How I got 180/180 on N1 in ~8.5 Months!
Discussion
Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters.
Archived post. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast.
Sort by:
Best
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
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.
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.
Language learning is never a competition!
It really shouldn’t be, because there’s nothing to be earned by getting there quicker or efficiently. You don’t need full fluency to make friends, using the fastest method doesn’t guarantee better job opportunities or capabilities at getting them done, and being a better learner than other people ultimately doesn’t mean much. Not to mention I’m pretty sure most people learning Japanese don’t have plans to live or work in Japan.
Go at the pace you feel comfortable with and that’s that. I did that, never cared about speedrunning the language, and now I’m employed full-time as a Japanese translator. I’ve also learned other languages along the way, made friends, completed two undergrad programs, and just lived my life without worrying much about it. I took my time and had fun, and eventually my hobby became my job.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said, and I want to add that even though I deliberately study 5+ hours a day while living in Japan and have plenty of immersion on top of that, I still don't produce results this efficiently. The reading and memorization speeds in the post are quite good, I'd guess top 1% of learners. And of course as it has been pointed out on this sub many times, even native speakers may not get a perfect N1 score, so bravo to OP.
I am not demotivated at all because learning a language is not a race with others. I'm really pleased with my own progress and I'm looking forward to several decades of conversing in Japanese, whether it takes me 2x or 5x or 10x the time of other exceptional students.
Reddit's upvoting system puts emphasis on incredible stories over the average person's struggle. For every post like this, there are 1000 of us succeeding nonetheless at a moderate rate.
This guy spent longer writing this post than my average study time per day.
Phrased it much better than I could have. I've been learning Japanese on and off for 13 years at this point, and I'm somewhere between N2 and N1. There are still so many words I don't know, and I can't read books fluently yet, but I've come to peace with that over time. I've learned that forcing myself to put more time into learning, when I'm not enjoying that learning, is a recipe for wasting time. You have to keep it fun, and for most people that means starting small (1 hour a day) since the beginning of the journey is tough.
Learn at your own pace, keep it fun, and don't have any expectations about pace. I'm a slower learner than probably most people on this subreddit, but so what? That doesn't invalidate the time I've put in so far. I've spent very little time studying when I didn't want to, and because of that I have a good relationship with the learning process.
Good luck everyone :)
The average study hours to get to N1 for non-CJK language speakers is 3000–4800 hours. According to OP they spent 3242 hours, which is on the low end (assuming there are no unaccounted for hours) but not some crazy impossible feat.
It's perfectly typical for even someone living in Japan to take 5-7 years to reach N1. Posts like OP are very impressive but they can be as dispiriting for some as they can be inspiring for others so I think it's good to keep in mind that sprinters and walkers all cross the finish line eventually. Put in the hours and you'll get there!
(not that N1 is anywhere close to "the finish line" but hey I'm trying not to be discouraging haha...)
Comment deleted by user
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 tend to put a lot of time into the things I enjoy and am passionate about so there is an element of discipline but more than anything it's what kyousei8 mentioned - I was really enjoying what I was reading at the time and that time was my rest, in the same way many would spend that time playing games or another hobby instead. Also, that job was only for a month and that 6-7 hours a day was an average, meaning that it was heavily weighted by certain days (especially weekends). I was still consistently going to the gym and was still going out with friends (albeit a lot less frequently because of COVID) it's just that on those days I'd immerse slightly less and then make up for it on the other days. I honestly believe that spending time like that to stay mentally/physically healthy is very important in order to be able to keep going with studying Japanese too (I mention this in my tips that I wrote too).
It sounds like OP enjoyed their studying, since most of it was things they liked. For them, that might have been their "rest".
I think so too. Personally I cannot sustain 7 hours of immersion per day. Only at most 1 hour per day. On average 30 mins. This is on top of the university work commitments that I have.
I won't compare to others. I'll just run my own race to reach fluency, albeit at a slower pace.
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.
Thanks, honestly I have regrets like that from when I was younger, wishing that I'd spent my time better. That's partially what drives me to try and do better as I've gotten older, to try and avoid the same regrets as much as I can - since, while we can't do much about the past, we can all make positive change in the present.
Top 3 things this kind of posts do
Make people quit learning Japanese
Serve as a vessel for OP's ego
Inspire people
In that exact order, too.
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?
For me, the problem is more that a lot of those 50 words would be gone from my head the next day, and I'd be scheduled to learn 50 more on top of the ones from the day before. It would compound until it felt out of control. I hate that chaotic feeling.
