I lately stumbled across this topic, our beloved intermediate plateau, when reading through Maraās Study Log and some heartwarming experiences were shared. I thought it would be great to have them in one place to easily refer to and have a place to specifically talk about the dreading intermediate plateau.
I hope we can all share our experiences, maybe how we overcame them, or how it feels to be in there, and be there for each other to reach the next level
ā A maybe related topic on what to do after N3 can be found here.
EDIT: Is it okay to have this topic here in Japanese or would it make more sense to have it in All Languages?
Intermediate plateau for me probably started when I was almost finished preparing for JLPT N3.
I felt so unmotivated. I did not see any progress. I felt like I should know more like I should understand sentences more while reading short articles for N3 or listening to YT videos or podcasts. It was also the time when I was not satisfied anymore with only understanding the main story. I wanted to understand the details. I wanted to understand the subtle nuances. And I always felt like I was almost there, that I only need to reach out a bit farther. That was really frustrating.
To get out of there I googled a lot about this intermediate plateau and one suggestion that really stick with me was āHow about changing study methods?ā I then watched a lot YT videos about other peopleās study methods and found the microverse of polyglots with talks precisely about linguistic topics and became really interested in how people study that study a lot languages (later on I also got some pros and contras about that polyglot world but at that moment I was really excited). I found a lot of different study methods like the gold list method, like preparing study plans, rethinking and writing down oneās own motivations and goals. To be precise. That āI want to be fluentā alone might not be helpful, when oneself does not have in mind what āfluentā for they mean.
So I played a lot with different methods. I also dropped Anki. It was so time consuming to create the cards, though I got really creative with HTML & CSS to have pretty cards that work for me.
And most importantly for me: I started reading. I have not read books before because I had always thought: āYou need to understand the language more to be able to readā. I got to know satorireader.com and I also had my ććŖć¢ę§ććæć¦ć | L28 novels in the book shelf waiting for me. This series is probably not a good one to start, but I did not know the language level at that time, and I love that story which motivated me to keep going and slowly be able to see the books as books and not study-books.
I suppose thatās what Iām experiencing now. I think itās natural to an extent. When you newly start a skill you make what feels like huge strides early on, and once you hit a more intermediate level even if you are still progressing it feels slower than when you were a beginner because improvements donāt make such a huge difference as beforeā¦ Or maybe thatās what I tell myself to feel myself better?
Iāve been learning japanese for years but 2024 was the year I truly took it seriously. I know I made strides of improvement. But the past few weeks Iāve been finding everything japanese harder than usual. Especially reading. Iām just trying to ride through it (with shifting focus somewhat to listening over reading) and I assume eventually things will click again. Maybe my brain is just tired. But I must admit itās demotivating.
No, Iām pretty sure thatās a big factor in learning. When you know 0 things, learning 35 new concepts/words is enormous. But when you know 17320 things, an extra 35 doesnāt feel like much, even though youāre still moving forward.
Keep at it, and take a break when needed! I know with my brain, things getting harder usually signals some kind of ah-hah moment for my brain, and once it consolidates all the info itās learned recently and gets over the current hump, things are smooth sailing again for a while.
How I always think about it is in terms of actual percentages - 35 would be .20% of 17,320, so if you go through learning 35 things 5 times you get an increase of 1% which is not insignificant at an intermediate level. If you are sustained and consistent in your learning over a few weeks or months, you can bump that up to 5% or 10% and then youāre really cooking.
Not sure if thatās really motivating or not, Iām just trying to say those small things snowball.
Therefore I use a method to make progress measurable for me. I use three ābenchmarkā series around level 35, of which I read (at least) one volume per year. I assume that the difficulty of the books within these series do not change.
Then I measure average number of look-ups (words and grammar together) per page, number of pages read per day, and number of pages with no look-up at all. Edit: I speak about physical books only.
So I can see that look-ups decrease with time and the no-look-up pages increase. Edit: I donāt read all books of a series one after the other, but cycle through several series during a year.
Why series around L35? Because with easier series for me serious improvement already happens within a book, not to mention a book series.
Some rule I discovered for me for some easier books: no-look-up pages donāt appear while the average number of look-ups is still above or equal to 8. Of course here I would only count pages that have full text, so no end of chapters, pages with images, etc.
I see people say this anectodally a lot, I wonder if there is any science behind it. I tried to search for it but modern internet is awful for searching such things, or possible Iām not using the right keywords.
I have noticed this as well. Usually when things seem to be getting super difficult and Iām struggling a lot, if I work through it then shortly afterwards certain things just click into place and it becomes easier.
I found this with reading when I was struggling way back at the start when I joined Natively and powered through the Tadoku graded readers. I also saw similar results after powering through Flying Witch manga and the first few childrens books I read before Zenidendo series, and again more recently with listening when I powered through over 100 hours in the space of a few weeks.
Thereās still a lot that Iām missing (practice tests say Iām intermediate level but I still donāt consider myself there yet especially with my low vocab level) but I have noticed this more and more, especially with my listening and reading more recently. I kinda wondered if it was just me and I was doing something wrong while studying that was making things more difficult
I donāt really believe in the intermediate plateau - it seems more a problem of measuring than actually plateauing in terms of skill advancement. I could always tell I was improving because I had a stack of books that I went back to every couple of months and try reading the first few pages of, and even though it didnāt feel like any great progress had happened in between, suddenly I could understand a book that a few months ago looked impossible.
