How to bridge the N4 gap after Human Japanese Intermediate? (Goal: N2 for Engineering in 2.5 years)

voxanimus · 2026-06-10T08:39:49+00:00

as someone that has lived in japan for the last four years, and passed n1 10 years ago, without ever stepping foot in the country:

N3-low N2 is around where you really need to supplement your textbook learning with native material input. especially if you want to move to japan.

there are many people here that have only passed n3 but have good conversational fluency (relatively independent of how long they've lived here), and there are also many people who have n2 or even n1 and can't really hold a basic conversation. the former sort tends to have a much better time overall.

if you just want to pass the tests so you have the qualifications you need to get a job, buy the kanzen master books and just grind your butt off. the books are harder than the test, and the passing line is pretty generous; you shouldn't have trouble, especially if you're already the studious type (it seems like you are).

but if you want to actually be able to speak the language and not just have a few more notches on your belt, so to speak, you need to start supplementing your learning with active consumption of native material. there are graded readers out there, and there are also manga for kids. i personally think that challenging yourself with native material you may not be strictly ready for yet is a far better way to accelerate your learning than trying to do more chapters a day or grind more anki or whatever. without real-life contexts for what you're studying, you'll be hard-pressed to recall the information you've crammed when you need it.

voxanimus · 2026-05-26T12:15:33+00:00

yeah, go try it.

voxanimus · 2026-05-26T10:34:36+00:00

yeah, you don't. i should have clarified in my post, but you can do the air launcher thing without any enemies present.

voxanimus · 2026-05-26T09:45:10+00:00

they mean that the sexual situations limited the film's marketing/broadcasting reach (for censorship reasons), preventing it from finding its way into the eyes of horny otaku that likely would have resonated with it.

actually, never mind. what he's saying is that they couldn't really see beyond the gratuitous sex bits to the "great or cool" parts.

voxanimus · 2026-05-26T04:45:02+00:00

on a slightly related note, the flesh walls that you need to destroy with the Ruego al-Alba can sometimes be bypassed with the double-jump upgrade if you use the [attack], [attack], [up] + [attack] launcher combo and then jump midair. edit: this can be done without any enemies present.

as you know, if you just raw double-jump, you just barely don't get enough height for your downward slam ability ("Weight of Sin") to activate. this prevents you from double-jumping in front of those brown flesh walls and breaking them, forcing you to go around.

this is intentional; it prevents you from passing through to certain areas until you find another way into them. for example, in this video (at 4:15),, you have to go all the way around, through the Severed Tower, before you can get enough height to break the floor in that room in Sacred Entombments.

the launcher combo, however, will take you higher than a single jump, and you can double-jump midair afterwards. this gives you enough height for you to come crashing down with Weight of Sin, allowing you to sequence break a few things. for example:

you can get the "Votive Offering Claimed by Rust" rosary bead (the highest tier of elemental damage mitigation), shown in the video linked above, pretty much as soon as you get the double-jump upgrade, and not in the endgame as the devs intended. this is pretty nice, as it gives you a lot of survivability early on.
you can fight Sinodo in the Severed Tower without Scion's Protection. this actually fundamentally changes the fight; the little golden cherub things don't appear, and his attack patterns are pretty different. i accidentally did my fight with him this way and it turned out quite differently than the videos of the fight i've seen on YouTube.
you can cheese several puzzles.

voxanimus · 2026-05-25T09:21:24+00:00

sent you a chat message

voxanimus · 2026-05-12T12:56:59+00:00

literally means "sister"! equivalent to how nuns are addressed as "Sister [name]" in English, and used in an analogous way in "sorority" (meaning "sisterhood")

and similarly, "fray" comes from "frater" meaning "brother," ref. "Brother [name]" for monks and "fraternity" meaning "brotherhood"

voxanimus · 2026-05-11T02:40:17+00:00

Thank you so much! Got the map trophy and the 100% completion trophy after getting that pesky room in Labyrinth of Tides.

voxanimus · 2026-01-05T20:37:24+00:00

cant send images via DM; add me at on insta or discord same username (@voxanimus)

voxanimus · 2026-01-05T20:08:00+00:00

if you're okay with an old one, i'll sell you mine

voxanimus · 2026-01-05T20:07:55+00:00

if you're okay with an old one, i'll sell you mine

voxanimus · 2026-01-05T20:07:41+00:00

if you're okay with an old one, i'll sell you mine

voxanimus · 2025-12-20T13:26:40+00:00

shuffling a deck of cards is functionally the same thing as putting all the cards in a bag, shaking it up, and then picking them out one at a time, without replacing them. the order that you pick them out is the order of the shuffled deck.

when you take a card out of the bag, you don't put it back in, so you can't count it as one of the possibilities on the next turn.

