Do you have any advice for Japanese learners who struggle to overcome the intermediate plateau? You are so knowledgeable about Japanese, I'd love to hear your experiences on how you learn and keep improving! Thank you ^_^
Aww man you’re just too sweet. I’m still in the process of learning too. 💗
That intermediate plateau is the hardest thing to overcome. It’s something that was talked a lot about in some of the second language acquisition courses I took back in uni. Let’s delve further into it, because this is something that all language learners will struggle with, regardless of what language you’re learning.
What is the Intermediate Plateau?
👆 a visual representation of the plateau lol
When you first start learning a new language, most learners experience quick and satisfying progress. “Oh man, learning the “te” form was way easier than I thought it’d be!” or “Okay, I got this list of verbs down right away!” “Alright, I got this hiragana down!”
But then you move on to the kanji. The whole kudasaru, yaru, kureru, ageru, sashiageru, morau, itadaku mess, and you start to struggle a bit. But you can still do it! You’re still learning the words and the grammar and it’s challenging, but you can feel your progress and success.
But then you finish your textbooks (Probably Genki I, Genki II, and An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese), and suddenly those bursts of success become less and less, until you can no longer feel any progress.
You read manga and you see lots of words you know, but lots more words that you don’t know. You watch anime and you can catch some sentences, but there are still a lot that you wouldn’t have understood without the English subtitles to help you out.
This feeling of a lack of progress, of a stagnation, is called the “intermediate plateau.”
My Experiences with the Intermediate Plateau
I tackled the Intermediate Plateau twice: with spoken Japanese and written Japanese.
I’ve been lucky to have very good listening comprehension and an ability to “fill in the gaps.” After finishing Genki I, II, and An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, I could basically follow most spoken conversations. There were words I didn’t know, but through context I was able to make educated guesses at what they meant. However, I was stuck using simpler words when I spoke, and it was so frustrating to be able to understand the words, yet be unable to recall them and use them when I wanted to.
Then I graduated and moved to Japan. Oh man, I thought I was such hot stuff. “I studied Japanese for 5 years, and I even studied Classical Japanese. I’m gonna have such an easy time of it here.”
…It took me about three days of living in Japan to realize that I was absolutely illiterate. I couldn’t understand any of the visa application forms or what they were telling me I needed to provide. Misunderstood the times I had to have the garbage put outside because I had never seen the kanji 迄（まで, “until, by”) before. Couldn’t read most billboards.
Especially with that kanji for “made” 迄. That was what really made me realize that I was at the plateau kanji-wise. You learn the particle まで in your first year. It was something I could use perfectly. But I hadn’t even known that there was a kanji for it until I tried to take out my trash out and found out that I was supposed to have it in the bin BY 9:30, not AFTER 9:30, like I had guessed it meant. :(
To pour salt into the wound, I have been able to read in English since I was 3 years old. I literally cannot remember a time I could not read. It is one of my favorite pastimes and I also do creative writing. This made the fact that I couldn’t read all-the-more frustrating.
How I Overcame the Plateau
I took that frustration and I turned it into fuel. I vowed to learn ALL THE KANJI. I started using the website and app WaniKani obsessively. I’m here to tell you, that app is what made me literate. It is worth every single penny if you already have a good grasp on the language but your kanji is weak, like me.
Basically, it teaches you 2,000 kanji and 6,000 reinforcing vocabulary across 60 levels. It doesn’t group the kanji necessarily by JLPT level. Rather, it groups them by radicals and frequency more or less. Each level will introduce 3-4 radicals, and then 10-15 kanji that use those radicals. It quizzes you on their on-yomi and kun-yomi, gives you mnemonics to remember them, and then once you’ve answered them all correctly enough times, it introduces vocabulary that uses those kanji, further reinforcing the readings and increasing your vocabulary. As a former language teacher and studier of second language acquisition, I am here to tell you that this method works. And it’s fun. It doesn’t feel like studying.
I also started reading Rurouni Kenshin. Even today, it is a challenging read for me. Back then, it would take me days to read just one chapter. But I wrote down every new word in a notebook, and also saved them to my dictionary app, Akebi.
To this day, this dictionary is my lifeline. You can make vocabulary lists in there, so I have a list for each book or series I’m reading, along with a list of words I find just everyday in conversation or news or something. It’s got a simple flashcard quiz feature for each list too! Seriously, if you’re an Android user, I highly recommend this app. It’s free!
Those were my two main study methods. The more kanji I learned how to read, obviously I was able to read better.
The really fascinating thing about kanji is that they’re like Legos. You can stick them together to make any word you want, really. So if you understand each kanji and remember its pronunciation, even if you see/hear a word for the first time, you can put together the meaning piece by piece.
Because I understood more kanji and could recall their readings, I could hear a new word in a conversation and think to myself, “Okay, we’re talking about how Hokkaido doesn’t get as much snow as it used to. This word ‘ondanka’ must be…温 (おん, heat) 暖 (だん, heat) 化 (か, change). Oh! ‘global warming!’”
So when I overcame the kanji plateau, I simultaneously overcame the spoken plateau. Knowing the kanji gave me the power to hear a new word in a certain context and infer what kanji must be used for that word, and therefore what that word meant.
For me, the key to overcoming the plateau in Japanese was studying more kanji. So I recommend that you keep studying kanji and keep reading. But make sure that they are reading materials that you love!! If you’re not interested in what you’re reading, you’ll run out of steam.
Another really important thing is to be cognizant of the progress you’ve made. For example, maybe you have a Japanese song you’ve been listening to for years, and for the first time today you picked out a new word–one that you just studied the other day. Pat yourself on the back at every victory, no matter how small it may seem! There’s proof of your progress.
Best of luck to you in your studies!
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