See title. I’ve been to quite a few local language meetups and saw lots of people IRL who are learning languages: wondering how are y’all doing too
For myself… learning French due to necessity. I am making progress, just veeery slow. I underestimated how difficult it would be (a lot of vocabs between English/French are similar… but the languages themselves are not!)
I’m on a strong streak with my Japanese self study. Been going for over a year and I’m somewhere around N4-N3 level. It’s very rewarding to understand long conversations, but it also feels like progress is slow. My grammar is pretty good now, but learning vocabulary and kanji is like a Sysyphian quest.
I’d say I usually get in at least 30 minutes of listening practice every day. I’m still not speaking much, but I think this is OK. I’ve heard VR chat is a good resource for that, but the timezone mismatch makes it pretty hard.
Overall I recommend immersion based study with a strong emphasis on input (listening + reading) before doing much output. Duolingo is a waste of time if you’re serious about approaching fluency. I’ve never seen a single comprehensive product that actually works for learning Japanese. You have to consume native materials, and there are some good tools that make it easier, but you need to be a bit savvy to stitch them all together into a cohesive workflow.