Hey everyone,
Tis' the season for posting JLPT results, I guess. This is a follow-up post to my year 1 and year 2 posts that I made previously and will be the final one of these progress updates I post. I started these because these sorts of progress posts were originally very motivating for me and had good advice (I myself was inspired by Doth's 0 to N1 in 1 year post), but LJ has been absolutely saturated with these types of posts and pretty much all the good advice is already common knowledge at this point, so I'm not going to reiterate it too much.
To summarize my background, I was a full-time college student studying two STEM majors and started Japanese on the side as a hobby during my freshman year. I was raised monolingual do not have any kanji background, I also do not have particular aptitude for languages (my worst grades in HS were Spanish lol). I passed N2 two years ago and N1 this year (results below) with no particularized JLPT study, just took one practice before each test to familiarize myself with the test format. I am making this post just to add in another data point and re-affirm the efficacy of immersion-based learning.
My process was simple.
- Skim through introductory grammar books like Genki I, Genki II, early levels of Bunpro
- Rote-memorize about 4000 vocab words on Anki
- Watch anime, read books, watch Japanese youtube videos, etc. and sentence mine Anki cards
- Review the Anki cards.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 ad infinitum.
That's it. No tricks. No expensive paid courses. No weird apps (besides my reader, yomichan, and Anki). How many years it takes you to pass N1 will depend only on how much time you spend on steps 3 and 4. As long as you are reading and watching something adequately challenging (as in, you can mine new words) you will progress.
As for the next steps, I intend on continuing 3 and 4 pretty much forever. N1 is nowhere near any reasonable level of proficiency and frankly probably puts you at intermediate or upper-intermediate at best. I also started learning Chinese with this exact same process a few weeks ago and I'm fairly confident I can pass HSK6 (or whatever the highest proficiency level is) within 2-3 years knowing what I know now.
Final Stats:
Books read: ~40 (light novels mostly)
Visual novels read: 3
Anime watched: roughly 30
Anki Reviews Completed: 129,081
Anki Cards in Japanese deck: 11,406
Last piece of advice: if you've been studying for X years and you see someone pass N1 or N2 in some shorter period of time, treat that as motivation. This isn't just about learning languages, it's about literally anything. If someone does something better or faster than you, your instinct should be "is there anything I can learn from that person so I can be better/faster," not "damn, they're just lucky/smart/humblebragging for attention." Whenever I saw someone post "JLPT N1 in 1 year," I combed the thread for any advice or techniques that I could add to my own learning. A lot of times, those posts simply gave me motivation to read more or grind out my Anki reviews for the day. NEVER prioritize ego over progress.
Anyways, that's all from me on LJ. I'll be happy to answer more specific questions in this thread but I pretty much just did what I did from year 1 on out. Thanks to everyone who posted motivation and resources when I started out, and wish y'all the best of luck with your studies!
by ihateanime6969