Monthly Log: JLPT N1 in A Year Or So Speedrun Attempt

Japanese
#43

I wish I also had started learning Japanese during COVID… "Unfortunately’ I was already heading towards the end of my own PhD and spent time working on papers (and watching anime).

My concern is that adding something to the review queue does not mean you have learned it. It’s possible to add it all really fast, but at one point it comes back to bite you. In my case I often get things right until it gets to the Seasoned level. At that point if I do not have a good grasp of the item, it tends to go up and down in the SRS as I occasionally will get it wrong, especially with vocab. I have ghosts on to reinforce items that get stuck at this level, which make reviews go up really fast and become frustrating.

My accuracy for grammar is >90% for N5 and N4 so far, but sometimes I still feel like things are getting mixed up in my head and have to slow down to compare different points and really understand it.

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#44

Hm… I already regret posting this because I do not want to just add to the negativity haha. Just sharing some of my own frustrations. Anyways keep going as long as you are feeling great!

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#45

Tbf I don’t see much negativity, people here are giving grounded insights. Unfortunately that’s the harsh reality that comes with language learning, which holds especially true with Japanese being so deeply shaped by a culture that’s so fundamentally different from ours. It’s not to deter, but rather an invitation to reframe ambitions from a realistic perspective if deemed necessary at some point of the journey. No arguing that Bunpro is a major convenience for skimming through grammar points, and their SRS seems quite functional, but actually acquiring a language takes so much more than just doing reps. It’s a matter of empathizing with the language to the best extent, developing intuitions, and the answer to that is pretty much immersion and immersion again, more than anything else.

At the end of the day it all depends to the goals we set for ourselves, obviously. Bunpro can certainly take anyone to the JLPT and that’d be perfectly fine if that’s the end goal, otherwise long-term benefits for practical use of Japanese appear faint to me if not also actively immersing with native content. That being said, more power to OP if they can keep up with their pace and not get overwhelmed

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#46

I would argue that comprehensible input is what needed, not necessarily immersion

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#47

I tried full immersion with listening when I needed to cram that for the JLPT in less than a month. However, rather than getting better at listening, I instead did a very good job of teaching myself to tune out Japanese. Took like another month to undo to get back to listening practice, but by then I got busy again.

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#48

I believe in you, and I expect these updates to become more and more unhinged.

Week 30. ‘this week I completed 27000 SRS reviews. Read the entire 日本書紀, and watched 3 seasons of anime at the same time’

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#49

45週ー英語を話すのが忘れった。

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#50

もそんな感じが出ると思う

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#51

What are you thinking of when we’re saying immersion?

Immersion is a lot of things, but mainly it’s surrounding yourself in an enviorment that you must rely soley on Japanese to survive. Whether that’s playing a video game in JP, watching TV/Shows in JP with no English subtitles, speaking to Japanese people who don’t know English, or exclusively speak to you in Japanese, and there are many many more ways of immersing.
The whole point of immersion is to rely fully on your Japanese knowledge so far to promote “Active Recall” one of the best tools for learning, whether that be for Math, Sciences, or Language. You see/hear something, and then spend time (without any hints) figuring out what that thing you saw/heard means. This builds strong mental pathways that help retain knowledge long-term.
You can “know” many things but when the time comes to actually apply your knowledge, if you don’t know how to do that you’ll be left wanting. Studying a Math Textbook for your test is good “comprehensive input”, but for some people if they never do practice problems they’ll flunk the test, even with hours of “study”.
Everyone learns different, and not everyone will need to immerse as much/if at all in order to be fluent in a language, but every baby that has ever been born learns through immersion. It’s a strategy that has been known to work since the invention of human language.

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#52

Do you mind explaining how you went about immersing? This to me sounds like you listened to Japanese content in the background while you did other stuff, as opposed to focusing on what you were listening to, in which case I can see why you would learn to tune it out.

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#53

When I say immersion I mean the same thing, but I just say that it’s possible to supplement native content and environment with sufficint quantity of good quality sentence cards, because not immersion metters but comprehensible input. And then switching to native content will be like changing accent of content you are watching. And I say it should be more efficient if we maintain cards on a right level of difficulty. There is a thing like context of what you care and what you like, and what you need that can help, but to which degree :thinking:

Anyhow, I don’t see any way to prove it or disprove right now

#54

I agree, but like with dietary supplements, you cannot live off of supplements alone. You can take a multivitamin every day, but if you don’t eat food you will eventually starve and die.

The issue is for most self-taught beginners (which there are a lot of on BunPro, including myself), it’s very hard to find a “sufficient quantity of good quality sentence cards.” If you don’t fully understand the language, how do you know what is good quality? And good quality for what? Someone’s “good quality” (learning Japanese to play Videogames and watch Anime) won’t be the same “good quality” (learning Japanese to move to and work in Japan) to someone else.
If you make your own cards, you may make mistakes in sentence creation/translation, or choose lines that have been localized, further altering the meaning. If you use premade cards, the creator of said cards may not have had the same goal in mind as you do now for learning.
Every single person I’ve met in my professional life that speaks English as a second language has told me the same thing, “I watched English TV Shows/Movies/Cartoons with English subtitles and spent a lot of time talking to English speaking people.” Their grasp of the English language is fantastic and they have virtually no “foreign accent”.

