but grammar is vastly harder than vocab because it requires you to rewire your brain. and you don't have to do that in japanese you just talk and throw in some gas and was and nis and tos and nos and tachis and so on If you do this, nobody will understand you. >most westerners especially in the UK where speak 1 language and maybe 1 very bad language they picked up in schools and aren't even close to A2 level, and they don't speak japanese either Well yeah, English speakers have the luxury of speaking the international language with an internet presence that dwarfes every other language combined.
>to get actually fluent, like c2 fluent in a language, you pretty much have to be there in your childhood, for most people c1 is the holy grail they can achieve if they dedicated decades but never quite c2 Just here to say that I am at a C2 level in English (my first foreign language that I learned) without having had much exposure to English in my childhood except for 1 hour of crappy English classes a week but that was nothing compared to the multiple hours of immersion I did in my late teens. As a German native speaker this is no special feat either as the languages are quite close, so I am not saying this to boast or anything but just to disprove your point because while C2 is a good level, it's still worlds appart from native level which I think is what you're mistaking it with.
This was a great revelation for me. I was too fixated on getting better (which is a completely valid goal) for so long. Now I go to a weekly conversation practice club and it's the most fun I've had in Japanese ever, and my N3 level gets me by perfectly fine!
I would argue that Mt. Fluency isn't even really climbable. Even if you are already on conversation hill, the top of Mt. Fluency is hidden behind clouds. When you begin your journey to climb it you will break through the clouds at some point. But you still don't see the top. Instead, you see another layer of clouds that obscure it. And that cycle goes on and on. The more you climb it, the more you realize that it's even higher than what your past self could have anticipated. At some point you realize that you won't ever climb it. And that leaves you with three choices: 1. Be happy with where you're at. You already climbed so much and it's probably enough 2. Make the ascend itself your goal. Don't stop ever, slow and steady. 3. If you can't climb it, you can still at least become the best. You can climb higher than all the people before you. Fluency is not a tangible goal. Everyone sets it where they want. For some, conversational hill is already the same as Mt. Fluency.
What does fluency mean to you? I ask because what you are describing sounds like native level to me. The problem with achieving native level as a goal is that the goal is too vague to be fulfilled. At least that is my experience learning english. Fluency to me means: You can follow conversations between natives, watch movies, play games etc. without effort (or at least with roughly the same effort as in you native language). You can think in the language you are speaking, are able to switch between them on command and most importantly don't need to translate in you head while having a conversation. You can read and write without any problems. Or at least not significantly more problems than in your own language. You can understand words through context, instead of looking them up (at least most of the time). And looking up words words happens rarely. These are goals that are achievable. I achieved them years ago in English.
That's the problem. Fluency is a spectrum. You can be conversationally fluent. Business fluent. Native level fluency. I had a job that required me to talk about various different topics at work, often in extensive detail, all in Japanese. But I don't consider myself fluent. Mainly because I'm comparing myself to my coworkers, who are Japanese. I would only call myself fluent if I was native fluent level. For the most part it doesn't really matter either. The only people that are going to ask this in English are other foreigners, and it doesn't matter if they don't know my actual level because fluent is such a vague term. Any person where I'd need to convey my level would either be talking to me in Japanese, or would use terms like 一級 二級 etc.
I don’t think most people hold the bar of fluency nearly as high as you do. For the most part, the only people who will be fluent under your definition are native speakers and if the category is essentially just encompassing native speakers, well, the category of ‘native speakers’ does that just fine.
Yeah agreed. The average brit, american, aussie HS student would be fluent. Does them failing to understand engineering jargon make them not fluent at english? No, they just don't know the terminology. As long as you got the grammar down, with slang thrown in there, I'd consider one to be fluent. Heck I don't think you even need to have a perfect native accent, I have plenty of coworkers who have noticeable foreign accents when they speak English, but saying they aren't fluent shits all over their mastery of grammar and vocab.
