On improving Japanese at an advanced level
Thursday's Thousandth Thought (TTT #22)
I’ve been an “official” advanced speaker of Japanese since I passed the JLPT N1 (the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test) in 2016.
I lived 4 more years in Japan after taking it and improved my Japanese even further by using it at the office and talking with my girlfriend at the time. Apart from this, I also dabbled in a few different topics:
I studied Haiku for a while.
I studied and explained 4 character expressions (yojijukugo, 四字熟語) for my old blog.
I read a few novels and looked up words of interest.
But I pretty much let my Japanese stale when I went back to France in late 2020. I used it once in a while and watched a few Japanese videos but never truly chose to focus on it again.
Instead, other languages (such as Thai and German for a while) took over. The most important of them all was Korean with my decision to finally get out of that damn intermediate plateau.
As you already know, this culminated last Sunday with me taking the Test Of Proficiency In Korean (TOPIK).
Which was also the trigger for me to decide to turn back to Japanese.
And so here we are a few days later and I’m already loving it.