Getting bored or burnt out is a different matter though, and losing consistency in studying is a pretty fast way to actually plateau because you need a certain amount of forward momentum to get anywhere.
Iām sure I went through the intermediate plateau but I donāt really remember it too well I agree with others about having āgoalā books to check in against, though.
One of my favorite books, 64 | L39 I finished in early 2022, but in August 2020 I wrote this about the book in my private notes:
Started reading with ććÆćØć³ ā incredibly hard. I read the first chapter twice and understood maybe 80% after looking up words. 20% is a huge amount to miss though. I understood the manās daughter was missing, that he worked for the police in some capacity that involved the media, that he traveled far to see the body, that suicide spots were being posted about on the internet but completely missed the rest of the chapter. I didnāt even realize he was there with his wife until I read the chapter in English
Blurred very very minor spoilers - itās all first chapter stuff. Iāll note I never read more than the first chapter of the book in English I had originally planned to do a side by side reading but realized that wasnāt a great idea.
Also at the end of 2021 é»éä»®é¢ | L38 was my goal book, being out of reach but less so than 64 had been for me in 2020. I managed to read it just about a solid year later at the end of 2022.
I actually still have goal books. Last time I tried reading ę¦åęåć®ēå„äŗ件 | L35 ā¦last year? Maybe? It was a bit exhausting to read. I think L35 is wrong there Seeing as Iām the only grader and graded it against shorts thatās my own fault, will fix.
I do agree it can be a problem of metrics, but it mostly depends on what we mean by skill. When I felt I was in the intermediate plateau, it was because the thing I cared about was being able to read books comfortably. The problem is that itās a yes/no thing, so even while I was making progress (measurably, thanks to Anki), my skill (of interest) was plateauing. I was fine with manga (and could read with virtually no look up thanks to context), but books were forever out of reach.
Once I got to low N1 and could finally read books without being burned out from the number of look ups, it suddenly felt like smooth sailing (I was out of the plateau). Not that my progress was any faster, itās just that I could directly measure it through my reading speed and number of look ups.
I didnāt experience that because I was easily able to find enjoyable childrenās novels to read and had a no-lookups-while-reading policy - anything too hard to understand without lookups got put back in the goal books stack. During the N3~N2 stage I was doing one book/week, so it never felt like there was any levelling off.
So, how many unknown words did you accept to read a book with no look-ups? I myself find even one word per page unacceptable Though during listening I would have no problem with thatā¦But during reading I will look it up, just because I can.
On my blog at WK I have done some vocabularly measurements since the beginning of 2023. I donāt really recommend that kind of tracking for most people (if you look deeper into the posts, youāll see I had to be quite careful about how I did this, and it only tracks one narrow aspect of progress). After 2 years of data, though, (spanning the tale end of my beginner phase and getting me deep into intermediate) I found some insight into the intermediate plateau and other people on my log seemed to identify with it as well:
beginner stages: progress is astoundingly fast for very little effort (if I read consistently every day).
intermediate stages: progress comes slower and I was less aware of what progressed until I looked back over a few months. Sometimes it was vocab, sometimes, grammar, sometimes kanji, sometimes synthesis or speed of comprehension. It never felt like my vocabulary (or those other factors) was improving, but looking back, it was always increasing at roughly the same rate. Thatās because I was learning lots of words, but also forgetting lots of words (or grammar, etc). The forgotten words cause frustration each time, whereas remembered words donāt get noticed, and in fact it enables awareness of more āunknownā.
there is a forgetting curve and as the progress (as above) isnāt always immediately or consciously apparent, I think one version of the perceived intermediate plateau is a roller coaster: progress made (not noticed), demotivation, inconsistent reading/longer pause - progress lost. Repeat.
So the most important lessons I internalised from all of this so far is to be consistent, i.e., read every day even a small amount, and when looking back, look 3-12 months back at specific notes (learning logs are great) or reread a book from that earlier time period.
Many, lol. But I think getting used to ambiguity was a good thing. I went through some stages where I marked unknown words with sticky notes to look up later - but most of those werenāt getting learnt anyway so I donāt think it made much difference. Doing lookups wasnāt very convenient as it was all paperbacks and pre-google lens.
The intermediate plateau isnāt something that Iāve struggled with too much. What Iāve noticed is, once I start reading and pretty consistently interacting with the language almost every single day, there is no such thing as a true plateau, even if the progress is indeed less obvious sometimes. The key element I think is to have some way to compare yourself to your previous self. I usually do this through books, whether thatās rereading a book Iāve previously read (or the next volume of a series), or regularly attempting a book that I know used to be way above my level, seeing how I do now, if I can get farther.
Another thing thatās interesting is reading speed. If I look at a book where I read part of it around May and the second half in December last year, I can very easily compare my reading speed. A faster reading speed means that not only did I do less lookups, I was also less puzzled by the grammar and didnāt need to reread sentences as much. Thus a tangible improvement.
Ah, I think my problem was that I couldnāt find anything like that. Everything was either way too hard or boring (or both).
I wish there was something like Natively back in the days
I agree with others about having āgoalā books to check in against, though.