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Especially from people who weren't there to see my progress from the beginning, I've received a lot of questions about what I did at different stages of my journey as well as advice/a reflection on what worked well and what didn't. Also, really happy about how well the test went and I felt this would be a good opportunity to reflect on my journey thus far. Hence the purpose of this post. Pretty new to Reddit but I felt this platform would be a good way to reach more people - hopefully you find something useful in this post. ^_^

Side note: just as an aside because sometimes I also get people asking me about this, I do not know Chinese or Korean and Japanese is the first language I've tried to learn. A bit more about my background, I've lived in the UK my entire life and my native language is English, although ethnically I'm Pakistani so I can speak a little bit of Urdu and my listening is also decent (but I cannot read or write it) as a result of family.

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As I'm sure is the case for many others, I had a lot more free time opened up as a result of COVID-19 restrictions. Alongside my university degree (currently a Physics undergrad student 😄), some of the activities that usually took up a lot of my time were training (as I'm an amateur boxer) 5 times a week, and taking part in/holding various events as a committee member of different societies at my university. Due to various quarantines and lockdowns I was unable to do either of these for quite a while and also found myself indoors a lot more often due to not being able to go out with friends as frequently.

In addition, when I was younger I used to read a lot and I've always loved a good story but during high school and while at uni I haven't done much reading for pleasure at all. Thus I figured it would be a cool idea to learn a language and read enjoyable material in that language, as a fun and productive way to use the extra time I'd gained. As someone who used to watch anime/read manga when they were younger, Japanese was the obvious choice for me.

I spent a couple of days researching different language learning methods until coming across the AJATT website. Upon reading through it, the idea of learning a language by immersing with content I enjoy sounded very attractive to me and is also something I realised I'm already familiar with. In my household I've always grown up speaking English to my parents but they speak a mix of Urdu and English to me, however, despite hardly ever using the language otherwise, when I visited relatives in Pakistan once every few years I found I was able to hold basic conversations with a pretty good accent purely because of the listening input I'd received from my parents. Therefore, it definitely didn't seem like a far-fetched concept to me however the idea of sacrificing all my time every day for Japanese was definitely not something I was going to do, but I decided to just have fun with it and try to immerse as much as I can alongside my main responsibilities (by using my time efficiently). I came across many other websites/blogs talking about a similar immersion-based learning approach and so decided to just get stuck in - marking the beginning of my Japanese learning journey on 18th March 2021.

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My first day was spent learning the hiragana and katakana - I did so by grinding an Anki deck for each of them and also repeatedly writing out each character about 10 times. I then left it there and decided I'd just hammer them in long term by seeing them in my immersion - quite the brute-force method for sure but it got the job done lol. Next, I used a Core 2k vocab deck that I found on Anki to gain an initial base of vocab (examples of good decks are the Core 2.3k Deck and the Tango decks). I continued the deck for 20 days doing 50 cards a day (which took me about 45 minutes a day at the time), dropping it after hitting 1000 cards at which point I decided to start mining (i.e. creating my own anki cards out of unknown vocab in my immersion material).

Throughout these first ~2.5 months I was immersing using native content, right from day one. At first it was largely through Japanese-subbed anime (tending to more slice-of-life style series which I still found interesting, as they usually use more basic vocab) - of course, in the beginning I couldn't understand much at all so it mostly just served the purpose of getting used to reading hiragana/katakana, getting used to listening to Japanese, hammering in the Core vocab I learnt through Anki as well as being a source of new vocab (which I would pick up by stopping to look up words every now and then as well as by being exposed to common words many times in different contexts).

After the first couple of weeks I started diversifying my immersion sources - for listening I was using a whole range of native podcasts, youtube videos, audiobooks, dramas, reality TV, etc. I would look up a word if I heard it used a lot or it stuck out to me but otherwise I wouldn't pause and just focused to try and pick out as much as I could. One podcast I highly recommend is the Sokoani podcast, a series which discusses different anime shows - I found this useful because by watching the podcast episodes for anime I had already seen I would have more context as to what they're talking about and would be able to pick out more. A youtube channel that I also really liked was NO GOOD TV, a podcast-type channel hosted by 錦戸亮 and 赤西仁 where they do a bunch of different things and have natural conversations on random topics (they also get guests on there often) - but overall there were a broad range of different channels I watched from.

