Find an easy (I'd say below L30) and short (I'd say below 300 pages, preferably less than 200) novel from here: https://learnnatively.com/search/jpn/books/?type=novel

Read reviews and tags to see if any sounds interesting.

Start by reading a novel in bite-sized chunks. Read 2 pages today. Then 2 pages tomorrow. Look up words that you don't know. Re-read passages if you get confused. Ask for help here. Then read 3 pages the next day. Then 5 pages. Pretty soon you will be up to 10, 20, or as many pages a day as you want. You will learn lots of new vocab by seeing words in context. Your capability (and stamina) will grow almost without noticing.

The second し is devoiced, so it's pronounced like "toshishta" rather than "toshishita". I would look into "vowel devoicing in Japanese".

Yes this word is normally said "as is" even during causal conversation. としした

You can say 駅の近くです or 駅に近いです

I would say 駅の近くにある

よっぽど/よほど does have the meaning of "quite a bit", BUT it has a separate usage where it is paired with a volitional question (よっぽど〜ようかと思った) and adds the nuance that one was on the verge of doing something but didn't.

Definitions and examples from dictionaries:

Genius: ［思い切って・よくよく］1時間も待たされたので、よっぽど帰ろうかと思った I was kept waiting for one hour and by the end I was on the verge of leaving the place.

O-Lex: 《ほとんど》よほどあいつに本当のことを言ってやろうかと思ったけれどこらえたよ I came close to telling him the bald truth, but I bit my tongue.

Sanseido: ほとんど そうするつもりになるようす。「よほどやめようかと思った」

Meikyou: 行動を起こす寸前のところまで考えたさま。思い切って。よくよく。「よほど帰ろうかと思った」

I guess you could imagine it as よっぽど modifying 考える, as  in "I thought about ...ing quite a bit, but ultimately didn't", "I was quite ready to ..., but ultimately didn't". Though it's important to capture the functional meaning, and not just the literal meaning.

In college, it took us about 6 months worth of lessons to cover the book. And it involved about 6 hours a week in-class plus various homework on top which added probably another 4-6 hours. And not everyone in my class was able to master it. Most of those who started from zero struggled quite hard with that pace.

So I'm not sure if 20-30 minutes on most days is gonna be enough to finish the whole book in 6 months and actually fully master it, unless you really put in some extra hours over the weekend.

The thing is, the book expects you to not just go through the lessons, it also expects you to do the accompanying workbook, and the audio lessons, as well as practice hiragana and katana as well as the relevant Kanji, to mastery. So it is a fair bit of work.

But it's impossible to tell how easy or hard it's going to be for you exactly, it's gonna depend on a lot of factors. But just so you know, your 6 month plan is basically college level pace, but you won't have a teacher to help you or quiz you to check if you've actually mastered the content. So you need to bring that discipline yourself. Anyone can flip through the book over a single weekend, but that won't lead to mastery of the content. So make sure you actually learn what's in it. Do all the lessons and workbook content!

If someone says, この本は難しそうだ, they are telling me that based one what they perceive: the book looks or seems difficult. I am hearing their own personal specific perception of the book. That person perceives it as seeming difficult.

If someone says, この本は難しいようだ, then I understand them as telling me not their own personal perception of the book itself, but their general understanding based on general external evidence. Maybe someone told them it was difficult. Maybe there are statements on the cover that give the impression of being difficult. Any number of reasons. However, the person making the statement is not taking personal responsibility for this judgment. Their understanding or impression is that the book is difficult, but it might not be. They don't have enough information to confidently make that judgment.

It seems to me that the distinction that Quartet is making is that your perception of the book's difficulty is that you see a smart person struggling with it. You haven't actually seen the book, and are not commenting directly on it, but only indirectly based on the surrounding external evidence (smart person is struggling with it), and thus 難しいようだ.

I personally don't think it's very useful to try and find the specific "coded" nuance between them like a rule. It's much better to get a lot of exposure to the language and how native speakers use it, and you'll slowly get a feel for it.

For example I can tell you with 100% confidence that in most situations 難しそう is the option you want because it's very common/natural as an expression. 難しいよう is not wrong and you'll see it sometimes but it seems to be much more limited to the point of being not even useful to worry about its existence until you come across it.

