~3.5 years, ~500 hours and ~€5000 later… Passed the N5 last July, but just barely scoring at 89/180 (minimum of 80 required). To be clear, N5 was never really the goal for me. I took the exam mainly as a way to measure where I currently stand. And that makes the result a little weird to process. I've been learning Japanese for roughly 3.5 years. Books, apps, classroom lessons, even Japanese language and cultural classes while actually in Japan. Countless hours of vocab and kanji SRS, podcasts, J-dramas, shadowing, etc. I know comparison is the thief of joy, but when you constantly read online that N5 level can be acquired in about 6 months, it's hard not to feel a bit lost. My vocabulary and kanji are probably somewhat beyond N5, but I'm still struggling with grammar basics like beginner conjugations and easy sentence construction. Also very frustrating is knowing a word when I see it written, but completely failing to recognise it when someone actually says it. I (still) genuinely enjoy learning Japanese. But I guess limited exposure in real life makes learning it just so tremendously slow and the approach to learning relatively static and passive. As Japanese isn't really a necessity in my life but just a mere hobby, so sometimes it's hard to justify continuing spending lot of effort, time and money towards it when progress feels so slow and there's no clear goal to meet. So I'm wondering: Has anyone else been in a similar situation? If you were 3.5 years into learning, still struggling with basic Japanese despite putting in a lot of time, would you completely change your approach, keep going, or just accept that it's a slow hobby and stop worrying about the timeline? Especially interested in hearing from people who managed to break through a similar plateau with (getting faster at) comprehension and actually producing sentences. I'm not necessarily looking for the usual "don't compare yourself to others, everyone's journey is different" (although obviously that's true). I'm more interested in hearing from people who were genuinely stuck at a beginner plateau and what they actually did about it. Because honestly, passing N5 feels simultaneously like an achievement and like a slightly embarrassing reminder of how much effort I've put in compared to how little I can actually do with the language. Kind regards,