As for reading immersion I started reading a lot of manga, initially going for more slice-of-life series and manga that used furigana before branching out into other series - I found manga and subbed anime to be a great gateway into reading because the visual aspect gives you more context to understand what's going on and the heavy inclination towards dialogue over narration means the sentences you encounter are usually simpler as opposed to a novel. I was still watching anime but I started splitting my anime immersion in to 2 different types. With half of the anime I watched I would use it for listening immersion by not using subs and rarely pausing to look stuff up. With the other half I would have Japanese subs on and would pause a lot more frequently to look up words I didn't know, more so using it as reading immersion. During this period all the cards I mined on Anki were sentence cards (since the websites/blogs I'd come across usually recommended sentence cards) and I was repping between 30-40 new cards a day, which usually took around 40-50 minutes.

For quite a while my comprehension was not that great and a big reason for that was grammar. I never did any sort of grammar study and still have not to this day. I briefly watched 3 or 4 Cure Dolly youtube videos but quickly got bored and stopped. However, eventually just by seeing different grammar patterns frequently in my immersion in different contexts I started being able to understand basic grammar patterns - slowly I started understanding much more of my immersion. Sure, perhaps I could've sped this up by going through a grammar guide like Tae Kim or the Cure Dolly videos but I enjoyed the route I took and even if I could do it all over again I wouldn't change it.

I've had questions regarding how to go about grammar study and my view is that I do think it can be a good idea to go through Tae Kim or Cure Dolly to prime yourself for seeing the grammar in your immersion, however, I personally don't think actually grinding grammar (e.g. by doing a grammar deck in Anki) is a very effective use of time as you won't truly understand what a grammar pattern means/how it's used until you see it many times in context while immersing - will come on to this a bit more in the next section. In terms of the immersion time I was putting in - from 18th March up to early May I was averaging about 3-4 hours a day (was usually skewed towards weekends so around 2-3 hours on weekdays and then 5-6 hours on weekends), after which my uni summer holidays started and I did ~6-7 hours a day for the rest of May. That brings me to the end of the first (just under) 2.5 months.

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~2.5 Months to ~5.5 Months (1st June 2021 - 31st August 2021):

The beginning of June marked a fairly significant turning point in my Japanese language journey. I decided I wanted to give reading light novels and visual novels (will use the abbreviations 'LNs' and 'VNs' from here on out) a try - I'd been wanting to read these in Japanese ever since I started and initially I thought it would take me a long time to get good enough so I was holding off, but I got somewhat impatient and figured there's no harm in giving it a go. After looking it up I found a youtube video that explained how to use a software called Textractor coupled with a clipboard inserter and Yomichan to mine vocab from visual novels (note: Yomichan for those who don't know is a browser extension that allows you to import multiple dictionaries and look up Japanese words on your browser very easily as well as add them to Anki, it has a wealth of useful features and is one of the greatest tools available for Japanese learners). Unfortunately I could not find the exact video when I tried looking earlier but I am sure there are even better tutorials out there now. The video skimmed over many of the details regarding setting up Yomichan so I tried looking further for a more comprehensive guide.

This was when I came across the Resources page of TheMoeWay site which is, to this day, still one of the most useful pages of Japanese learning resources I have found. In particular I came across Stegatxins0's Mining Guide on it - a very comprehensive guide that explained in detail how to establish a quick mining setup using Yomichan and Anki, as well as how to set up programs such as Sharex to add screenshots/audio to your Anki cards. Additionally, I came across a linked site called AnimeCards which contained a detailed Anki setup guide I used to replace the Anki settings I was using before; it also introduced the idea of using anime cards (essentially just high quality vocab cards) over sentence cards. At this point I started making anime cards too for some words but the majority of my Anki cards were still sentence cards. Furthermore, on the resources page I encountered a great browser ebook reader - ッツ's Ebook Reader, which I would use with Yomichan (and Kiwi Browser for when reading on my Android tablet) to read novels.