If I had to make a guess, 難しそう is simply pretty much a 1:1 translation for "seems difficult", so you can just stick to that, but 難しいよう seems to be more like an inference done like a conjecture based on physical evidence like you see someone struggling to do something and you might use 難しいよう but even then honestly I feel like it's mostly going to sound odd.

Let's look at some example sentences of 難しいよう: https://massif.la/ja/search?q=%22%E9%9B%A3%E3%81%97%E3%81%84%E3%82%88%E3%81%86%22

A lot of them are part of the grammar point 〜ような〜ような like 難しいような、難しくないような which is a set pattern (like "I feel like it's kinda difficult but not sure if it's difficult" and it raises indecisiveness). Then there's stuff like:

答えを見つけるのは、とても難しいような気がした。

This is a common pattern where you have 気がする and you add ような to make it even more abstract/indirect so it becomes "it's kind of like a 難しい vibe".

Then you have a "real" ようだ like:

これはかなり難しいようだ。

Looking at the context around the sentence it's about someone describing some kind of ritual or something related to some isekai game mechanic (idk) that is likely going to be hard. I can imagine the person actively thinking among himself like "hmm..." pondering with a serious look on his face like "... this sounds complicated..." rather than just looking at something and going "wow, seems difficult" (難しそう). Like ようだ in this usage to me feels more voluntary/thought about and less instinctive.

These are all vibes I got from being exposed to Japanese. I don't know if that's the "official" rule or explanation to these words but, as I said, my advice is if you want to get to this point where you just "get it", you need more exposure rather than asking "what's the difference between X and Y according to this totally arbitrary rule?"

Ill be your penpal 🙋‍♂️

Also try here: https://www.reddit.com/r/language_exchange/

しかし to me sounds more stiff and maybe even literary/old fashioned. でも sounds more casual/colloquial/spoken.

Why did your teacher change it? I don't know, maybe just cause it sounded better in the register of the rest of the story. しかし to me sounds like something you might see in "proper" である speech while your story is narrated in a ます form that is common in children's stories so maybe でも gives it a softer and more friendly feel. しかし can sound much colder/objective maybe.

These are just guesses of course, you'd have to ask your teacher if you want to know more. Grammatically speaking, your usage of しかし was fine, in my opinion.

Yes

Imagine the person does many things, and you have listed everything in front of you. 軽音部を選んだ is one of them.

You feel the most 狙ってる vibe of the person’s from THERE.

Parents are talking about their older child: あの子も、弟の世話をしたりしてずいぶんおとなになったと思ってたけど、あんなオモチャを欲しがるあたり、まだまだ子どもなんだね。

Hope this helps your understanding

It's not really のかと as one thing.

の and か and と are each doing (one of) their normal jobs.

残っている「の」 is nominalizing

か is a (rhetorical) question mark

と is a quotative

Then the sentence is inverted for impact. Think of it as こんなところが残っているのかとちょっと驚きましたけどね 

"I was surprised that a place like this was still around."

「こんなところが残っているのか」と驚きました

13 years ago there were not that many tools or they were not that well known for learning Japanese. Now there are a few good ones (and I guess lot of bad ones too).

I think its probably time to rip the bandaid off kanji and just srs through them (using anki or something). It's the main reason people bounce off reading. Then just read with an electronic dictionary so its easy to look up words, don't make it hard on yourself and insist on paper.

You'll be surprised how quickly you learn words. It takes time but its generally enjoyable time once you make looking up words easy.

I could read Doraemon more or less. Cannot read things like Detective Conan.

I can recognize about 800 Kanji.

These to me seem like two major issues that you need to fix. You've been living here for 13 years and are basically illiterate. Now, don't get me wrong I don't mean this with spite or to shoot you down, but it's just the reality of it and the sooner you accept it, the better. You mention things like doing taxes but honestly I've also been doing taxes her and filing your 確定申告 every year doesn't really take much (and there's also pretty straightforward directions, including in English). Especially now that we have eTax.

Anyway, the good thing is that this is not a huge issue and it can be easily solved. The solution is... READ MORE.

