So gave the exam on 1st December 2024, passed with 108/180.
I have no real use for this certificate, and I have no plans of going to Japan, so I decided to see how high of a score I could get with no specific study for the exam, or any specific study for Japanese grammar in general.
So I have not read a single page of any grammar book, the extent to which i have actively learned grammar is randomly watching a few videos on youtube, duolingo, and sometimes asking chatgpt to explain some sentence when it was really difficult to understand.
Apart from that, its entirely been immersion.
So to preface this, I did actually start learning japanese 3 years ago, but that was with duolingo, and at only 1 lesson per day on 90% of the days, just to keep the streak going, thats barely like 30 hours of study across the 2 years i spent learning Japanese on duolingo. It would be very very generous to call me N5 at that point, but I did not want to say "0 to N1" because of this caveat.
On October 18th 2023, I started using jpdb.io, and thats when my Japanese learning became serious. Thanks to my 2 years of duolingo, I could read most kana, and understood the very basic grammar of Japanese aka は、が、を、ます and so, at this point I still really did not fully understand how the verbs conjugated, but I knew the very basics.
I started with the horimiya deck as it is a simple slice of life, I split up the decks into episode wise decks, and learned to up to 80% of all the words in the given episode, then watched that episode, and then started learning all the top words in the next episodes deck, and then watched that and so on. This took me around 3-4 days of learning words per episode before I could watch that episode at the start, so I was learning 100-200 new words a day.
After I was done with horimiya, I started Nisekoi. At this point i discovered the jpdb mpv plugin, which is a one click sentence mining setup. IMO this is the best and easiest way to mine sentence cards, but it is paid and you need to donate to the jpdb patreon atleast once to get it. A free alternative im starting to use for mandarin is memento with anki.
With these sentence decks, adding new words became even easier, so I kept adding 100 new words a day on average. After I was done watching all the seasons of nisekoi, I had reached a point where I did not need to do this episode wise thing anymore, as I had 70-80% coverage on most anime by default now. This was around December 2023. After this point I could immerse in pretty much content I wanted and it was manageable.
at this point my average new cards dropped alot, mostly 40-50 a day, but with alot of variance.
I also started reading, unlike alot of people claiming you need to read 50+ books to pass N1, ive only read 4 books till now, with the 5th one being 25% through. Most of my immersion was through anime (I dont read manga in Japanese).
Total hours spent
JPDB: 433 (Total known nonredundant: 18643)
Reading: 66
Video games (only played Divinity 2 Original Sin): 50
Anime: Counting only with Japanese subtitles, id estimate ~400 hours, I would not really count with english subs as I did not attempt to match what I was hearing with what I was reading at all.
Kanji study (android app): 108
Other: ~50. Other forms of immersion that werent intentional, like navigating a japanese website or so
Duolingo (pre jpdb, i stopped using duolingo for japanese after starting with jpdb): 20-30
by SwayStar123