At the same time, I joined TheMoeWay Discord server that was linked on the website. I hadn't used Discord much nor engaged with many online communities before I started learning Japanese so it was definitely a new experience for me. There were multiple clubs in the server which I could use to discuss Japanese media such as VNs, novels, anime and manga with others (there's usually a monthly read that gets chosen in each of the clubs and it can be nice to read the same thing together and talk about it), and throughout my time at the server I've met a lot of great people. One feature in the server that I found cool was the implementation of the Kotoba bot quizzes for discord roles - they usually involve correctly answering the reading for a certain number of words in a row. The quizzes can be a somewhat decent indicator of where you're at with your vocab level (if you're not grinding them) and served as a small source of extra motivation in trying to aim for higher roles. When I joined at the beginning of June I only managed to pass the Kotoba N5 quiz. Another feature I really liked was being able to log immersion times and the implementation of a monthly immersion leaderboard, which brought out my inner competitiveness during certain months. 😄 There were a few other Japanese learning Discord communities I joined throughout my journey but TheMoeWay was the one I interacted with most.

And so, with my mining setup sorted, I started reading my first LN and VN. It definitely wasn't easy at first - despite having a decent understanding of basic grammar from the first 2.5 months of immersing there were still a lot of new grammar points I was having to look up while reading (note: back to the topic in the last section on acquiring grammar, this is how I acquired pretty much all my grammar knowledge from this point onwards - by looking up all grammar points I didn't understand while reading, using either yomichan or an online grammar reference such as DoJG and just being exposed to them a lot in my immersion). Furthermore, I encountered a ton of new vocab that I had not seen before. As a result, I was reading at a very slow pace initially (around 3,000-4,000 characters/hour) because there was a lot of vocab and grammar to look up, plus it often took me a little while to think about a line before fully understanding it and moving on. However, personally I highly recommend this approach to reading of looking up everything you don't know and trying to understand as much as you can before moving on, since, while it may not be the most enjoyable at first, in the process you engage a lot more with the vocab you come across and also gain a better appreciation of the role different grammar patterns you encounter are playing in a sentence. I can attest to the fact that putting in the effort early on and not cutting corners really does pay off. For me, just the fact that I was learning so much new vocab I hadn't seen in my first 2.5 months of learning was enjoyable in and of itself.

Seeing more experienced people than me in the server who were able to read a lot more per day really motivated me (I also came across Doth's reddit post which was another great source of motivation). A few days later I managed to pass the Kotoba N4 quiz on the server, my vocab was pretty much there from the first 2.5 months of immersing but just a few days of reading was enough to solidify it. Halfway through the month I ended up finishing my first LN, and a few days later I also finished my first VN. My reading speed at that point had grown to about 6,000 characters/hour for the LN and 7,000 characters/hour for the VN due to the increased familiarity with reading and a growth in vocab. Continuing on, I then started reading my 2nd LN (just the sequel to the first one I read) as well as beginning my 2nd VN, one called Summer Pockets Reflection Blue. Usually when people ask for recommendations on a beginner VN this is the one I give - it's fairly long (around ~1.1 million characters) but that's good for a beginner as it gives you substantial time to get used to the reading style, the sentences are simple and more than anything it's a brilliant VN (my bias coming in to play there of course but I had a blast with it 🤩).

A great site for getting a rough ballpark figure of how difficult you can expect a certain novel or VN to be is jpdb.io, roughly speaking most VNs rated 4/10 and below for difficulty are beginner-friendly (although there are some exceptions so it can be a good idea to ask in a VN club/experienced people about their thoughts). I began a 9-5 summer job towards the end of June but even so I was spending 5-6 hours reading every day (and slightly more on weekends), my listening immersion time took a drastic drop as a result though 😅. The main reason being that I was just really enjoying the VN I was reading and wanted to keep going. This is what I think is the single most effective way to read more - choose content that highly interests you.

