Not sure about next step

Just reached 670 known words.
Do you think i am ready to begin intermediate 1 lessons or should i increase my known words further before moving to intermediate.

Also, i not sure how many known words i should aim for before i begin to have meaningful conversations with natives via social media (typing not speaking).

I believe you should move on while still revisiting the beginner material frequently. The more you lingq, the more you learn; and the more you learn, the faster you learn. I can’t remember, but I think Steve said in one of his videos that staying with the beginner material too long can be a mistake for many people.

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I would work on improving my listening comprehension first, before moving to Intermediate. At the early stages, I think that listening is more important than reading. I started listening to the slowest lessons, and then moved up to the Mini Stories.

The whole goal is to increase your words. The intermediate words might be easier for you to get you just don’t know. Just because they aren’t used in easy conversations doesn’t mean they are difficult.

Find someone who vlogs in intermediate Japanese. We have a lot in the LingQ section for Russian and French.
Again the goal is to increase your words always. I have tried to carefully increase my French for the past eight years. My words here on LingQ after 2 weeks stopped at 2200 words. After 8 years of studying French I had a passive vocabulary under 3000 words.

I remember reading a blog posts about someone not being able to juggle his anki after 2000 words. I felt I had barely any progress and then I stopped thinking about maintaining the language and instead just explore new content. Thats when I realised I don’t have time to repeat and to learn new words. So I choose new words and continued listening and reading new lessons. I never repeat.

I’m ashamed of saying that, because it feels like a bad thing.

Another thing I want to say is that you have to use what you like to increase your Japanese. Don’t force what you think you need. I wanted to read about the History of France, but I would always stop reading. I never read about the Grocery Stores or stuff like that, because if felt dumb.

I now realise that I’d rather read about escalators, shopping malls and expensive brands than the economy of France through the years.

Again something I don’t like saying out loud, but LingQ has made me realise I put more energy in things I think will help me. But the fruits come from the things I try to push aside.

So don’t claim you know what you like to read in Japanese before you tried. Just read about Japan in Japanese as long as you see yourself wanting to read more and more and don’t judge yourself.

This is just my opinion, but I don’t think you’re even close to “ready” for intermediate material. That doesn’t mean you might throw some in from time to time, but I think there will be so many unknown words that you’ll be spending all your time looking up the words and struggling to remember so many. It will be tedious, and I personally think not very effective.

Granted at the very beginning the percentage of unknown words is very high too, so you are spending a lot of time in the initial stages this way. However, I think once you get passed this fledgling phase it might be better to go with material that is just incrementally harder than what you know currently…I’m not sure the exact percentage that Steve suggests in some of his youtube videos but I think it’s between 10-25 % unknown words. In other words choose content on lingq that has, for example 20% new words. The percentages are color coded…I think probably sticking with “orange” percentage would be better than “red” percentage. That gives you a chance to reinforce words you already know while learning a much smaller amount of words at a time. You’ll acquire those new words quicker. If you have too many new words you’ll never remember them as you read them because you’ll have whole sentences that you are looking up every word. At least that’s been my experience. I acquire the words far better in that 10-15% unknown range.

This also helps with listening too. If you are trying to listen to content that has 50% unknown words to you it’s simply not going to be helpful or useful at all imo, other than to get used to the language.

500 words is a huge achievement, congratulations! In the beginning you learn the most frequent words, which also happen to be the most difficult. It’s much easier to learn normal nouns and verbs and adjectives than functional stuff like “although”, “perhaps”, “moreover”. Also a lot of this vocabulary has to deal with grammar. What does the verb “have” mean in English? It appears everywhere and has a million of different uses. It’s just a one word in your statistics, but you a lot more study time to learn it than, let’s say, a word “giraffe”.
Now, about that whole intermediate vs. beginner material. There’s nothing harmful in getting ahead of yourself. Try this and that. Explore your interests, obviously. Check out some true native texts. Surf Japanese internet. In the worst case you’ll get really tired of difficult material and you’ll go back for a while to easier stuff.

I also recently got done with my intermediate level and now i am in the process of working my transitional level to advanced english. I am also focusing on writing and i have realized that online writing prompts are helping me as well to write. And the final touch is editing it using things like Grammarly or Bartleby - Write | bartleby