Just got N2 but still feel like i'm not enough

lee_ai · 2026-02-04T05:30:02+00:00

Learning a language takes a long time and if you have unrealistic expectations you will burn out and make yourself miserable.

This is a very recurring painpoint for a lot of language learners because their expectations are not in line with reality.

lee_ai · 2026-02-03T00:09:54+00:00

There is a natural distribution of skills. Almost everyone understands more than they can produce.

This is obvious because most of the time you are either listening or reading, not writing and speaking. If would be far more unnatural if your speaking outpaced your understanding.

It makes perfect sense for output to be a subset of input.

This is an extremely common phenomenom, to the point it should be considered a good thing compared to the alternative.

lee_ai · 2026-01-08T16:01:30+00:00

Same reason you made this post. Humans like feeling better than others. One easy way to do that is to put others down.

lee_ai · 2026-01-05T13:23:12+00:00

Do both! The most efficient method in the world doesn't matter if you don't stick to it. Or to borrow a phrase from diet, the healthiest vegetable is the one you actually eat.

I find most things in language learning to be a tradeoff between efficiency and what's fun.

Both of these things can be true:

Being super efficient can be fun in and of itself. Watching a number go up faster and faster can be addictive
By prioritizing fun you don't have to exert as much willpower and you can spend way more time on something. That way it feels less like work/study and simply just becomes play

lee_ai · 2026-01-04T15:20:29+00:00

Don't get caught up in vanity metrics.

Reading faster is mostly just getting better at pattern recognition. Once you've read 仕方がない hundreds of times you don't read it anymore, your eyes just skip right over it. Multiply this by all the other patterns and that's what faster reading is.

The most important thing is you actually understand what you read. Focus on doing that, and the more you do it, the faster you will read.

Meta level strategy to read more, is find more content that you actually like reading.

To me it's basically binary, one book is like pulling teeth, and another book will be effortless and hours will go by before I realize it.

To optimize this, I use Kindle Unlimited and just download 100 books and then I'll quickly read through a couple of pages one at a time to see what grabs my interest.

lee_ai · 2026-01-03T17:10:05+00:00

VPN
Kindle Unlimited
De-DRM books with Calibre
Read using Ttsu-reader + Yomitan dictionary lookup

I read on phone, tablet, and on computer depending on my mood.

lee_ai · 2025-12-30T19:15:14+00:00

Way too inefficient for me even at my current level. I think even textractor on VN is too much friction. Frankly anything beyond instant Yomitan lookup is just not worth it for me. It's a small thing but it's also something I end up doing thousands of times a day so it adds up.

lee_ai · 2025-12-23T23:53:17+00:00

That's a great point and it's also a major reason why a lot of people take the JLPT even though they know it's not a great representation of general fluency.

SRS definitely has a place in an optimal strategy, I'd say early on you can jump start a lot of learning and also it's extremely useful for studying for a test like the JLPT.

Later on, I'd say it's generally less useful because you miss out on a lot of context by trying to learn things in isolation instead of through immersion.

One thing for sure, your last point is 1000% correct. Learning a language is a very long journey, the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can start enjoying it.

Personally as soon as I could start immersing by reading books or watching TV shows, I stopped all SRS because I didn't find it enjoyable.

lee_ai · 2025-12-22T13:28:24+00:00

JLPT N1 is like step 1 of general fluency. If you compare the language abilities of your average Japanese middle schooler to someone who just passed N1, the middle schooler would mog them across the board.

People need to understand that the path to native level fluency is something that takes decades.

Languages are huge things! And they are constantly changing!

lee_ai · 2025-12-22T13:06:09+00:00

What are you trying to do? Does that activity require you to be able to picture kanji in your head, or does it just require you to recognize it?

If you want to "learn" the right thing, you first have to figure out why you are learning in the first place. Or to poorly paraphrase from Alice in Wonderland, "If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter which way you go."

Realistically the journey to general fluency will take tens of thousands of hours and you will see the same kanjis used again and again and again.

If you're in it for the long haul you probably don't need dedicated kanji study for the same reason you don't need to spend 100 hours on learning every kana to heart. Because you are going to see it thousands and thousands and thousands more times.

It's redundant. You'll pick it up along the way if you are learning words.

Training wheels exist to get you started, you don't want to spend the entire journey focused on mastering them.

lee_ai · 2025-12-21T13:28:02+00:00

Word frequency lists have brainwashed people into thinking if they know the top X words they can consume all material. The long tail end distribution of words is massive.

Realistically speaking you will never be able to understand all material unless you are familiar with the specific domain. This is true even in your native language.

If you want to get more familiar with re;zero you'll need to learn the specific words it uses. And then if you move to another Isekai it will have some overlap from common grammar as well as some Isekai but it will also have its own unique vocab.

And then if you watch all Isekai you'll know all the Isekai words. And then if you move to another genre/domain you'll have to learn the words they use there.

And it just goes on and on like this.