My average immersion time for June was ~7 hours a day. By the end of June, I also fully stopped using JP subs when watching anime and was only mining vocab from LNs and VNs (so I was only using anime for listening immersion). Just around ~1 month after I passed the N4 Kotoba quiz and <2 weeks into reading my second VN Summer Pockets, I managed to pass the N3 Kotoba quiz (although it did take quite a few tries 😅). I was hugely surprised at how quickly my vocab had managed to grow as a result of reading! By now, I had gotten used to reading Summer Pockets as well and was encountering unknown vocab/grammar a lot less frequently (and it was taking a lot less time to process what I was reading), causing my reading speed for it to grow to 10,000 characters/hour around the beginning of July. The first few weeks of July passed much the same - with me doing my Anki and an hour of listening immersion in the morning, working from 9-5, and then reading for 5-6 hours in the evening. Just before the last week of July I finished my summer job (as it was for a 1 month period) and so decided I'd challenge myself to read more that week. Additionally, I was going to be busier next month so I wanted to immerse as much as possible while I still could.

In that final week of July, I ended up reading 100,000 characters in a day for the first time (I was reading Summer Pockets at about 13,000 characters/hour by this point) - before going on to hit 100,000 characters in a day another 3 times that same week. I did a total of 80 hours of immersion that week (so an average of 11.4 hours a day) - 47 hours of reading and 33 hours of listening. Within that week I finished off the rest of Summer Pockets, started another VN and finished my 3rd LN. Also, I took part in TheMoeWay's immersion leaderboard for July and managed to win that month. At the end of the month I changed all of my sentence cards on Anki into anime cards since I'd noticed that far too often I was able to remember a card purely based on the context before I even got to reading the word. As a result, I was still repping 30-40 new cards a day but it was taking almost half the time per day that it did with sentence cards. My retention rate dipped slightly for a short while after the change but quickly got back to normal. For July as a whole, my average immersion was ~7.5 hours a day.

I went away on holiday for a few days in early August during which I didn't do any immersion and was busy with other things during the month such as moving house. Plus, with COVID-19 restrictions pretty much gone I wanted to spend a lot more time with family and friends that month. But overall I still got a decent amount done. By halfway through the month, I'd finished another 2 VNs (one of which I'd already started in July). I then started a VN called 白昼夢の青写真, which is one of the best VNs I've read yet (Case 0 in particular is a brilliant read). (Side note: I recommend reading something that's roughly around your current level but which you still find interesting - if you read something far more difficult than you can handle you won't understand a whole lot and won't get much out of it, on the other hand if you don't gradually increase the difficulty of the stuff you read your growth will stagnate. For me, I had a lot of different LNs and VNs I wanted to read and slowly worked through them in order of increasing difficulty, very roughly speaking.)

Around the same time I also started making the monolingual transition, i.e. transitioning over to using J-J dictionaries rather than J-E dictionaries. Since I'd read a fair amount by this point, I found it to be a fairly smooth transition but it still took time to get used to and my reading speed dropped for quite a while. I often mined common words that I would see in definitions too. Up till now I had mostly been mining words in i+1 sentences (i.e. I'd mine something if it was the only piece of vocab/grammar I didn't know in the sentence) but I stopped following that rule and instead would mine even multiple pieces of unknown vocab from the same sentence as long as I could understand their meaning in that context. Furthermore, I had been very reserved with what I mined to Anki up to this point since I figured that particularly while I'm still new to reading I'll be able to acquire a lot of the more common stuff just by reading a lot so I would only mine words that I could tell for some reason would be difficult to remember (or if they contained unfamiliar kanji or had a meaning which is not obvious from the kanji). But from this point on I started being just a bit more lax with that. Oh, and I also managed to pass the Kotoba N2 quiz in early August 😄. For August I was doing an average of 4-5 hours of immersion a day.

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September was a huge month for me in my Japanese language journey. In early September I decided to sign up for the December JLPT N1 test on a whim as I figured it would be a cool side goal to have. At the time I wasn't sure if I'd even be able to get good enough to scrape a pass on it in time for December. However, I sure as hell was going to try. I decided to really challenge myself to immerse as much as I could in September. Around the beginning of the month I also began an internship I had lined up, but luckily it was quite flexible with timings (my day could be anything from 9-3 or 8-6 purely based on how quickly I got the project work I was responsible for done). Also, since it was remote I didn't have to waste time commuting. So I tried to be as time-efficient as possible, essentially finishing by 3 everyday and managing to get 6-10 hours of immersion in every day (some in the morning and in my lunch breaks lol), as well as 10-12 hours on weekends.