I like to work more slowly, but with a solid sense that I will never lose what I've learned so far. Around 2 years in working full time I'm at several thousand words & around 1100 kanji with readings, with very solid retention even after several years of only infrequent use.
I think a slower and more methodical approach (including grammar study) works well for those of us who only have an hour or two at most to dedicate per day, and some days where there won't be time at all. (Like working 8-10 hr days + needing to cook for and spend time with family, other rewarding hobbies, etc).
Speaking of hobbies, I bought nice Japanese paper (midori md grid notebooks), fountain pens and ink (pilot f nib and iroshizuku ink) and turned my kanji practice into handwriting practice, which has been really fun. Everything else I do for work and hobbies is on my PC, so I really enjoy how tactile it is to write out kanji. I hadn't had to really hand write anything since college 15 years ago, so it took getting used to. My handwriting has come a long way! I've always loved kanji and enjoy being able to write them beautifully. I change inks every month, and am about to finish my third book full. Given 176 pages per book and 260 grid spots per page, I'm at well over 100k characters written at this point. Its very zen, I just sit and put on music and write without worrying about other responsibilities.
My goal for now is to get to N3 or so before visas open back up, then study full time in Japan and properly enjoy going further, feeling confident in already being conversational. I do a weekly class for speaking, but it has been hard finding language partners to speak outside of that with limited time to schedule it in.
All that to say, we all have out own unique journey and approach.
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.
I sometimes don't get posts like OP's and whether to think it's inspiring or not.
I feel like OP's a rare case of natural aptitude and hard work both paying off dividends in his language learning. You just don't improve that fast without having the knack and an amazing memory for retention of information.
I've already passed N1 2 years ago and just pretty much consume native content daily so it doesn't really faze me, but I can see how this can be very demoralizing for some people.
damn and people call me insane for getting N2 from scratch in under two years...
it's still insane. congrats.
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.
I find it hilarious that this sub frequently shits on 4chan yet almost every success story I’ve ever read on this sub or elsewhere references people using DJT/4chan based materials. I’ve actually never seen a post about someone succeeding based on resources from this sub.
This post is already getting some criticism, even after only being up for a few hours.I'd like to caution against taking the advice of people who say things like "Only geniuses can do things like this" and "This is only possible for those absolutely overwhelmed with free time." These are incredibly impressive results, like absolutely, overwhelmingly impressive. I'm sure that Jazzy's personal ability certainly was a great asset here. However, I'd say, more than inherent intelligence or language learning ability, the thing that helped Jazzy most was dilligence and dedication. Consistency is what gets these kinds of results. It is remarkably hard, especially as a beginner, to push through and spend hours with Japanese. Free time, of course, certainly helps. However, I think it's worth noting that this time is not spent doing workbook drills or studying at a desk. The grand majority is spent just enjoying Japanese media. This is fun time, not study time. I think that helps a lot.
I think there's unfortunately a lot of people in the Japanese learning community that give advice they're just not qualified to make. This goes beyond people giving long replies to questions like (made up question so as not to put anyone on the spot) "How do I reach a level where I can comfortably read classic Japanese literature?" when they're at a level where they can't read even simple stuff comfortably. These people exist, and they're obnoxious, but honestly like 80% of the time, their advice is honestly fine? For my theoretical example question, I'd imagine the answer is obvious pretty much no matter the level "Work on your vocab and grammar, and keep reading". So who cares.
My issue lies more with people who come into a thread from someone who passed the N1 with full marks in 8.5 months and their first response amounts to "Yeah, but...".
These come in a variety of flavors:
"Yeah, but if I just had that kind of time, I could do the same thing!"
What do you do with the free time you do have, taking away time dedicated to relationships and work? You clearly have some time like this, since you're on reddit. Sure, it took Jazzy an average of six hours a day to get a perfect score on N1. That's a good bit harder than, for instance, narrowly passing. That is, you can certainly pass N1 in 8.5 months with way less than 6 hours a day
"Yeah, but you're just some kind of genius or something..."
Have you ever tried doing something like this? I promise you that these kinds of feats of hyper intelligence mostly just amount to dedication and diligence. I see it as almost rude in a way to say this to someone, in that you're basically telling someone that they "cheated" their way to victory instead of relying on hard work.
Yeah, but N1 doesn't test output ability..."
