Roughly 45 minutes a day for 15 months: textbook chapters, kanji reviews, and a podcast on the commute. I passed a mock N4 easily nine months ago and I would probably still only just pass it today. Nothing feels like it is compounding anymore. What did people actually change to get moving again — concrete changes, not motivation advice.
Plateaus are usually a mismatch between what you practise and what you measure. You have been drilling recognition and testing recognition. Try producing: write 150 words a day about nothing at all, get it corrected weekly, and you will discover an enormous list of things you thought you knew.
Timebox differently. 45 minutes split across three activities is 15 minutes each, which is barely enough to warm up. I moved to two 30 minute blocks, one input and one output, five days a week, and got more out of less total time.
Matches what I saw. Context switching eats a shocking amount of a short session.
Fifteen months is not that long, be slightly kinder to yourself. The N4 to N3 gap is roughly double the vocabulary, so part of the flat feeling is just that the next step is bigger than the last one.
@curious_wren · 2w ago · 3 replies
You changed nothing in fifteen months, which is the whole answer. 45 minutes of textbook plus reviews is a maintenance routine, not a growth routine. The B1 plateau is where structured material stops feeding you new things fast enough and you have to switch to volume of real material. Concretely: drop the textbook, read one native thing every day even badly, and make your reviews words you met in the wild rather than a premade deck.
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@curious_wren · 2w ago
It is miserable for about three weeks. Pick something with pictures and low stakes so you can tolerate not understanding. I did four panel manga and looked up two words a page, maximum, and put the rest down.
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@adjunct_life · last wk.
Reading native material at N4 sounds miserable, honestly.
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