Stage 2 — Building the Habit (N4)

You know your kana. You can parse basic sentences. You have a feel for は vs が, and verb conjugation no longer looks like random noise. Good. Now the real work begins — not harder study, but a fundamental shift in how you spend your time.

Stage 2 is where you stop studying Japanese and start using it.

Your goals for this stage are concrete: watch anime daily without English subtitles, begin sentence mining from real content, and read graded readers at Tadoku L2-L3. None of this requires perfection. You will understand fragments. You will miss jokes. That is the process working exactly as intended.

The single most important habit you build here is daily immersion. Not daily Anki. Not daily textbook drills. Daily contact with Japanese that was made for Japanese people. Anki supports this habit. Your textbook supports this habit. But the habit itself is listening, reading, and absorbing the language in context.

The hours you spend immersed matter more than the hours you spend studying. Prioritize accordingly.