Passing the JLPT N2 exam after 2.25 years (179/180)

Today I found out that I passed the December JLPT N2 exam with a score of 179/180!!

I was fresh out of Genki II at the beginning of May last year and I’ve put in a lot of time towards improving my Japanese since then, so it feels great to see a concrete result like this.

Since the study methods that I’ve followed so far have generally been successful for me, I wanted to share my Japanese language learning experience over the first two years and three months (September 2020 to December 2022), focusing on May 2022 onwards when I began to fully prioritize studying Japanese and started to progress much faster than I had before.

**Score breakdown**

* Language knowledge: 60/60
* Reading: 60/60
* Listening: 59/60

Proof: [https://imgur.com/a/pCivzFJ](https://imgur.com/a/pCivzFJ)

**Estimates of my time spent learning Japanese by exam day**

* **Active study**: 1600+ hours (classes, textbooks, Anki)
* **Reading outside of class**: 50+ hours (manga, novels, news, etc.)
* **Japanese-subtitled anime**: 250+ hours
* **Japanese music**: 2000+ hours ([all i know is that it’s a very large number](https://www.last.fm/user/bentosekai))
* **Podcasts**: 70+ hours

**Some rough stats from May to December 2022**

From early May to the day of the N2 exam (December 4, 2022), I did about [26,000 reviews in Anki](https://imgur.com/a/WpTiopT). I tend to average around 30 seconds per card, so I spent more than 200 hours on reviews, but my actual time spent in Anki was a lot longer if you take into account making/editing cards.

Factoring in the time I spent writing out kanji, doing the Kanji in Context workbook exercises, studying the Shin Kanzen Master N3 and N2 grammar books, and working on my university classes, I probably spent more than 1000 hours actively studying Japanese during this period.

In terms of immersion, I watched just over 80 hours of Japanese-subtitled anime and 10 hours of a Japanese-subtitled drama, read for fun for maybe 10 hours, and listened to around 50 hours of podcasts (actively) and 500+ hours of Japanese music (mainly passively). I also switched the language on my phone to Japanese slightly earlier in the spring, but I had to keep switching it back to English fairly often until late last summer.

I’ve been on exchange in Japan since early September, but I spent a lot of my time leading up to the N2 exam studying in my dorm, so I had been exposed to \~100 hours of conversational Japanese and spent 20-30 hours reading documents/forms/news/labels/train ads and the like by exam day.

**Looking back on the N2 exam**

Heading into the exam, I was nervous as usual but knew that I had prepared enough not to worry about passing as long as I could make it through the whole thing.

Unfortunately, my seat just so happened to be across from someone who was coughing intermittently throughout the entire exam, so there were a few moments where my focus slipped and I had to force my attention back to my test paper. At first I was pretty frustrated about this, but I got used to it eventually.

Since I had been reviewing grammar in the lead-up to the test, I started with the grammar section before moving onto vocab and then reading. The grammar section was fairly straightforward, but I was annoyed that I switched to the wrong answer on one question purely because my initial (correct) answer was a grammar point that I knew wasn’t on any JLPT list to date.

I also made a mistake on one of the affixes in the vocab section, but I really enjoyed the vocab because I ran into a bunch of words that I had encountered in the wild. For example, the last word in the vocab section was the title of a song released by one of my favourite bands 羊文学 last year, and I had made an anki card for another word that popped up on the exam while watching Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge last summer.

I expected reading comprehension to be my weakest point, but it actually ended up being the section that I felt most confident on. I was able to absorb the text way faster than I would have been able to even a few months earlier, and I could tell that actively studying grammar and reading short academic texts for one of my Japanese classes at uni had made a big difference in terms of my reading comprehension.

By the time the listening section came around, I was feeling the fatigue from the earlier sections so it was a bit harder to stay focused. I’m pretty sure that I got the second part of the last listening question wrong, and another one I wasn’t sure I heard properly. I was at the back of the exam room so it was slightly harder to hear the audio coming from the speakers at the front, but the aforementioned coughing person sitting across from me came in clutch and did their best to hold it in while the dialogue was playing, which I really appreciated.

Honestly, I wasn’t exactly expecting to get this close to 180 even with the JLPT’s scaled scoring system, but I’m genuinely proud of my score. My main goal was to understand the content of the exam while having developed the practical skills to back up the result, and I think I accomplished that.

**Timeline of my progress in Japanese**

I started studying Japanese in the fall of 2020 after transferring out of engineering into humanities at university, where I’m now majoring in East Asian studies and linguistics.