Look for tools like what is described in this guide, get yourself a "mining" set up with anki if you want (it's not mandatory but strongly recommended) and simply... start consuming a shitload of Japanese content. Find things you like, manga, anime, games, books, visual novels, TV dramas, etc. Literally anything. And just spend your free time enjoying it in Japanese. Look up words you don't know, add them to your anki deck, look up grammar you don't know, ask questions here or on some random discord server (like EJLX) when you find sentences that are too hard, and just keep chugging.

You already live in Japan, you have Japanese family, you can't avoid Japanese content. Just spend time actually consuming said content. I don't know what you've been doing for 13 years but try to focus on removing English-focused content and instead change all of that with Japanese content. Watch some Japanese TV instead of binge-watching youtube or LSF or tiktok or whatever other English-based slop content people watch these days. You are now Japanese.

If you do that, you'll fix your problems in like 6~12 months of consistent effort and will reach basic literacy. Then you keep doing that until you're good. That's what we all do.

Also don't rely on ChatGPT and don't take your study advice from shitty LLMs. Especially for this kind of stuff LLMs are known for regurgitating the most common (and often bad) advice you hear from random people who don't really know much but are part of the "majority" of the internet (where the LLMs are trained on). Most people are beginners, you're basically sourcing the advice of beginners doing that.

Yea ignore the FOMO, reviewing the cards so late after mining them is just wasting the benefits of mining

The words will come up again even the rare ones and what is the FOMO exactly anyway one extra lookup later on? Why worry about that

I personally don't like having a huge backlog but the most common way to handle this is using some add-ons that activate new cards based on some frequency list.

You can find something to start of here:

Setup - Immersion-Based Japanese Learning

But personally I'd just be more strict with what I add, pick words you like or think will be useful. Honestly the vocabulary you need is very personal to the type of content you consume, there is some language specific aspect to it (synonyms that are super rare alternatives) but a lot of it is mostly on you so you should be able to make that call better than most frequency lists.

Also consider that if you have such a big backlog, then there is a chance you are reading a ton in which case you might not even need to add some frequent words to your decks as you will get enough repetition from your regular reading.

Also make sure you are adding context sentences to your cards and reading that first on new cards, you should be able to remember a lot of the context from an entire sentence (well, at least the longer sentences, short ones can be tricky).

Instead of fully saying the N, you sort of half-say it, not fully letting your tongue touch the roof of your mouth. This keeps the nasal quality but lets you glide between the vowels easier.

I imagine your native language will have some phonetic/pronunciation differences with Japanese so I would advise you start by studying how Japanese speaking works in a more general sense.

The trick is not emphasize or stress ん unless there is reason to do so such as in the case of 〜んです.

For your particular question, my tip would be to not emphasize it as much and instead consider it as being a part of a half-syllable. For example 恋愛 is made up of four parts that we need to pronounce れ plus ん plus あ plus い. If you try to stress the pronunciation of ん it will will "split" your word in half (ren-ai). Instead, you can blend it with the following up sound and make a subtle new kana instead. In this case you can combine the sound of ん with the anticipated あ and make a subtle な which would change your word to "re-na-i" and you will instead pronounce れ-な-い.

If you don't mind, did you start conversation lessons online? I am trying to find a good place to start lessons as well

Congrats on the output. I'm not that far in but the expert opinion is that output is the way to go. Writing is fantastic because you have time. You don't have that with speaking. The hack with speaking is generally to drill common phrases and do lots of listening if you aren't already.

犬と works, but it would mean お父さん equally enjoys walking as the dog does.

犬の散歩 is appropriate to mean that as a chore.

犬に is not grammatical. What did you think it would mean?

There are just a lot of ways one can say this, just as in English "walk my dog" exists alongside "take my dog for a walk".

In this case, the key information is 散歩に行きました, and 犬の is simply modifying the 散歩. The nuance is something akin to "took our dog for its walk," i.e., it's not just any walk, but specifically a walk for the dog.

You could also say, 犬と散歩に行きました。"went for a walk with the dog." This doesn't imply it's specifically for the dog, just that the father is going for a walk along with the dog.

犬に散歩に行きました would not be grammatical. But you could say, 犬を散歩に連れて行きました。"took the dog for a walk." Again, not necessarily only for the dog; the father is going for a walk, and took the dog with him.

That workflow looks horribly inefficient, I'd focus on streamlining it. Mining a word should take literally a second.

How long does it take for reading VNs to feel about the same as English?

