After a few years studying Japanese on and off, you'll have a good working vocabulary, will be able to hold your own in most conversations and feel confident communicating in Japanese. At this stage, it's tough to know how to improve. In this article we'll look at ways to stay motivated and break through the 'intermediate plateau'.
While I don't have any hard and fast solutions, here are some tips that have worked for me over the past few years:
1. Focus on Vocab
There's only so much grammar and structure you need to learn before you've covered off 99% of situations you'll come across in day-to-day life in Japan. The list of vocab and idiomatic phrases however is endless.
If you haven't already started using a spaced repitition system, now is a good time to start. At this stage you'll have a passive vocabulary around five thousand words, and it helps to have regular exposure to them, especially if you live outside Japan.
2. Merge your personalities
My mantra for studying Japanese now is simple:
If I know a word in English, I should know it in Japanese.
That means that if you can read a sentence like:
"The coalition government has come under criticism for budget cuts to the military".
then you should be able to read the same sentence if it was presented to you in Japanese.
At this stage you know all the Japanese I'm ever going to need to be 'conversational', but it's time to raise your game. The goal now is to be native.
To make that happen, there should be nothing you can comprehend in English that you can't in Japanese. The Japanese and English versions of your personality should be 'fully merged'.
3. Your goal is to read real books
'Intermediate' is a nebulous term that sort of means 'competent beginner'. At this stage people have different strengths and weakenesses. I've always been a much better speaker than reader or writer, but I've met many Japanese learners who are the opposite.
Either way, to get better at Japanese from here, you need to be exposed to as much of the language as possible. The best way to do this is to read books by Japanese, for Japanese.
Make no mistake, this can be an extremely demoralizing and frustrating experience starting out. This is not sitting in front of a fire with a coffee and reading through your favourite novel in English. It's sitting at a desk, reading through a collection of short Japanese stories with dictionary in hand. There will be a lot of words and patterns you don't know, but that's the point.
4. Imitate native speakers
While reading, studying vocab and focusing on 'synching' your knowledge of English in Japanese are extremely good for your ability, there's nothing as much fun as actually using the language in conversation and feeling it become a part of you.
Unfortunately, whether we realize it or not, we bring over our little English personality quirks into Japanese with us. At an intermediate level, you've probably ironed out the most common Japanese pronunciation problems. At this stage, any speaking quirks will be extremely difficult to single out and identify. Japanese people will say things like "Your Japanese is amazing, but if I close my eyes I can tell you're not native, I don't know why."
Rather than try to eliminate your quirks by singling them out and stopping them, I've found it works better to replace them with quirks from Japanese native speakers. At the basic level this is things like aizuchi, but more importantly you want to copy intonation and speaking patterns. Recording your voice and playing it back helps with this, though can be extremely painful.
Wrap Up
Breaking through the 'intermediate plateau' in any field is difficult. When you're a beginner your gains are fast. You do a little work, and see huge results. At this stage, it's a slow, hard struggle. Keep at it though, and eventually you will surprise yourself, reading whole novels in Japanese and being mistaken for native on the phone.
- Ali
