The biggest help for me was finishing N3 grammar, but there’s a ton of stuff not well covered in N2 or N1 as well. I think some of the N2 and N1 points are fairly common and probably belong in lower levels, but it is what it is. Just go at whatever pace you like. I did 4 a day, but it’s not like doing 3 would have slowed me down much.
Vocab is the most important part after N3 since word recall and lookups is what will slow you down most at this point if you’re regularly reading, but I don’t see any reason to delay N2 and N1 grammar.
Bunpro helped a ton. It has to have, I haven’t really used any grammar resources other than bunpro and jitendex lookups and sometimes I’ll look things up on the internet in Japanese because it’s not anywhere else. Most of my confusion around certain things get solved by just reading more though, there are some “ohhh” moments.
I’ve done 30 words a day for the past half year or so, but every now and then I’ll do 40-50 depending on what I’m adding (especially if it’s all kinda obvious words and known kanji that I won’t struggle with), but that’s more of a temporary thing when I start a new novel that’s different from what I usually read and want to grab a bunch of words fast because I am confident I keep running in to them over and over and save more time doing the reviews than slowing down my reading. Anything grammar related and not a word I tend to add immediately on top of the usual 30 words.
I really try to not go over 30, but it’s hard to pace myself some days especially because a lot of the words in my reviews currently aren’t so rare that I need anki. A tactic I’m experimenting with is taking 15 from the immediate top of the pile, then adding another 15 while reading, and past these 30 words added to my reviews I reposition any new words that I try to mine that I’ve already mined so they’re prioritized the day after without adding extra reviews yet. I figure anything I try to mine regularly and such reposition to the top of the pile should be prioritized because it must be common in what I like to read (also the benefit of still being somewhat recently read words when in the learning pool, makes the first reviews faster). I’d change it to most recently mined, but then all the common words I mined earlier when I started mining would be stuck in a backlog despite being more important.
It’s probably fine to do less. I think 20 is pretty common. I have plenty of time and energy for reviews and reading so I don’t care if I have to do a bit more reviews. The sooner I can get to 20K heaven the better for my reading. (Currently at around 10k after 1 year, aiming for 20k next year).
what Books are you currently reading ?