I managed to finish the month with a total of 292 hours of immersion (average of 9.7 hours a day) - consisting of 2 million+ characters read from VNs and LNs, 20,000+ manga pages (yes, I got hooked on manga again this month lol) and 33 hours of listening. The majority of the characters I read this month came from LNs (completed a total of 14 books) - before this point I had mostly read VNs so at first I found it difficult to read the same amount in a day with LNs as with VNs, but over the course of the month I got used to it and was comfortably managing to read 100,000 characters a day with LNs too. I won my second month with TheMoeWay monthly immersion leaderboard and also won the Tadoku reading competition for that month. In addition, at the end of the month I managed to pass the Kotoba N1 Grammar quiz (the highest role on the server) and was feeling a lot more confident about being able to pass N1! After the intense period of immersion that was September, I also felt significant improvements in my reading ability.

October was a very busy month for me between finishing off my internship, starting uni again (my holidays had finished), preparing grad job applications and other commitments. From early on in my Japanese language journey I'd been building up a large backlog of new cards in my mining deck. This was mainly because I never set a limit on how much I mined in a day, so there were often days where I'd mine like 50-100 new cards (meaning that my backlog kept growing faster than I was repping new cards). In order to try and catch up with it I began repping 50 new cards a day from then on. Not much else significant happened in October other than perhaps the fact I started reading a VN called Dies Irae during the month. It was probably the hardest thing I had read up to that point and I came across a load of vocab I hadn't seen before. Also, I found there were many lines I'd have to reread and think about for a while before being able to fully understand. As a result, my reading speed during the prologue of Dies Irae was about 7,000 characters/hour and even by the end of October I was only averaging 10,000-11,000 characters/hour on it.

I read quite a wide range of different texts during the month including LNs, VNs, web novels, blogs and just surfing random articles on the internet. Additionally, I tried my first reading stream in the server during that month by reading Dies Irae out loud - found it really fun and have done more since then. My average immersion time for October was 4.5 hours a day. At the end of October I decided to try my first N1 practice paper to see where I'm at and, to my surprise, I managed to get a raw score of 89/105 on it. This gave me the realisation that I was already able to pass N1 with quite a good score. My original plan was to mix in some JLPT-specific study in November but after getting that score I decided not to, and just continued immersing as normal.

November was mostly the same, being occupied by other responsibilities and only averaging about 4 hours of immersion a day up until the last week of the month. After that point, however, I had significantly more free time available again up until the end of December. With slightly over a week to go before the N1 test, I decided to challenge myself again by trying to read 1 million characters in a week at the end of November. I managed to achieve this goal by reading a total of 61.5 hours during that week and also managed to read 200,000 characters in a day for the first time. Anki was also going well, and by now never took me more than 30 minutes a day (even while doing 50 new cards a day with around 92-95% retention). I get questions regarding best ways to increase retention on Anki and what I personally found is that just trying to read more helped a lot more than fiddling with Anki settings, as it increases your familiarity with kanji and you're more likely to see the words you've mined again (although of course I understand that isn't feasible for everyone and a little bit of time spent optimising the settings isn't the worst thing in the world, it's just that it is a lot less effective).

And so, that brings us up to 5th December, on which I took the JLPT N1 test and passed with a full score of 180/180. Even though I had never read any news(/typical non-fiction stuff people say closely emulates N1 reading passages) or done any JLPT prep at all, I still found the N1 reading section very easy and managed to finish with about 15 minutes remaining despite closely reading every passage and thinking a lot about every answer. Furthermore, I found grammar to be probably the easiest section along with reading despite having never studied any grammar. This highlights the effectiveness of focused reading - whenever I read in Japanese I always tried my best to understand as much as I possibly could and think deeply about what I read (including thinking about e.g. what the writer's trying to portray, the underlying message, what different character's motives are, etc.) and that reading comprehension ability translated over well to the JLPT N1.