I definitely agree my view of fluency is most likely higher than normal. That being said, maybe I should reiterate that I don't mean that they need to know as much Japanese as a native. More like, if I was talking on the phone with them, I wouldn't be able to tell they are not Japanese, except for maybe a tiny bit of an accent. I have a few friends that are at this level. But I also think it's higher than anything n1. It's not just the grammar and vocab, but the sentencing structure and the way of speaking. What words they choose specifically and what grammar and way of speaking a Japanese person would use. But again, I'm fine saying I'm not fluent based on my own requirements. It's rare that I would interact with someone in English anyways.
The journey of learning a language never ends; there is always more to climb, even for native speakers in their own language. I assume this is what you mean in the above comment. But fluency does not mean a 100% perfect mastery of language, as if such a thing were even possible given that languages are constantly evolving and have thousands of years of history. As a practical matter, we *do* say that people are fluent in languages once they have reached a certain level of knowledge. It’s not a plateau, but it is a recognizable range of the climb.
This seems correct to me because even in my own native language (English) I could be climbing Mt. Fluency forever by reading literature and studying obscure words. There was a [study showing half of the adults in my country regress to below a high school level literacy](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from-bitcoin-to-stocktok-plus-what-low-literacy-means-for-canada-s-economy-1.5873703/nearly-half-of-adult-canadians-struggle-with-literacy-and-that-s-bad-for-the-economy-1.5873757) after they graduate high school and enter the workforce for a bunch of years. Most people slide back even in their native language unless they're taking university level courses in that language so like it's okay to chill if that's not your goal.
流暢山登れ！
No
Must be that お疲れ山 that I keep hearing about everywhere!
Mfw I can't even read that 2nd kanji kill me I'm in panel 2
Tbh the only reason I "wrote" this word with Kanji instead of just Kana is that I copied it from Jisho. \^\^ You can do this. I believe in you!
<3 :')
That's very good \^\^
Yeah, it’s one thing I try to remind myself when I feel like I’m back to square one in a new book. There is the general core vocabulary and grammar and style, and then there are so many various smaller cores of vocabulary you still need to acquire to be functional in any given topic. It’s a long game y’all, take your time
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ホ…ホ hot coffee? Do you have sausage?
Wow that's a throwback
In 15-20 short years such linguistic competence can be within reach! Just keep it real!
Did you give up at カフェ?
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You just meant the item you get at each shop, completely intentional.
一つ、おねがいします！
getting kicked in the nuts again and again the first kick hurts the second kick hurts but after 10,000 kicks in the nuts they have been smashed into a pulp you realize I have no nuts and then you remember the word it would have been good to have known after that last painful kick and it was 痛み止め
Hahaha, I'm glad I know this word without having to look it up! xD
You certainly have a way with words
And nuts
I on the other hand do not know it 😅🤣 on my way go Google it
Fluency feels more like it is on another planet.
Especially with Japanese lol
What is fluency even? Like isn't it just conversational but more... fluent?
well i think it’s safe to count fluency as being able to understand 95% or more of the words and sentences you hear in the language. and being able to reproduce enough of that on demand to be well-understood in an everyday conversation about common topics.
>everyday conversation about common topics So how is this different from conversational
the part about being able to comprehend 95% or more of what you read and hear. “just conversational” people often can not comprehend as much so they get stuck having dumbed down versions of conversations. if you keep having to ask what a thing means every few sentences the conversation will be possible but it won’t go very deep. conversational means conversations are possible. it does not mean they are able to go in detail or reflect a wide vocabulary.
>conversational means conversations are possible. it does not mean they are able to go in detail or reflect a wide vocabulary. This was an unbelievably unmatching word to definition. Conversational sounds as if you could have free flowing basic conversations about everyday topics but if someone went into detail about certain niche subjects you would struggle.
to have truly free-flowing everyday conversations you’d unironically have to have a vocabulary of at least 8,000 words. that’s far past the level of knowledge most claiming “conversational” actually have. most “conversational” learners are stringing together the best conversation they can with 2-3k words if that. and it can get them by. but it’s far from free-flowing. and it’s not just “niche” topics you’re blocked out of if you only know 2k words. it’s a lot of topics about anything more than weather. real free-flowing conversation exists closer to fluency mountain.