No, it doesn't. But it certainly does test to make sure test takers have a fundamentally solid grasp on Japanese grammar and usage. Sure, I doubt Jazzy is ready to go on TV and talk about politics. But they're absolutely primed to get there real quick with some effort. The inability to output well while having solid input ability gets framed as if output ability is still at the start line, as if they'll need to go to the local community college and take Japanese 1 with everyone else to reach the point where they can output well. This, of course, is kind of ludicrous given that they already have the vocab, the grammar, and the fundamental language ability. They can get that output ability relatively quick.
In short, I'd encourage taking Jazzy's advice as much as possible, adapting it to something that works in your life. I'm sure there are a lot of people here who don't have 6 hours or the ENERGY necessary for 6 hours. That doesn't make you a failure.
I'd also recommend being careful where you take your advice from. If someone regularly says things like "Not even natives can read stuff like this!" (literate natives can, assuming it's not literal Classical Japanese), "I can read JLPT N3 level manga fine but JLPT N2 level manga are too much for me" (Beware people that judge media difficulty. Some things are easier for beginners and some things are notably challenging. But ANYTHING meant for Japanese natives is "JLPT N1". That is, there's going to be the occasional rare word, super literary grammar point, super casual grammar point, kobun phrase, etc. The JLPT comparisons are a surefire sign of an upper beginner Japanese learner or someone very unfamiliar with the JLPT tests. And it's rarely the latter. A similar criticism goes for notions of JLPT N-level vocab or grammar. There's also a unique phenomenon in these communities of people living and working in Japan while having completely awful language ability. "I can talk just fine with my colleagues and friends!" being used as proof of ability is a surefire sign of someone incompetent. Someone with real listening competence will know better than to use this as proof of ability. "I can follow my Japanese colleagues and friends' conversations with one another about any subject with little difficulty", for instance, IS a good sign. Same with "I can follow the news and a wide variety of Japanese media (not just limited to anime or slice of life dramas) comfortably.", which is a good indicator that someone knows what they're talking about when it comes to listening. For reading, the thing to look out for are the same things as listening ability AND in addition the ability to read Japanese literary fiction (which tends to use a very full range of vocab and grammar). You might be surprised by the inclusion of listening ability in there, but when reading, you're very likely to come across shortened or colloquialized phrases that are near impossible to parse without some listening ability.
Apologies for this overly long comment. I just have a lot of thoughts from 3 years of seeing how advice is given to beginners and the kind of attitudes that are held.
Those people feel bitter/jealous of OP's accomplishment - they've put years of their life into learning Japanese and OP blew past them in 8.5 months. It's easier to look for caveats/excuses than admit the fault lies in your own lack of effort.
I feel the same way - makes me question what I've been doing. Really jealous of OP's results and resolve/determination (and talent). I guess some people might find this inspirational but for me it's more demotivating - kind of like looking in the mirror and seeing what you could've become if you tried harder.
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.
There is another person called Aussieman who reached N1 within <9 months so the holder of the world record (for non CJK people) is ambiguous. The OP did get a higher score though.
Congrats! That's very impressive. DJT, AnimeCards, and The Moe Way for life!
One small thing, your link to Core2.3k is actually the older version of the deck. The latest one can be found at https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/docs/coredeck/
Comment deleted by user
explains what worked for them and why
explains what didn't work and why
provides links to materials that helped
learning timeline broken down in hours
gives me faith that i can get somewhere without forcing myself to watch cure dolly or read tae kim
i like this post
Sure you didn't spend that 8.5 months writing this post?
I don't get this sub. Seems like some of you are quite cynical. How can someone explain in detail their pathway to learning Japanese and somehow recieve criticism for it?? Are you jealous?
Made an account just to comment to this post and Jazzy, you’re truly a madman. Your commitment is insanely motivating and made me want to try much harder after slacking off for a while. But holy shit, the comments here are pathetic.
People seriously trying to defame you and call you a liar, coping and seething due to their own inability to put effort into something they supposedly want to do. I'm disgusted. These people do not want to learn Japanese, they want to tell about themselves that they are learning Japanese, so they can feel like they're part of a community while doing no effort in order to actually reach a high level. And when they see someone actually make it, they recoil and break down crying and spewing inane shit just to justify their own pitifulness, spending more time finding excuses than studying Japanese.
An advice for beginners: don't take these bitter, toxic people seriously. They want to pull you down to their own level, they want you to never make it and wallow in low-intermediate despair for all your life. But it's not true. You can make it. You can learn Japanese. And it does not take decades to get good.