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As mentioned earlier, I had more free time in December which I used to read more of the things I had been looking forward to (one of the VNs I read called Musicus is great and I would highly recommend it!). I ended up immersing a total of 255 hours in December (average: 8-9 hours a day) - including 3 million+ characters read and 55 hours of listening immersion. Already I feel a lot better than I was at the point when I took the N1 test and reading in Japanese has come to feel very natural for me. Thanks to that I'm able to enjoy a whole range of VNs, LNs, web novels, etc. effortlessly and it's honestly a great feeling. Doing this much focused reading over a month really gets you used to it - when I started out with reading it felt like there was always this insurmountable barrier in terms of how every time I read in Japanese I'd have to actively exert myself and concentrate to understand (unlike in English where it's just natural). Took a lot of immersion/effort (and reading wasn't the most fun in the beginning) but now enjoying content has never felt so fun.

I can now comfortably finish an average 100,000 character LN in 5-6 hours. Also, I finally caught up on my Anki backlog about 2 weeks ago (mid-January) and surpassed 10,000 cards on Anki (although this isn't indicative of my vocab amount since I learnt a lot more vocab purely through reading rather than from Anki). During the past week I've only done about 35 new cards in Anki since it's hard to find new cards to mine at this point unless I purposely try to find really difficult material that will use more obscure kanji. For example, I read White Album 2 Introductory Chapter which is ~210,000 characters long recently but only managed to mine about 20 words. So nowadays in Anki I mostly just end up doing reviews.

I've also passed the 1900 hours of immersion mark and will probably hit the 2000 mark next month. I didn't talk much about output but essentially I started being a lot more conscious about trying to ouput from October onwards. At first it was really difficult, but just trying to think more in Japanese and purposely looking out for how things are conveyed in my immersion has made a noticeable difference. I make significantly less mistakes in my writing output nowadays and my speaking ability is also coming along quite well (I can more comfortably speak about a range of topics now) but there is still a ways to go and I will be putting more focus on it this year. I'm also doing more listening nowadays (my reading:listening ratio for this month has been 1:1).

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Learning Japanese as an extra hobby over the past 10+ months has been great and I certainly won't stop reading anytime soon as there's still loads of LNs and VNs I want to read. However, I'm going to be spending far less time on it from now on and will be spending more time on/prioritising other endeavours. Not to mention I need be studying more for uni in the buildup to exams as well as preparing for grad job interviews. In terms of my language learning goals specifically, I will spend more time speaking Japanese with natives this year to improve how natural my speaking ability is and I'm also thinking of starting to learn Arabic eventually (by eventually, I mean probably not within this year).

Note that where I talk about 'efficiency' or the best way to go about something it's just referring to my thoughts on it and what would, hypothetically, be the best way to go about it in my experience. At the end of the day, as long as you keep going you will make it. It's completely fine to make sacrifices on efficiency if it makes the process more enjoyable and sustainable for you. Also, I can't stress enough the effectiveness of focused reading - getting enough good quality immersion will make up for any imperfections in your learning method in the long run.

I get asked sometimes about how I can read so much but one thing to note is that, personally, even more so than aspects such as discipline it's largely that I just really enjoyed the content I was consuming as well as the feeling of learning a new skill and most of the time it did not feel like study to me.

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Here's some general tips I wrote up about a month ago answering common questions I'd gotten regarding the topic of getting good quickly/taking N1 purely using immersion: https://rentry.co/gitgud

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My N1 result: https://i.imgur.com/GGtjWqj.png

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邪魔 for doing a great job over in TheMoeWay and implementing really useful features such as the monthly immersion leaderboard, Doth for being a great source of motivation for me, Madoromi and Tommeh for the great 朗読 streams (they were a lot of fun and I've really enjoyed reading out loud since then!), Stegatxins0 for the brilliant mining setup guide which was super helpful, Xelieu for helping me with a bunch of stuff, ッツ for creating a great ebook reader, QuizMaster for the Anki guide, Artikash for developing Textractor, and all the other developers of various tools that I have used which have helped me enormously during my journey! I also really want to thank everyone in TheMoeWay and other servers I'm in for the encouraging comments and for always pushing me to do better - you guys are the best! 😁

This ended up being a lot longer than expected but it was a nice trip down memory lane and hopefully there was something useful in here for you. If you need to contact me for anything then Discord would be the best way (Jazzy#1234). You can usually catch me on TheMoeWay server as well, where I've often posted progress reports and reviews for a lot of the stuff I've read. Good luck with all your goals for this year everyone, Japanese-related or otherwise!