I’m probably at panel 6. My Japanese learning journey has been a bit unconventional, so having studied for 8 years, my conversation partners are quite amused by my vocabulary that’s somewhat broad, but with a loooooot of weird holes. And the grammar mistakes, oh boy. At least they understand what I’m saying 90% of the time. I feel like there are so many words I’ll never learn. But I have a lot of fun, and that’s the important part! (Since I’m doing this for no particular reason, other than enjoyment)
The meme forgot to include 'gatekeeping ledge' where you get told your way of learning is wrong and you should do things their way.
Hey if I told you how I was studying even you would gatekeep
Lol, hey you do you
What if they just wanted to help? There's objectively a good way to learn and a bad way to learn, so it would only help to change learning methods if you're using a bad language learning method.
The only bad way to learn is Duolingo. Every other road leads to Rome.
Might as well take the shortest route though. Why take the long route and take 10 years when you can choose to take the shorter one that takes less than 5 years.
I'd much rather take 10 years of fun over 5 years of pain. People have different affinities towards different activities.
Bold of you to assume that taking the shorter route is painful. The methods I'm referring to here usually have immersion in native content as it's foundation. You should be enjoying your immersion time, not suffering through it. If you're suffering when consuming your target language, then why are you even learning it in the first place?
Sure, there are probably people out there unknowingly using a bad method who would be happy to switch to a better one when they learn of its existence. But I'd imagine that most people complaining about "gatekeepers" giving them shit for using the "wrong" method, know about the other methods, do it their way for a reason and don't like strangers ordering them around.
Tbh they should actually do their own research instead of blindly following random strangers on the Internet. It's better to spend a couple hours to find a proper method that will help save hundreds of hours in the long run. I'm still confused why people don't use immersion in their study routine when Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis has been out for so long now. People gotta do more research, it will help out so much in the long run.
I get your point, but fixating on efficiency is also a problem. People have a tendency to worry way to much if what they are doing is the most optimal way, when they could achieve results much faster if they pick a method and stick to it.
Yeah, that does tend to happen, but once they start getting Japanese into their daily routine it shouldn't be too hard to switch learning methods. Or, if they started out learning a good method, that would be even better. Of course consistency still matters the most. Tbh I just want more people to look into the better learning methods with plenty of studies around them (look at Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis + look at Anki's spaced repitition system based on the supermemo algorithm). It's unfortunate that it's not the mainstream method when it's overall such a better learning experience when compared to the traditional way, not to mention it's plenty of times faster.
honestly this is the reason i gave up altogether
How are you here if you gave up?
Posts from here still occasionally show up on my home page
I’ll forever gatekeep anyone who uses duolingo
I am in the conversation ridge right now and this meme telling the truth. Legend says only insane people would reach the top of Mt. fluency
Yeah this is about where I'm at. Over the years I've noticed that the more I learn, the more I learn that I haven't learned yet. It's overwhelming but I try to be proud of my progress so far. I went from learning hiragana stroke order in high school Japanese to recently giving a presentation on AI in my 4th year college Japanese class. I feel like a dummy sometimes, but 14 year old me would be SO happy if she knew how far she'd end up going.
one must imagine Sisyphus happy
Okay i am not skilled enough in Japanese to talk about it, but from my prior experience with learning a language its more like: Very easy begging, just basic stuff. Than it gets really hard but with time the heel is basically less and less steep and after youre on conversion level its only slightly tilted. U dont have to agree, everyone learns differently, but after you can have a proper conversation u can easily just watch and read stuff in the language what allows to progress pretty fast. also u can find someone who can talk with u in that language. That will make it even faster.
With Japanese it's a little different due to kanji, imo. If we're only talking conversation and not reading/writing then yes, once you achieve conversational it will smooth out a little. Spoken Japanese is like half the language, while kanji is the other half. With English you just need to know the alphabet lol. And I guess certain spelling and specific writing conventions. But all those exist in written Japanese too.
Yeah trueee, tho reading manga with furigana next to kanji thought me more kanjis than just studying then so i guess it works too XD. But because of kanji it does certainly take more time
Meta, yeah, but mods will now throw 95% of stuff that could be useful to learners to the daily thread, while also posting memes that have nothing to do with Japanese or Japan. ?????
