I don’t really plan on learning another language. It’s a lot of work and I’d much rather improve my Japanese. But if I were to learn one, It would probably be French, Chinese, Pali or Lojban.
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I was a bit curious about this, so here are some more language specific polls:
Japanese
How long have you been learning Japanese?
- < 1 year
- 1-2 years
- 3-5 years
- 6-9 years
- 10+ years
0
voters
What’s your current Japanese level?
- Absolute beginner
- Upper beginner
- Lower intermediate
- Upper intermediate
- Advanced
0
voters
How many pages have you read on Natively in Japanese?
- < 100 pages
- < 500 pages
- < 1000 pages
- < 5000 pages
- < 10 000 pages
- < 30 000 pages
- 30 000 +
0
voters
Korean
How long have you been learning Korean?
- < 1 year
- 1-2 years
- 3-5 years
- 6-9 years
- 10+ years
0
voters
What’s your current Korean level?
- Absolute beginner
- Upper beginner
- Lower intermediate
- Upper intermediate
- Advanced
0
voters
How many pages have you read on Natively in Korean?
- < 100 pages
- < 500 pages
- < 1000 pages
- < 5000 pages
- < 10 000 pages
- < 30 000 pages
- 30 000 +
0
voters
German
How long have you been learning German?
- < 1 year
- 1-2 years
- 3-5 years
- 6-9 years
- 10+ years
0
voters
What’s your current German level?
- Absolute beginner
- Upper beginner
- Lower intermediate
- Upper intermediate
- Advanced
0
voters
How many pages have you read on Natively in German?
- < 100 pages
- < 500 pages
- < 1000 pages
- < 5000 pages
- < 10 000 pages
- < 30 000 pages
- 30 000 +
0
voters
Spanish
How long have you been learning Spanish?
- < 1 year
- 1-2 years
- 3-5 years
- 6-9 years
- 10+ years
0
voters
What’s your current Spanish level?
- Absolute beginner
- Upper beginner
- Lower intermediate
- Upper intermediate
- Advanced
0
voters
How many pages have you read on Natively in Spanish?
- < 100 pages
- < 500 pages
- < 1000 pages
- < 5000 pages
- < 10 000 pages
- < 30 000 pages
- 30 000 +
0
voters
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I’m not sure what I would be here. :S Probably pretty safely Upper Intermediate, but I never feel confident enough to say Advanced.
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That’s always pretty subjective anyway. It seems like you’ve read quite a lot of N1 lightnovels, so imo that’d make you an advanced learner, at least for reading. But then it also depends on if you consider other skills that aren’t reading, so just go with what you think fits best.
I mostly wanted to see if there’s a correlation between time spent learning, pages read and level. If we notice one then cool, but correlation =/ causation either way so no need to overthink your answers.
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I’ll admit I’ve only been taking reading into my account with my answers. 
Speaking/writing/listening are all neglected children in my language family…
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You can use the Natively groupings
I chose Upper Intermediate, which does check out with (the upper range of) my comfortable reading range
I suspect that’s a lot of us here 
It was weird picking a “how long”, cuz I’m at 2 yrs 6 months… Which feels like it’s more than “1-2 years”, but still isn’t in 3-5 range
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Haha same. I always see what I can’t do rather than what I can. I suspect it’ll be another hundred books or so and a lot more output before I feel like I can say ‘advanced’ without feeling like a fraud.
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I chose lower intermediate, although I’d probably give myself plain intermediate if given the option. Lower intermediate (going by the Natively levels) are very comfortable, but upper intermediate are a struggle.
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Technically 10+ years, but for many of those years I barely touched the language any if at all. I started “studying” the language erratically in junior high. In college I actually took some courses and learned a good amount. But then I struggled to keep up any amount of study for almost a decade until late last year after I found Natively.
Every few years I would try to do Anki and quit after a couple of days because it just isn’t for me. I didn’t have the willpower to actually sit down and study without a course forcing me to and I didn’t see any other options at the time, so I continued going back to Anki like a bad ex.
In terms of years of actually learning the language, I’m closer to 3-5 years and half of that was incredibly inefficient self-learning as a kid.
I’m only lower intermediate at the moment. But I’ve noticed real gains since I started using Natively and hopefully I can keep that going. Hoping to start lower N2 material by the end of the year.
I’ve read 6000+ pages. Nearly 2/3 is since March of this year (Though it’s almost exclusively manga, so it’s not as much reading as it sounds). It’s remarkable how much more you read when you can actually find interesting material at your level instead of just seeing things online and assuming that they are too advanced for you.
