Day 7 Progress Report (31%)

I just finished sentence number 700 of 2252 (31%) of the A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar.  Today was probably the most interesting day so far because I had a failure rate of 27%.  This is opposed to about 4% on day 1.  Failure rate basically means that I didn't completely understand the sentence the first time I read it.  After 1 or 2 reviews the sentence was learned.  It's boring to read simple text which is why graduating from textbook sentences to literature can be so painstakingly difficult.  That is of course my goal.

Only 16 more days and I can get ready to tackle the intermediate level book in the series.  I've already been reading the intermediate level on the side and the sentences are definitely more interesting.  A lot of the basic grammar is built-in to the intermediate sentences.  I've been waiting a long time to be able to read Japanese at this level.  It's really a joy to sit down and read   It will be a long time before I can really enjoy a Japanese novel but at least the way is clear to me now.

How much reading and listening does it take to achieve fluency?

How much input do you need to speak English fluently? - This is an interesting article over at Antimoon that talks about one mans journey to fluency in English.  He estimates that he's read about 333k sentences in 3 years.  It looks like a lot but it is a very achievable goal at less than 9 pages of text per day.

My 100 sentences per day challenge can only take me so far.  86 days to be precise.  Of the 3 volumes in the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series there are a total of 8,555 sentences.  I will consider the 8,555th sentence my graduation into real Japanese, and I'm looking forward to it.