Hello everyone, my name is Alexander, and I am from Florida. I began studying on cijapanese.com at the beginning of 2022 in preparation for a tip to Japan that finally took place last year (for my honeymoon)! I had a great time on the trip, and enjoyed practicing what I’ve learned so far. Below are a few of my favorite photos from the trip: a cute monkey near Kyoto, and some flowers with Mt. Fuji making a background appearance.
My current learning goal is to take the JLPT this December, though I’m not yet sure if I’ll register for N4 or N3. I like the new site and am excited to post more in the forums!
In the short term I want to take a JLPT in December of this year. Long term I want to eventually pass N1, but learning is mainly driven by my personal interest.
If you’re asking about registration, it depends on your country and state, the official site is https://jltp.jp/e/. If you mean to ask how I’m studying personally, I’m just using cijapanese and LingoDeer.
That’s correct, I don’t currently have a set curriculum at the moment. The most difficult part of my personal study is an interesting question to answer. I haven’t attempted to assess the limits of my skills, or how well I am grasping certain concepts. That’s part of why I want to take the JLTP, just to have someone else assess what I know. I’ll try my best to answer your question below, including some of my thought process for how I arrived at that answer.
Perhaps the reason I find this question interesting to answer is because in school I was taught another language in a very different way from how I am studying Japanese now. In studying Japanese, I’m going all in on learning from comprehensive input. I mentioned earlier that I use LingoDeer as well, but I would say that is just to study some grammar that catches my interest.
Comprehensive input has been so effective for me, but feels nothing like what language study did to me in school, where I could easily point to a verb tense or grammar that I didn’t understand. With comprehensive input, I can’t really describe the things I don’t yet understand.
With that context in mind: The part I find most challenging is avoiding “translation mode”. When taking comprehensive input, I can feel the difference between when I am translating internally, and when I’m just flowing with the language. Flowing with the language feels far better, but every so often I will catch myself translating internally, which feels tiresome and is probably less effective in terms of language acquisition.
English is not my mother tongue. It is a mandatory second language everyone needs to learn in school. Maybe because of my years of reading English books, I can think in English directly without having to translate. I don’t know the exact reason; it just comes naturally. And I believe that sooner or later, everyone with enough contact with one language can achieve that. My greatest difficulty in learning Japanese may be listening, which I’m particularly weak in. I have been driving in Japan many times over the last decade. There are navigation systems installed in every rental car. Those systems will remind the driver of every turn ahead. However, even though I have heard the Japanese phrase hundreds of times, I still do not know the Japanese word for “left” and “right”.