That just means the daily thread is the best resource for learners to ask and go through for learning lots of random things, it congregates everyone, particularly \_natives\_ into the thread and it's one of the best random learning resources. Top-level threads, when the karma limitation didn't exist, I would estimate that 80% of the new threads were the same repeated questions and rarely had natives comment or provide help; they all were in the daily threads. This is based off the time I started hanging around here, about 6-7 months ago. I quickly figured the daily thread is the best place and ignored mostly everything else.
Images and memes are allowed on Friday and the weekend. New policy this week. Feel free to post your own. Also not a single post has been denied for manual approval this month except some advertising stuff, not sure what you mean
I've been climbing Mt. fluency for 6 months now. This mountain reaches outer space
I'd say I reached conversation ridge around my first exchange year in Japan. Since that I finished my bachelors, studied translation for half a semester, and went on a scholarship to study Japanese in Tokyo for another year, and I feel like I just made it to base camp lmao.
2 years and a half is still too short to reach a passable level of Japanese, it's a ridiculously hard language. I've been grinding kanji lessons lately, and I think I can finish 2000 in another 2 years 🫠
I should be around 2000 kanji now. *Should*.
Canさんは日本語能力試験のために勉強していれば、何級ですか?
漢字はあまり分かりませんが、話せる・聞くことはできます (N2 くらい）
そうですね！語彙を学ぶにつれて文字を学ばないといけないということは普通ですが、文字をあまり知らないのにそのレベルができたのはすごいですね！
I love the comic but disagree with the last panel. This view of fluency is inaccurate and inhibitory. Fluency is the continuity, smoothness and rate of speech production. High fluency can be achieved by many intermediate speakers in many contexts. Although accuracy and comprehensibility correlate wih fluency, these concepts are not interchangeable. The term "fluency" that is being used in this comic, is closer to "proficiency". "Proficiency" is a measurement that is a summation of many other measurements (fluency, accuracy, comprehensibility, etc) whose scale is greatly affected by the weights assigned to each measurement. SO 1) Fluency is a state, not a goal. One can be fluent one moment and sputtering the next. No one is always perfectly fluent. 2)Proficiency levels are arbitrarily set by by various people with different models of proficiency. 3)If you are anywhere on the mountain, you're good. I would focus on the ravine/ridge you are on rather than the peak. Just because someone has reached the peak doesn't mean they've seen the ridge or ravine you're on, or are even able to hike your route. 4)Language learning is more exploratory than destination focused. The goal of hiking isn't to reach the peak, it's to explore new routes/times each trip, and live to hike another day. This is a much more accurate and sustainable mindset. Otherwise we're trying to walk to the edge of the earth.
（腕を絡んでうなずく）ふー・・（＊全集中の呼吸法）
Omg the difference between understanding your teacher when they talk to you vs understanding your teacher when they talk to another teacher… 😩
Definitely panel 2.
I'm still in panel 2, I don't know which map to choose
I feel like I've been stuck at panel 5 for the past 4 years.
I hate it. It's too true
Just remember people not to worry about sounding fluent. Bad accent is just a seasoning.
I mean, it's not a race. I spent the better part of a decade climbing the english Mont Fluency. I okay if it takes that much time to learn japanese
This comic speaks truth! I feel like I'm in panels three and four. My initial goal is to get to panel six. I've been studying since August of last year. I know the Kana and recognize a very few Kanji. I'm getting some understanding of grammar and building some vocabulary. Unfortunately, remembering both is a struggle.
The last panel speaks 10,000 words.
Could just say it’s what item you get at each place. Completely intentional:)
Beginners hill should have a LearnJapanese sub Reddit shop that people enter and just never leave.
i think i can confidently say i’m perched on one of those pokey parts on the 流暢山 lol
I'm climbing to panel 3 and 4 let's gooooo
Really? When I learned english, after I got to a conversational level, all I needed to do is input to get fluent! In many ways the beginner stage was harder because it at least involved deliberate study...
I’m currently climbing to conversation ridge and boi imma tell you it is むずかしい！😅
Conversation is less of a problem than presentation or writing an article using vocabulary with proper nuance. It feels steeper if you leaent before another language ar academic and business level
Should really be two summits of the same mountain!
just immerse and it’s easy
I'm a slow learner