@karen Well I "read" with kanji. But still, I struggle to know if a bunch of kanji together are a single word or many. Or if the hiragana are particles or part of the word conjugation. は vs が may be difficult to write/speak, but I don't think they are a huge problem for understanding. And kanji are difficult but it's easy to find what they mean online (and most of the things I read have furigana).

I'm talking about understanding Japanese. So this is probably not true for writing/speaking :).

@noeldemartin productive language skills help with understanding too though because they give you a deeper level of understanding in general

To reuse your example, if you're more proficient with particles it will help you, among other things, with recognizing word boundaries

@noeldemartin besides, nuance is a huge part of any language and you won't be able to recognize it without having knowledge of what meaning different particles convey in different contexts

@karen Yeah for sure, I guess at this point my Japanese level is just too low xD