I was just wondering how good you would say your Japanese is now. I’m not Japanese so I have no way of assessing it, but after taking a look at Michal Ryszard Wojcik’s site, Norsk Experiment, I became kind of disheartened. He has apparently studied English using this Natural Method, yet the English he has written on his site is far from perfect, with some sentences being completely ungrammatical. How close would you say you are to a native speaker? How has your language intuition developed? Would you say you can feel Japanese like you can feel English? (And thus correct sentences and change them around to make them sound better etc.)

I’d be really interested in hearing about this!

Many thanks! Luke!

Thanks for compiling that list — now I can check and compare myself against each point, and work hard towards completing the whole lot of them, haha!

When I started to learn chinese, I friend of mine who was in my classes too, advised me to listening Pmsleur sets, in fact his chinese was better than anothers classmates I included.
Was to boring need to listening ALL PAUSED ALL THE TIME sets, a lot of english, and them I tried to CLS pod, what a suck! The chinese guys ( a girls who probably apears to be very cute and another guy) trying to show us their english proficience, a Ni HAO lesson pay for 99% in english for exemple, in fact to boring too.

All chinese courses is VERY boring to listening or pay attetion that, I then deleted all kind of chinese courses from my HD.

When a suddenly stoped by in AJATT, to freedon my self about what in fact I have some feeling but dont has courage to accept.

Okay, when you are a beginner(without self confidence to accept WHAT YOU WANT) you can do some classes, listening to cousers sets etc etc. But, try another level and TRASH THEN as soon as possible!

BTW:

I keep on studying with a teacher (who is in fact very funny) a old citzen part russian part chinese. Just for fun! Just to test me! Just to know was china 50-60 years ago! Just to contact with anothers real chinese speakers! And the main: just to force me to become fluently as quickle possible and save my chineses classes money!

Even living in your mother tongue language target country is possible to know nothing about it,
I´m met a lot of people main chinese who despict the fact to living here (brazil) for many decads do not able to speak a single sentence, due to Katzumoto who even living is US learned Japonese to fluency level. Most part of person who plains to learn english
spends a lot of money to travel in “fulltime” courses stay about 3-4 month there and comeback to brazil in a same lavel when he or she went abroad.

It is possible create a artificial(when you stay on yours country) or natural(when you travel abroad) enviroment.

And despict the fact you travel or not a semi-natural enviroment is possible to building in yours origin country.

Khatzumoto show it for all of us, he was able to get the learning process change.

The listening process is in fact the most important( and pehaps easier to do, for sure)

The hardest part for me to implement is sleeping with headphones on. I can fall asleep all right, but my headphones will get screwed up or something over the course of the night. I tried leaving my desktop on playing low volumes of ripped anime dialogue but am worried about environmental friendliness and the electrical consumption.

You have several posts on listening, but mainly they are focused on why and when. Do you think you could do something on what and how? I know it seems like common sense, but myself and some other language-learners I know are just having trouble with the listening thing. Thank you!!

Some people recommend 10 minutes instead while others recommend 45 minutes, I think 20 is a balance. Frankly, I think myopia is still largely due to genetics, but if it makes you feel safe, you can try eye exercises or resting your eyes.

@Ivan, this is what I knew before the 18 months.
0. Some Chinese and Chinese characters…shaky and spotty…it was through this project and SRSing that my character knowledge grew, since I could “forget about forgetting”.
1. 情け無いぞ (なさけないぞ）, a phrase picked up from playing my friend J3B’s Japanese version of the PlayStation fighting game Battle Arena 闘神殿 （とうしんでん.
2. The words. こんにちは。これ。それ。あれ。どれ。何だこれ！？。
3. The first two verses of the song 夏色（なついろ）by ゆず — unfortunately, I didn’t know what the lyrics meant.
4. I knew the phrase 失礼な！ (“How rude!”)
5. I knew some kana I had learned by brute-force-rote as an experiment…but they were fading fast and I had them very confused (ほ／は、ま／も、シ／ツ、ソ／ン）. There are better methods (Heisig).
6. I may have known the numbers 1-4 from the Missy Elliot song “Get Your Freak On”. I once imitated the Japanese introduction for the amusement of my Japanese friends, but looking back, I misheard it and messed it up.