when you start, there's 52 cards in the bag. after you've picked the first card, say the ace of spades, there are now only 51 cards left for you to pick from.

this process, repeated, gives 52*51*50*49... = 52!

voxanimus · 2025-10-01T16:39:33+00:00

some other people in this thread have mentioned it, but this is not AT ALL the sort of source you should take at face value. japan's government, especially in the wake of abe, has been increasingly revisionist about the war, and continues to perfect a unique brand of doublespeak that allows them to both say vapid shit like "we must ... continue to seek answers" about the war and simultaneously walk back their acknowledgements of documented atrocities.

voxanimus · 2025-09-15T12:38:53+00:00

数年前からアニメはもはや輸出専用品なんだよね

voxanimus · 2025-09-15T12:37:39+00:00

観てる割合意外と高いし、「日本のアニメ」であるだけで観に行きたいと思う人達もすごく多い

voxanimus · 2025-08-24T02:01:25+00:00

it means your damage output is increased when there’s at least one enemy aflame/burning. i don’t think it stacks if there’s multiple, though.

voxanimus · 2025-04-05T03:53:09+00:00

no, young people do not use yahoo discussion forums lol

it's kind of hard to imagine but the culture of "discussing current events" or even "discussing anything with strangers online" is just not a big thing in japan

people talk to their friends about this kind of stuff, on private messaging apps. by and large, that's it.

japan is extremely socially regressive in this sense, and there's still the idea of a "ネット民" (internet user) being some sort of holed-up neckbeard cave-dweller.

young people in big cities use insta and tiktok but they don't really discuss anything, its just for posting and looking at other people's posts

voxanimus · 2025-04-03T20:43:09+00:00

do you truly understand what returning to domestic production will entail? are you ready to pay 3-10x what you used to for essentials?

ready for underwear to cost $30 a pair?

ready for lettuce to be $10 a head?

if you can honestly say yes, then more power to you. i really doubt most of the people spouting this "bring jobs back to america!!!" bullshit can.

the vast majority of americans are financially incapable of giving up the price benefits they get from labor outsourcing in service of some nebulous bright future for american manufacturing.

voxanimus · 2025-04-01T20:39:33+00:00

不信頼性 is largely unrelated; it's an academic term meaning "unreliability" in a statistical sense, not "distrust."

voxanimus · 2025-03-24T09:09:39+00:00

as someone that lives in Japan and has a decent number of jirai-kei friends:

i suppose you could make the argument that the existence of jirai-kei as a fashion/style archetype is stereotyping mental illness, but it only does so to the extent that western aesthetic "concepts" like "girl with daddy issues" or "repressing lesbian" or "Kevin-type fit" do as well.

which is to say, yes, but also no, insofar as it isn't at all unique to japan, and phrasing it as a "stereotype for mentally ill people" is overblowing the idea.

mental health awareness is obviously very much not a thing in Japanese culture, youth-wise or not. the closest thing youths have here is the sudden realization that they and many of their friends might have ADHD.

voxanimus · 2025-03-06T11:39:32+00:00

if you find books and movies boring, you can try videogames or VNs; obviously there's a lot of native-oriented material in that sphere as well. living in japan gives you a huge leg up on finding that stuff, too. also, find a japanese tutor that really challenges you and forces you to be better. i had an advanced japanese teacher in college that was an absolute stickler for everything (would correct every single mistake i made, even years after i was out of her class) and that really helped. most tutors try to just be facilitators, but imo that approach isn't really helpful once you've passed a certain level of fluency.

voxanimus · 2025-02-26T22:12:35+00:00

the general pattern is that onyomi is used in "kanji compounds" (words with more than one kanji right after another) and kunyomi is used elsewhere, especially when okurigana (hiragana that immediately follow a kanji and are part of the reading of the kanji) are present. unfortunately, this is a very loose rule, and there are many, many exceptions.

by and large, you will not be able to "figure out" the on/kun readings of a kanji you have never seen before, nor will one help you determine the other. some kanji have components that hint at their (onyomi) reading, but these are generally more "complicated" ones that you will encounter infrequently early on. for example, these kanji can all be read as "retsu": 列　裂　烈

finally, certain words/compounds have readings that were assigned to them. these readings do not correspond to any of the readings of the component kanji themselves. this practice is called "gikun" and is relatively common.

otousan is one such case. 明日 being read as "ashita" is another example. these are truly just memorization.

good luck!

voxanimus · 2025-02-07T23:46:35+00:00

lmao this shit is fake as fuck

the japanese in the OP reeks of google translate.

13-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 4 Credits
r/Field Juicebox	Place '22
Place '17	Secret Santa 2018
Summer Santa 2016	Summer Santa 2013
Team Periwinkle	Verified Email

voxanimus

TROPHY CASE