Congrats.

Just to any beginners/intermediate/literally everyone else, just take this post with a grain of salt.

This guy studied 6+ hours a day. This type of studier is very rare and they treat studying Japanese as a job or as something with a strong inner desire to perfect a skill. From the top of my head, this post reminds me of Stevejvs(forgot his name), Kaz, MattVJapan, etc. This is not achievable for the average person. The average person starts to question their motivation to learn Japanese and start to ask other's "what's the point" the second they hit a road block in learning Japanese (**cough cough** kanji/grammar). This is the same person who studies maybe a few hours A WEEK, and immerse when they have the time after life obligations and their other hobbies. OP obviously didn't run into this and just grinded for hours a day.

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TLDR: Don't think you're stupid or something or ask why you're progressing so slowly in learning Japanese. If you put 6+ hours of your life into anything, you're bound to get proficient in it.

You mentioned that you have to balance between your 9-5 summer job, as well as immerse in Japanese for about 7 hours per day. If you sleep for 7 hours, that leaves you with 2 hours of rest everyday. How do you balance between your huge work commitment and rest?

I can’t decide if this is inspiring or utterly demotivating lol. Congrats either way, that’s insane. I wish I spent my free time doing something as productive as that.

Top 3 things this kind of posts do

The 2021 December JLPT exam was cancelled in the UK. Did you do the exam in another country??

This is awesome to see! 50 new words a day seems also like a pretty crazy amount to rep in 30 minutes, so how many reviews was that per day? And did just learn all the kanji through other vocab?

damn and people call me insane for getting N2 from scratch in under two years...

A very important consideration for any readers of posts like this to take into account is that results vary from person to person drastically, even with identical input. While it's not unheard of for someone with this amount of focus to achieve this, it's extremely rare, even within the subset of people that attempt this. That's not to say that the above isn't good advice - it is, all those techniques are completely valid. But another person that spends the exact amount of time, at the exact same pace, doing the exact same things, will not necessarily get the same results within the same time frame.

Is this jealously speaking here? Definitely, damn straight. Several years ago, inbetween full time jobs, I spent a considerable amount of time doing the above, at a many hours per day rate (perhaps even more than the OP, for month long sprints at a time, here and there) for 2 years. It still took me over a year to get through one full novel the first time, memorizing all the words as I went. I have my 3000 hand made flash cards to show for it, my study book with timelines and measurements. And that wasn't even the only thing I was working on at the time. I made very important strides in learning. But I never achieved anything within an order of magnitude of what was achieved here. And I'm not exactly a slowpoke with learning things, including in languages.

So on one hand I'm sure the OP is proud of their work, and they should be, but on the other hand, this is not a reasonable expectation for outcomes, even given identical input, from another random person. The above is not advice that is actionable that will get anyone that does it at the same rate to get a perfect score on N1 in a year. The OP is privileged to have a lot of natural ability in this, on top of the amount of hard work involved.

My advice for others is to absolutely consider using the above techniques, but to strongly temper your expectations. Some people just possess particular mental faculties that are amenable to absorbing languages like a sponge, and most do not have this. I don't. It's not to say that others can't learn - we can. But ending up being as much as an order of magnitude slower than this, even with identical focus, is also completely within reason.

If you hear stories about 6 year olds doing calculus, or people speed reading a book and being able to recall what's on page 52, you'd also be amazed but not expect that from yourself, right? Let's put this into perspective:

Consider, for example, the many thousands of people that do actually move to Japan, do actually immerse daily, do actually need to use it for their jobs, and also on top of it take classes frequently, and engage in reading and tv daily for hours... FAR more hours, at a har higher rate than the OP, with direct 2-way native engagement... most of them do not pass N1 in a year, and close to zero with a perfect score.