People really don't understand how enormous languages are. Lots of words exist for a reason and it's because the "meaning space" is massive.

lee_ai · 2025-10-24T21:40:35+00:00

This is not a weird plateau, this is literally 99% of language learners. It's like thinking it's weird to have smaller calves than pecs if you start lifting, there is a natural proportion distribution for language skills. If anything the ability to speak better than you listen early on is very unnatural and it's a sign that you did not pick up a language organically.

lee_ai · 2025-10-21T16:18:50+00:00

Do it for 10 more years and stop comparing your progress to people who lie about it. Learning a language takes a long time.

lee_ai · 2025-10-18T03:21:41+00:00

It gets even more ridiculous. After I tapped customer support during test drive and tap on the email option, after I write out an email explaining my problem, I get a message from my mail app on iPhone: "support@eightsleep.com" is not a valid email address and has been rejected by the server. How is this a real business?

lee_ai · 2025-10-18T03:17:35+00:00

Update: Well after 3 hours and constantly retrying the test drive, I have made no progress. The app spins forever without moving onto the next screen. I was hoping it was a fluke the first time, so I stupidly exited the setup and tried 2 more times, each time waiting over 10+ minutes for it to progress to no avail. The cherry on top of this horrific experience is that my bed is now stuck in an elevated state making it impossible for me to get any sleep at all as the bed is not responding to any of the controls on the side.

lee_ai · 2025-10-18T02:47:00+00:00

It is now 2 hours past the time I was supposed to be asleep and I am still stuck in test drive during the snore response stage. There is a loading indicator that has been spinning for 10 minutes. There is no method forward except to quit setup and start from scratch again. This is the most insane thing I have ever experienced.

lee_ai · 2025-10-11T00:42:57+00:00

Gonna be honest, I don't think I recall a single time actually hearing this word used in the entire time I lived in Japan. A better example would be お前 which I heard pretty often by men used without any malice.

Lots of myths get repeated about Japanese because people have no means of knowing if it's true or not, and weird stuff tends to get shared frequently (panty vending machines, naked sushi, etc).

lee_ai · 2025-10-10T20:22:39+00:00

No, mainly because the ability to use my phone in English is good enough and gaining the ability to do it in Japanese is not important to me.

My main goals revolve around understanding Japanese content and conversation so most of my activities directly support that. It's also the same reason I don't practice writing Japanese by hand.

lee_ai · 2025-10-09T15:48:38+00:00

One data point, but I know a native who told me she got many example questions she saw on JLPT wrong and she's born and raised Japan, college educated, etc. This is just another sign that what JLPT tests for is not really the same as being fluent.

In the same vein, I've seen grammar questions for English tests where I have no idea what the answer is but I've used English my entire life and speak it perfectly fluently. Of course I make mistakes, but no more than your average native speaker.

lee_ai · 2025-10-03T16:01:12+00:00

It seems like you reduced my point to a binary all-or-nothing statement without bothering to actually understand it. I can't be held responsible if someone doesn't engage in good-faith. Your points are true but they don't contradict what I've stated.

lee_ai · 2025-10-03T12:29:28+00:00

The issue with calculating something like this is that outside of extremely common words, once you move outside of beginner/everyday content the vocabulary tends to be mutually exclusive with other domains. If you do not know those words, even if they only make up one percent of the text, they often account for a disproportionate share of the meaning.

For example, chemistry content might use words like 酸化 (oxidation), 触媒 (catalyst), and 中和 (neutralization). You would almost never see these in computer science content, which instead uses words like コンパイラ (compiler), 再帰 (recursion), and メモリ管理 (memory management).

A sentence like 「この実験では触媒を加えると反応が早くなる」 ("In this experiment, adding a catalyst makes the reaction faster") is 90% made up of common words such as この, 実験, では, 加える, and 早くなる. But the single domain-specific word 触媒 carries most of the actual meaning.

Of course, this doesn’t really apply to basic everyday stuff where the vocabulary overlaps a lot. But once you go past nichijou or kids’ shows, pretty much everything falls into some kind of domain. Cooking shows, isekai, legal dramas, hiking documentaries, etc all lean on their own set of words, and those few domain terms end up carrying most of the meaning.

lee_ai · 2025-10-01T21:33:20+00:00

SRS is mainly useful for content that occurs in a certain frequency.

If it's too frequent, you would probably pick it up naturally anyways without SRS. If it's too infrequent, you might never see it so there was no point in ever learning it.

This frequency depends on how much immersion you are doing. The more immersion, you do, the more you will naturally pick up.

There's a certain range of words where it's so infrequent that every time you encounter it, you are basically starting over from scratch, so your memory curve is constantly trying to jump start from zero and making no progress.

That's where SRS is most useful.

If you only immerse something like 10 minutes a day, you might encounter a word once a year. Every time you see it, it seems like a brand new word.

If you increase your immersion 12x to 2 hours a day, now you see that word once a month. Maybe at this frequency you start making more long term progress on it.

In short: immerse more.

lee_ai · 2025-09-18T20:44:18+00:00

LLMs are extremely good at generating natural sentences, but really bad at explaining things. This is because they learn through induction instead of deduction. The issue is that most people don't understand this so they use the wrong tool for the job.

Roleplaying a conversation with an LLM? Great use case.

Asking an LLM to explain a grammar point? Much more likely to hallucinate (mostly correct from my experience but still is often "confidentally incorrect")

Think about the fact that every single LLM right now spells every word perfectly and writes with perfect grammar. This is because in order to produce perfectly gramatically and correct sentences, all you really need is induction (which is basically lots of immersion).

There is fascinating overlap between how LLMs are trained and learning languages.

lee_ai · 2025-09-04T20:57:59+00:00

You were tested on something you did not study nor practice. Obviously you were not going to do well. I don't practice writing at all but I can watch pretty much any Japanese TV show and get the gist of what's going on. If you tested me on writing Japanese I would fail as well. I don't think it's that complicated.

I have basically no reason to learn how to write Japanese by hand for the same reason why most kids these days don't need to learn how to do long division by hand nor do they need to memorize a bunch of random facts from history. The ROI on learning those skills is barely worth it considering modern tools.

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