A 5 digit number of hours learning to read it with comparable ease, but you can get to a comfortable spot before that.

Just put more effort into grammar, vocab you can get by with lookups for the most part but grammar is more annoying to look up.

How long does it take for reading VNs to feel about the same as English?

I don't know what level your English fluency is but if your question is like "How long does it take to be good at reading literary works at the same level as a (literate) native speaker" then the answer is probably in the order of 20,000 to 30,000 hours of straight up content consumption.

But probably what you're really asking is "how long does it take to get to a decent-enough level to be able to comfortably read and enjoy VNs", and then the answer is probably going to be something between 3,000 and 10,000 hours depending on what you think is "comfortable" for you. Tools like texthooking and yomitan can help you make things more enjoyable even at a lower level of (initial) comprehension.

The problem with that is it will fail to parse and grab the right meaning of the word.

This is something you have to figure out on your own. A dictionary can't help you understand which meaning is being used in a sentence. You just need to get better at understanding Japanese.

It also doesn’t understand grammar.

Same thing. You need to study grammar and/or be exposed to a lot of comprehensible grammar/sentences in context. You just need to spend more time doing that. This is where the 3000+ hours I mentioned comes into play.

Learning Japanese takes a fuckton of time, especially as a westerner. Adjust your expectations.

And don't use LLMs, they are shit.

Drop the LLM from the process, IMO. It's not good for your learning since you're relying on it to tell you things that are correct, about 15% it is not. So 1/5 to make up something entirely BS.

What do? When does my suffering end?

This is a strange, but somewhat common sentiment. I don't understand the correlation? What are you suffering from? Is not being able to do things in a language you're learning like you would in your native language? I guess I can't relate. I'm not focused on how much I do not understand. I am focused on understanding enough to enjoy it and move on. Slowly the gains pile on, improvement comes with time and effort and studies. Before I knew it, looking back 2500 hours in, I got where I wanted to and have done nothing but do the same thing since then for another 1500 hours. Have fun.

So try to have fun, enjoy it, don't worry about how much you don't understand, work to understand as much as you can within tolerance and keep moving forward. It's not suffering if you make it point to enjoy yourself. If something is frustrating you or boring you, change it up. Prioritize enjoyment and fun in your processes and the gains will certainly come without you realizing it.

It's a great show to watch in general wink. Before talking about any media though: how "new to Japanese" are you? You can try immersing in Japanese content at any time, but it would be more useful to do so after you know some common vocab and kanji, and foundational grammar from a resource like Genki, Yokubi, or another reputable guide.

Then you might try watching it with Japanese subtitles. That said: it might be too hard to enjoyably follow if it's both your first media in Japanese and your first time watching this particular show.

jpdb.io has its average difficulty at 50/100 which I would guess is more intermediate territory. Watching/reading things you enjoy is more relevant to how successfully you learn, though, so if you've watched it in English before and liked it then it makes perfect sense to do so in Japanese. And regardless, feel free to try and see whether you can stick with it if you're particularly interested.

For the general question "when should I start immersion, how, and what to do before that" check out the Loop.

If your speaking level is that good, what about finding a "grammar refresher"-type class aimed at native speakers? (I expect Japanese schools are better at teaching their native language's grammar than American schools are for English, because just about everywhere is, but there's still always a market for people who didn't pay attention/forgot and now need to brush up for professional reasons.)

To do this, I'd like to re-learn everything from the start, just so I get the basics right and unlearn any bad grammar habits etc.

Uh.. I'm a bit surprised to hear you say this, you really don't need to do all of that. Assuming your level is as good as you said (which I have no reason to doubt) I think you can easily just start picking up reading/consuming Japanese media and use your current level of understanding to level up your reading comprehension which will give you the most boost to your language overall (including easily passing the N1). You can start from manga with furigana if you feel like your kanji reading is not up-to-speed, or you can use tools like yomitan to easily look up words in light novels (especially if you read on the web using ttu reader for example) or visual novels (with texthookers or tools like gamesentenceminer).

but I want to start fresh to make sure I get it right.

Let me be clear, you don't need to "start fresh". If you feel like you are lacking some grammar points, you can quickly skim/read through a grammar guide like yoku.bi which covers all the foundations you need, or look at a grammar point list like bunpro and read up on anything you don't recognize.