As a disclaimer, I didn’t start from absolutely nothing. I had watched 900+ hours of English-subtitled anime since mid-2018 and listened to Japanese music fairly consistently from around the same time, so I was able to recognize the sounds of Japanese and some common phrases. However, I had no prior knowledge of kanji and didn’t learn to read or write kana before I started taking classes in September of 2020, so I was very much a beginner at this point.

**September 2020 to August 2021: First-year Japanese**

We used Genki I in my first-year Japanese class, which was slow paced but had tons of assignments, quizzes, and tests. By the end of the course, I could read and write kana and about [200 kanji](https://imgur.com/a/tOcg4dj). I probably put 200-250 hours into studying Japanese for this course from September to April.

Immersion-wise, I went through a massive media burnout from the fall of 2020 onwards, so I kept listening to Japanese music but mostly stopped watching anime for about a year.

During the summer of 2021, I was taking linguistics courses the entire time so in terms of studying Japanese I just tried to get through part of the Core 2k/6k Anki deck. I put in 70-80 hours across [9000+ reviews](https://imgur.com/a/V24iEQr) and made it to around 1600 words before dropping the deck permanently in September (eventually I fully deleted it). At the time, I found it unreasonably difficult to try to remember words with kanji that I hadn’t studied yet while still at the beginner level, so I decided to concentrate my energy on second-year Japanese heading into the fall.

**September 2021 to April 2022: Second-year Japanese**

Much like the previous year, we used Genki II in my second-year Japanese class at a similar pace. Somehow the workload got heavier, which made balancing Japanese with my other classes a challenge. Heading into 2022, I also got a bad running injury which turned out to be the first of a series of unfortunate events that made it very hard to focus on uni and affected my Japanese progress for a couple months, but these things happen.

By the time I finished Genki II in April of 2022, I was around the lower intermediate level overall with slightly worse speaking skills, having learned to read and write about [400 kanji](https://imgur.com/a/RkTa7qf). I probably spent around 250 hours actively studying Japanese during this period. I also started reading my first manga in Japanese, which was of course Yotsuba, although I’ve still only read a few volumes.

**May to August 2022: Kanji in Context** (400 → 1540 kanji)

In May, I decided not to take any summer courses and focus on recovering from my running injury and the challenges of the previous semester, so I ended up dedicating most of my time to studying kanji using the Kanji in Context textbook and workbooks. I wanted to learn as many kanji as possible before leaving for Japan in the fall because I was concerned about not being able to navigate life here on my own without being literate in Japanese.

I used the stroke order charts on [jisho.org](https://jisho.org) for reference while writing out a word containing each kanji in the relevant lesson of the KIC textbook at least once to help absorb the form of the kanji better before reviewing all of the vocab in Anki ([here’s some of my handwriting practice](https://imgur.com/gallery/UHUrl3L)). I generally didn’t bother writing out the 400 or so kanji that I had already studied.

At first, I was studying around 20 new kanji per day including doing the KIC workbook exercises, manually adding example sentences from the workbook to the cards in the [premade KIC vocab deck](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1996057559) that I was using, and going through 160+ reviews in Anki, so I was feeling burnt out after about a month and a half.

Having made it to 1000 kanji by the end of June, I started manually replacing the English definitions on the cards in the KIC deck with Japanese ones using a monolingual dictionary imported to yomichan (大辞林) so that I could internalize the way things are described in Japanese and learn more synonyms/antonyms. To stop myself from burning out fully, I also changed up my schedule a bit. One day, I would spend 4-6 hours doing my Anki reviews, setting up the vocab cards for around 20 kanji, repositioning some cards so that I could study more related vocab at once, and looking for extra example sentences online (using chiebukuro, hinative, and eventually [yourei.jp](https://yourei.jp/)). The next day, I would spend a similar amount of time finishing my daily reviews, writing out around 20 new kanji, doing the KIC workbook exercises, and then studying the new vocab in Anki.

I also started taking days off, enjoying time by the lake in Toronto, cycling around the city more as my leg gradually recovered, and preparing for my upcoming exchange in Japan, which meant that I ended up averaging around 10 kanji per day from May to August.

Towards the end of the summer, I finally started reading my first novel in Japanese. I chose 5 Centimeters per Second, because I had already seen the film a few times and I could picture the scenery even if the first page felt like it took a million years to read. Unfortunately, I got caught up with life, put it down after about 40 pages, and haven’t done much reading for fun since, although I do intend to get back to it soon.

