I took the N1 (my first JLPT ever!) in December last year, and somehow passed! I know from lurking in this subreddit / other discords that my approach is pretty non-standard, so I wanted to share what I did to get to this point, and maybe encourage others who don't like Anki but really want to speak Japanese!
First, as a slight disclaimer: as you might imagine, as I don't do Anki at all, my vocabulary is not super great! I only scored 33/60 on the 言語知識 portion of the test, and when I read books/written media I often rely on having a dictionary/yomitan or a native (who isn't annoyed by my questions) nearby. But my reading and listening were 56/60 and 49/60 respectively so I think I'm doing something right! And for the words I do know, I understand the nuance very well.
I started learning Japanese because of my love for music in anime, and eventually for Japanese artists and vocaloid producers. I wanted to translate and understand the songs I loved and the anime/manga I consumed. And so began the first phase of my Japanese journey. I spent the first two years grinding on my own, doing Wanikani to level ten, reading/watching as many articles/videos as I could about Japanese grammar, learning stroke order, etc. I think I'm naturally pretty tenacious, and if I don't really understand something I'll look elsewhere to find better explanations or examples. But I'm also forgiving when it comes to forgetting what things mean; if I forget I can just Google it again! Through this process, I memorized hiragana/katakana (no SRS, just drilling on realkana) and I learned the grammar points and words of all the songs I listened to. While I struggled to form sentences of my own, I really enjoyed seeing the words and grammar I learned in one song/anime episode show up later in other media I watched, and this really motivated me to keep going. At some point I stopped Wanikani and started to try to memorize kanji/vocab by shape and context rather than mnemonics (which now, I'm really glad I did!)
After those two years of solo grinding, I graduate high school, still a "weeb" engrossed in Japanese media but not really all that social. I start a remote job in software development and start my adult life. そしてある日、先生に出会えたんだ！ I met someone in my area who had just starting offering weekly Japanese lessons. I take her up on her offer and start studying with her. We discuss what we want to do, and I tell her about the songs I like and want to translate/understand. I also made an effort to speak in Japanese whenever possible, even if it was totally broken Japanese. Then she could fix it (after trying and failing to understand what I meant a few times) and tell me what I meant to say. Relatively soon after that we also started reading 三日間の幸福 after I had read the english translation of the manga version and really enjoyed it.
Our lessons continued for just about 3 years, and during that period I became a more social person and started to meet more of her friends and in general more Japanese people in my area. I also made some friends abroad on apps like HelloTalk. I think the more people you can talk to the better; I've noticed that everyone seems to have their own personal subset of words they like, so talking to just one person won't get you that far. Over the last two years, my social circle has been replaced with mostly my Japanese friends. Even in my work, I now work at an office with many Japanese coworkers, offering study abroad programs to students in Japan.
There are a few things that I think I did very differently from most other Japanese learners:
- Learning kanji: Kanji barely register for me in isolation. If you show me a kanji card in your Anki, I'll probably freeze! But add some okurigana or another kanji and I'll usually figure it out. For the kanji I do know well, the ones I know how to write, I know them in terms of their composition in Japanese. 花 is changed (化けた) grass (草) and 最 is taking (取る) the sun (日) (something very hard to do!). But for the most part, I can only read in context and even full words sometimes I can only read in a sentence.
- 飛ばし読み: Whenever I can, I try to look things up in Japanese. If you've ever read blog articles / listicles in Japanese, you know how annoying this is. If you tried to read it all carefully and look up every word, you would be there for hours! So I learned to just skip words I don't know, because most of those kinds of articles are irrelevant fluff anyway. Eventually I became very good at this, and used this strategy to learn new words purely based on context. I think this helped me stay within the time limit on the JLPT readings with 10 minutes to spare, and with a decent feeling of "I know what this guy is talking about" without needing to know each and every word or kanji. I couldn't read 雄 on that one reading about the lions, but still managed to get through it and answer the questions with confidence!
- Full immersion: I only use English at work, with my parents, and occasionally online (especially when discussing programming). I try my best to learn Japanese in Japanese and rarely have to fall back to English. After all, if you're asking in English, you're probably not hearing from natives and instead getting second-hand information. It's not all that useful if you want to really get a feel for the nuance of the words you're learning. Also, people say that language learning is all about input; but I think the best, most useful input you can get, is the input in response to your output. Try speaking, regardless of your level!
- Grammar: Whenever I learn a new grammar point, I try to incorporate it into my speech to see how people react to it. I usually find out that I hadn't understood it fully, or that it has a nuance I wasn't aware of.
- Mnemonics: Mnemonics should be in Japanese! Also, I don't like proactively coming up with mnemonics; for me they are purely tools for disambiguation I create when and if I need to tell apart two similar but different kanji/words. Whenever possible, I like to have a direct association between me seeing the character/word -> it making a sound in my head. If I can do that without a layer of indirection (the mnemonic) getting in the way, then that's best. And I don't expect myself to be able to do this right away; usually, I look up a word 5-10 times before it sticks.
- Media: I've read two books (三日間の幸福 and スターティング・オーヴァー) to completion and read half of また、同じ夢を見ていた. I watch a fair amount of anime and dramas (about an hour a day). The books really contributed the most to my kanji reading ability, and I plan to read more. But most of my Japanese usage is in talking to people, whether over LINE or in person.
TLDR: Be social, participate in Japanese discourse with friends and online, if you have time to read you should read a few books, and don't fret if you don't memorize everything right away!
That's what comes to mind off the top of my head, but there's probably a lot more I've forgotten to put. Ask away if there's anything you'd like to know about how I'm learning Japanese!
by KCat156