Let me make myself clear once more: there's nothing weird or special or specific about the N1 or about "Japanese" as a whole. You don't need to make sure you go back to being a beginner and study beginner stuff, if you're already actively engaging and interacting with the language. The JLPT is specifically testing your overall language comprehension ability. All you need to do is to make sure you can listen and read Japanese and understand it. To do that, you need to listen and read a lot of engaging and interesting media/content (anime, manga, books, games, visual novels, TV shows, movies, etc. Literally anything that interests you). You do that enough, and you'll easily ace the N1 and more.

Following my first sojourn to Japan, I was verbally fluent and functionally literate. I returned to my home country with no nearby Japanese friends, and my speaking ability quickly cratered. To be sure, I could still speak with relative "fluency," but I could hear myself making many stupid mistakes and I struggled to remember words or expressions. And writing? Forget it. No problems typing out an email, but my ability to write kanji by hand, already tenuous even in Japan, disappeared for all but the most basic kanji.

However, my passive listening and reading abilities saw virtually no change at all. Generally, this is probably what you can expect. Output production abilities rise fast with practice, but likewise decline quickly when you are out of practice. Passive input abilities take a lot of time and effort to improve, but decline much more slowly, if at all.

Plenty of people have gotten there and stayed there without any of those factors because once you reach a certain point, as long as you don't cut Japanese out of your life. All you have to do is read, listen, watch, write, speak, consume, interact with the language daily and you'll continue to improve as long as you put in some amount of effort.

In general, changing the い on an i-adjective to く makes it an adverb, so you'd use 近い to describe a noun that's nearby and 近く to describe a verb, adjective, etc. that's happening nearby. (The く form can also connect two clauses like an "and" or "therefore.")

In the specific case of 近く, it can also work like a noun when paired with に for location (like in この近くに "near here.") That isn't a thing with most other adjectives.

What are the example sentences where they seemed interchangeable? Someone could probably explain more specifically

All that is to say, when watching a show and encountering a sentence I don't fully understand, is it better to pause and deconstruct what the sentence is saying as best as I can based on the substitles, or just listen to it in real time and absorb what I can?

Getting a mix is good I think, but the former is pretty much what I did 80% of the time until I didn't need to anymore. I also was very involved with the language overall. I was/am in communities, I converted all my hobbies into JP, I changed my UIs, etc. Although my free time was at most around 4 hours a day. I maximized my exposure to the language in that time period. No translations, no English fall back, etc. I started doing this nearly from the beginning.

This will easily get you over the hill if you have the foundation. It's hard at first--for sure. But you'll crush through every mythical "plateau" that people talk about in short order. I pulled my history of youtube to scrape how much I've watched in the last 2.5 years. According to statistics average of 2-8 minute videos, I've watched over 33,000 JP subtitled clips of live streams. That's about 3000 hours worth. Between communities, hobbies, casual reading, these clips, and live streams. It amounted to a lot of exposure.

I think finding a community + content you like is pretty much a golden ticket, because you don't really notice the work you put in. You're just along for the fun and memes and hanging out.

All that is to say, when watching a show and encountering a sentence I don't fully understand, is it better to pause and deconstruct what the sentence is saying as best as I can based on the substitles, or just listen to it in real time and absorb what I can?

I think there is value in doing both, honestly. It's good to build the ability to just deal with ambiguity and context to rebuild your understanding of a situation, so you don't need to look up every single thing you don't understand. Often, especially in anime, a lot of characters will repeat things or explain stuff that is intentionally hard/confusing, and just looking at the situational context can help you construct meaning.

But also on the other hand it's good to be aware of some of the more specific details or important sentences to keep up with the plot. If you find a sentence that you think is important or that strikes you as odd or specific (like uses an interesting grammar point or something that catches your attention) then yeah you should look it up and dig more into it. Just don't get "stuck" on it too long.

That's my philosophy at least.

while I understand the gist of what's happening, I feel like I'm missing the majority of what's being said in real time.

This is also something you build over time as you get your tolerance levels up. Sometimes it's okay to just get the "gist" of what is going on. Especially if you consume simple stuff like slice of life content that is not very plot driven and you don't need the full picture to appreciate some jokes or visual gags and situations.