Most of my time last year and early this year were spent watching/listening instead of reading. But in March I switched my focus to reading (I doubled my total pages read in March alone, which felt really good). Mostly easier manga without furigana to boost my abysmal kanji knowledge.
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I picked 10+ years since it’s learning, but if it were studying, then it’d be ~2.5 years (so, 1-2). Very little of what I did before finding WaniKani would I actually consider “studying,” but I did still learn/pick up stuff without necessarily setting out to actively do so.
I know I’m not a beginner anymore, but I still have a lot to learn and I struggle with grammar, so I did Lower Intermediate. I still would even if just straight “Intermediate” were an option.
I have 63k pages read logged on here. I started reading 2 mo. before starting WK and I haven’t stopped lol
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As with lots of others, I started learning a while ago, maybe ~9 years ago, but there’s probably a 7-ish year gap where I wasn’t really doing anything in Japanese.
Hoping I keepup studying though, it’s been really enjoyable this year.
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I marked lower intermediate but every placement test I do says upper intermediate yet I can’t do output at that level. 
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I’ve definitely seen two schools of thought on that. One is that you are at the level of your highest skill because you understand at that level. The second is that you are at your lowest level because your lagging skill holds you back.
I personally do not care about writing (and especially not hand writing), so I consider my level somewhere in between my listening and reading. If I had to count my speaking it would be quite a bit lower 
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So far, these results are already super interesting. It seem like the Japanese learners (at least those that are on the forums a lot) are made up of intermediate or advanced learners. Apart from me, no one voted as a beginner! Whether this means that there aren’t many Japanese beginners on Natively period or whether these people just didn’t vote though, idk.
Lots of intermediate and advanced learners also means lots of pages read! Japanese holds the highest number of pages read, which is probably at least partially due to the fact that a lot of Japanese learners tend to read manga, which can inflate pages read faster than reading novels.
Not many voters for the other languages, so I’m hoping that more will vote. So far though, Korean is interesting because most learners are newer to Korean, and somehow that still chalks up to a bulk of intermediates. Big numbers for the pages read here as well, just no one over 30k pages so far.
German is interesting, because all the people that voted have been learning German for at least 5 years. Are there no (or few) new German learners on Natively? Levels are also very mixed, with a mix of pages read as well.
For Spanish, there’s a mix of people that have been studying Spanish for varying times. We also have a spread among almost every level. As for pages read, most people have read more pages than German learners for example, but no one has gone above 10k pages.
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Aside from the few super low level graded readers there isn’t much to read in Japanese as a true beginner, and lower intermediate is when easy native content starts to be accessible. For people coming from English or most European languages the grammar is wildly different as is the writing system. Barrier to entry is simply higher.
I suspect if we had more people learning Japanese from say, Chinese, we’d see different results.
Also I suspect beginners aren’t as drawn to this forum. It’s a lot of book clubs, most being I think level 25+?
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My Natively Japanese page count has no manga in it 
(299 books and 99912 pages by Natively’s count, so about to hit a couple of major milestones in both. Though by my count I’m only on 298 – Natively includes textbooks in that figure.)
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Wow. I can’t even imagine how long that must’ve taken you. I’m not even sure I would reach that kind of number for English (although if Natively accepted rereads or fanfictions, then that would be a completely different story).
Did you buy all those books, or do you have access to a nice library? Because honestly, with so many books, you must have a great collection of bookshelves.
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I’m the one absolute beginner in there. I learned German for 8 years (through school) and remember nothing. (It’s been 20 years, too )
I read one novel back in the days, though, so I have 300 ish pages logged. I guess I would say I was intermediate at my peak… but it’s long gone.
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I think one or two I borrowed from the library, but practically all of them I own in paper form:
(Books on their side rather than shelved properly are the to-read pile. The shelf three from the bottom is about three quarters 赤川次郎; if I read another fifteen or so of his books I’ll be able to have a complete shelf just for him…)
It’s taken the best part of twenty years to get here, so it’s more persistence than anything else.
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I thought of an interesting question so doing a poll
In what language do you believe you currently read more books in (as in literature/comics/audiobooks and not news/signs/work/etc)?
- my native
- the main language I am learning
- the secondary language I am learning (for those learning more than one language)
- in another language I am fluent with (for example, English if you’re a non-native to it but read in it a lot)
0
voters
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