>>159430I'm not going to sugarcoat it, you are going to have to spend at least 6-10 months of daily studying before you feel like you can follow along conversations and read decently, and then years of studying if you truly want to master the language.
Anyone telling you they understand x% of a stream from like a month of studying is talking shit and are heavily deluding themselves into thinking they understand what they are saying and are most likely only relying on the context rather than what they are actually saying.
And age is just an excuse, I don't know how old you are but I'm late 20's and have studied for several months now and seen remarkable progress. It all comes down to you making it a habit.
>>159456I don't believe it is helpful to sugarcoat the massive time investment that is learning a language, especially one like Japanese. The risk is that he thinks it is smooth sailing until he realizes that he needs to take extra steps to truly learn and those steps might feel like walls.
Getting stuck in the doulingo/anki spiral without branching out into much more important steps(Reading, listening, making your environment as Japanese as you can) is the death knell of learning.
