/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Level B1: Intermediate

“Both the advantages and disadvantages of being the Hulk is the constantly need to smash things” – the Hulk at B1

At B1, you’re getting more comfortable. You now have a working knowledge of around 2500 words total, maybe half of which you can recall and use pretty quickly. This makes conversations much more fluid generally.

You’ll still hesitate if it’s a topic you haven’t talked about much, but this is where you can start going into stores or ordering at restaurants and it’s not much of a burden on the people working there. You can read simpler books or read a good amount of newspaper articles if you know the context. You can even watch TV if the subtitles in the target language are on – it’s still pretty rough without them.

Think Dev’s Italian in season two of Master of None. Or maybe Colin Firth’s Jamie proposing to Aurelia in Portuguese at the end of Love Actually. They’re not totally fluent, but it’s not a huge struggle to understand what they’re getting at or generally communicate with them.

Reaching B1 from A2 takes about 200 hours, so you’re looking at roughly 450 hours of work from scratch. At one hour per day, this is about 18 months of work total. If you’re working at it full time in a program, you can probably get here in about 4 or 5 months.