On top of that, this person said they spent about 1500 hours. N1 requires 10,000 words of vocab. That's 7 words per hour, 40-50/day, nonstop with perfect recall (otherwise if any slipped than they'd have to be re-memorized). Average overall time spent up to N1 that I've read is more in the 3000-4000h range, even for those that have done it in a year, yes that means 8-10 hours a day, a full time job of studying. Yet this is double that rate, maybe even triple.

And on top of that, before approximately the N3-passed point, which is maybe halfway time-wise in most study arcs from zero to N1, it's extremely difficult to get much out of native material. It's too fast, too dense with unknown words, too much unknown kanji. (N5-N4 studiers don't just pick up newspapers and manga, or listen to tv or anime or radio, and get much out of it.) So, much of the immersion factor is going to be absorbed in the second half of this person's 8.5 month time period, shrinking the valid absorption timeline down to maybe 4-5 months of actually understanding a reasonable percentage of native material.

And that's just vocab. Not even kanji for the vocab, for that they somehow managed perfect recall of 2500 new letters in less than 1500 hours while overlapping everything else they did. Stress on the perfect part - the JPLT tests love to throw in homophones and very easily confused kanji, and yet the OP didn't trip up on a single one of these once.

For a bit more context, native learners pick up vocab from directly consuming media at about 1/10-1/4 of a word per minute of listening or reading. So if the OP spent half that 1500 hours just listening and reading, so 750 hours, then at the high end that would be 750*60/4=11250 words from that alone. Assuming retention on the high end of native acclimation. So we're in the right order of magnitude here, it's not like claiming 100k words in that timeline, but it's at the limit, even for natives.

Also, native learners are expected to learn the 2500 or so joyo kanji by high school. So middle school students in Japan still have about 1200 or so kanji to learn in their 3 years or so, and as we can imagine, not all Japanese natives get 100% on their kanji tests. And theirs is a situation of 100% perfect immersion, bombarded by all senses, 24 hours a day, with vocabulary and kanji. So the OP memorized and internalized kanji at 2500/8mo=312/mo compared to 1200/36mo=33/mo that native middle schoolers would be expected to. Now, adults have different learning rates and focus than middle schoolers, but that's ten times the rate. Again, just keeping this in context.

Perhaps a minor point, but one part that sticks out to me is all the written-only, stiff, literary grammar points that the N1 specifically is filled with, that don't even crop up in native material all that often. And yet this person got a perfect score on that stuff, too. Without studying N1-specific material, they said. So I'm wondering what they read or listened to that filled in all of these rare occurrence patterns that are at best uncommon in modern media content, that the JLPT loves to trip us all up with.

Color me skeptical that either this person is a memorizing savant, or something else is going on here. Honestly this borders on not believable, like photographic memory. Physically possible? Yes, this is within the order of magnitude of human limits, it's not an impossible claim outright... But, most cannot. (I wonder if their total hour measurement or start date are off in some way, for starters.)

At any rate, this is not a study expectation or results target that one aims for. If it's inspiring, great. But I can imagine how it's also terrifying. Just manage expectations; you'll get there, I'll get there, we'll do it together, it just won't be on this kind of timeline.

Is anyone else confused on how they got grammar down? I assume that they found the meanings of their sentences and then could piece together how the words together, but that seems really tedious. Maybe they meant that they researched grammar when they were looking words up, so it wasn’t focused but that allowed them to proceed?

Edit: I read more carefully and it seemed like they did the second while reading novels, but I’m not still sure how someone would do the first at a decent pace which seems implied like they did in the beginning.

Did you take the test on another country? December JLPT was cancelled in the UK but you say you are from there.

Assuming this isn't an elaborate troll, this has to be a world record, right? I've always found stories about people passing N1 from scratch in <18 months totally ridiculous but this is a whole other level of insane. If anyone is reading this and feels discouraged, don't. For 99.9% of people, this sort of pace is totally unachievable, even with extremely hard work. OP is much more intelligent than the average person and has an exceptionally good memory.