By the end of this process, my kanji recognition, [vocabulary](https://imgur.com/a/OodG9Tg), and intuitive understanding of Japanese grammar had improved to the point that I could do reasonably well on the JLPT website’s N2 sample questions ([available here](https://www.jlpt.jp/e/samples/forlearners.html)) and partially guess my way through the vocab, grammar, and reading sections of a past N1 exam, albeit in more than 1.5x the time permitted on the actual test.

On the other hand, I realized that my speaking and writing weren’t keeping up with my reading and listening because I hadn’t taken the time to output consistently over the summer. I had still only spoken with a Japanese native speaker twice in total outside of my classes at uni, and most of my grammar knowledge beyond the early intermediate level came from looking up grammar structures that I found in the KIC workbook.

With that in mind, I decided to try to get a solid grasp of N2 grammar in the fall while working on my vocab and speaking skills. My ultimate goal for the year was to pass the N2 exam and feel like I earned it.

**September 2022: Moving to Japan**

I moved to Japan for my exchange at 東大, so I didn’t have the time or energy to study as much while getting settled in Tokyo. I kept up with my daily reviews in Anki and studied 20 more kanji with KIC to get up to a total of 1560, which is where I stopped until after the N2 exam.

**October to early December 2022: Shin Kanzen Master N2 grammar**

My classes started in early October, with half of them being Japanese language courses (conversation, academic skills, and tutorial). In the tutorial class, the whole point was to make our own study plan and follow through with it, so I decided to study the Shin Kanzen Master N2 grammar book from front to back by exam day.

Starting in mid-October, I typed most of the content of the book straight into my [notes](https://imgur.com/a/xLzC6s9), made an [anki deck containing each grammar point](https://imgur.com/a/15ZVOvW), worked through the practice problems (excluding the ones for individual lessons in the first section), and added extra example sentences to my grammar cards from the practice problems while checking my answers.

I worked on both part 1 (individual grammar points) and part 3 (sentence/paragraph-level grammar) of the book every week and finished part 2 (sentence construction) a few days before the N2 exam in early December. Breaking things down at the individual grammar point/word level in the first part of the textbook while also working my way through sentence and paragraph structure in part 3 really helped me improve my overall understanding of Japanese sentence structure, and I liked that all of the explanations were exclusively written in Japanese because I find English translations very distracting.

The night before the N2 exam, I had a major deadline for one of my other classes so I stayed up slightly late afterwards to do the two mock N2 grammar exams at the back of the SKM book, got a half-decent night’s sleep, and then skimmed the grammar points the next morning/on my way to the test centre.

**Reflecting on the process**

It was tough balancing serious self-study with my other uni courses while simultaneously adjusting to life in Japan, but putting in the time to study N2 grammar properly made a huge difference in terms of my overall confidence with my Japanese ability. I feel like I can put together sentences much more naturally now without having to actively focus on ‘building’ them as much as I used to.

Coupled with my kanji study using Kanji in Context, studying grammar with Shin Kanzen Master got me to the point where I was able to make it through the N2 exam with enough time to review my answers, which was a big deal for me because I often struggle with time on tests and never thought that I would be able to read or process information even remotely quickly in Japanese.

In terms of immersion last year before I came to Japan, finally getting back into anime (with Japanese subtitles) to help me destress while doing some extra vocab mining, working my way from JLPT level-specific podcasts to the 朝日新聞 podcast by the end of the summer, and basically listening to Japanese music all the time made a big difference in terms of improving my vocabulary and listening skills.

Taking half of my classes at uni in Japanese while living in the heart of Tokyo obviously helped me improve my Japanese even faster during the last three months before the exam, and gradually building confidence in my spoken Japanese by talking to native speakers on a regular basis was something that I only really could have accomplished here, but I wouldn’t have been able to make it to the starting line without building a solid kanji and vocab base through consistent self-study last summer.

**Moving forward**

My first semester in Japan is coming to an end this week, so I’m hoping to explore Tokyo and the rest of the country more in the next couple months, see some of my favourite artists perform live, and really try to take everything in while I’m here.

In terms of studying Japanese, my current plan is to finish learning the jouyou kanji with Kanji in Context (I’m at 1660 now) and work my way through the Shin Kanzen Master N1 grammar book in preparation for the N1 exam in July so that I can get it done before my exchange ends in August.

There were a lot of moments of frustration and doubt along the way, but ultimately I was able to stay motivated to study for the same reason I started learning Japanese in the first place: I love the way it sounds (the writing system is cool too).

I just hope that I never forget what it feels like to enjoy learning something new:)