Can people use sentence cards to learn Japanese? Of course they can. Is it the best way to learn? It could be for them. But again, every single people who has ever learnt a language has learned at least one through immersion, so telling people to immerse and how to do it properly will never (in my opinion) be bad advice.

10 Likes
#55

Actually a good point. If you learn with prebuilt deck and it’s something like “top 10k words” you’ll learn at least a few thousands of words you almost never use. So something to keep in mind.

Did the same, unfortunately I have an accent but my speaking and understanding of the language is quite large compared to my writing. So it is definitely something that works and I have tested myself.

I can fully agree on that

Anyhow at the moment I think it’s sub efficient, but that is why sentence mining and spaced repetition exist I guess

#56

The leap from N4 to N3 on BunPro is big, the leap from N3 to N2 is even bigger in terms of grammar. Trying to also cram circa 6,000 words in on top of some of the N3/2 grammar points where you have 9 different ways of saying the same thing in subtly different shades is gonna be rough.

I’ve let my vocab lag long behind my grammar. I’m nearly done with N2 additions to my stacks but only just over 60% of the N4 vocab deck. In general this has given me a great deal of flexibility in terms of listening, speaking, and reading practice where I know the form of the sentence and know what I need to look up to obtain some understanding.

I think probably speed running N2-N1 is almost a super human task. It’s not impossible, but I do wonder how much understanding versus just knowledge of the language you’ll end up with trying to cram it all in like that.

I tend to think you can sprint the grammar, but you need to marathon vocabulary, getting to the first 10K words is just a very long term goal I think.

I have 2 great speaking tutors, I’d recommend starting speaking as early as you feel able to say meaningful small sentences. Conversation is really where you end up honing the skills that lead to actually understanding in Japanese IMO.

10 Likes
#57

I’m making this update a day early on account of me having plans this weekend and I think I’m likely to be too busy and/or too drunk to remember making this update tomorrow.

So let’s all pretend that these are the results after Two Weeks of steadily using BunPro:

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The more discerning of you might notice that I did not stick to the plan this week, namely finishing off the N5 Vocab and then “mostly chilling”. That is because this week at work was a good deal busier than the previous one and I didn’t have that much time, and I also just didn’t feel like forcing myself to add 100 entries a day for half of the week.

However you’ll also notice that I took a good chunk out of the Genki II deck instead. Reason being that I thought I’d go through the Genki I material and really make sure I “get it”, however it was terribly boring and I simply flipped through the chapters realizing I already know all this shit.

So I was like “alright I guess I’ll just go through Genki II material right away instead”, and I started doing just that. I’m not actually sure how many new entries a day that corresponds to, I decided to kinda take it easy this week.

What I do have are the stats for how many ghosts I have remaining and how many reviews I did:

  • Improving upon last week, instead of having 20/4 vocab/grammar ghosts I’m down to 0/10 today!
  • I averaged 517 reviews per day, down from 534 last week, with a minimum of 267 (yesterday (it’s 12:30AM rn)) and maximum of 876 (Monday).
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Just like last week, my accuracy still hovers at around 98%. My average SRS level however grew from 3 to 4! Definitely due to me adding way less entries a day than I did before.

Knowing now that I don’t actually care about finishing off the N5 Vocab deck as fast as I can that much, and hoping that next week won’t be busy as this one, here’s my plan for the rest of February:

  • Saturday and Sunday: I’ll be busy socializing so besides just going through my reviews I might add 20 entries of the Genki II deck per day at best.
  • Monday to Friday: I do still want to finish off the N5 Vocab deck, and there are 163 entries left. I’ll be doing 32 new entries from this deck per day, and 18 entries per day at least from the Genki II deck, putting me at 50 new entries per day.

This should keep me well on track to finishing off JLPT N4 content before the end of March as planned.

Other than BunPro I’ve also been keeping up with my WaniKani reviews, which compared to what I have to deal with here lowkey feel like baby type shit. I’ve also looked for tutors and they’re cheaper than I thought they’d be so I figure I could actually do 3 hours a week or so of conversation without much trouble, and starting in March instead of waiting for April when I start covering JLPT N3 content.

Somehow I feel like I haven’t gotten to study as much Japanese this week as I’d have liked, and am a lil disappointed in myself. Womp womp.

5 Likes
#58

@KurokawaMasumi you did a lot of good work this week, and you shouldn’t feel bad that you prioritized things that came up at work over your Japanese study. You’re still making progress and that’s good!

That being said - remember when many people in this thread were telling you that they’ve seen this happen before and that you shouldn’t let speed bumps make you pull over and quit, and that you will have a smoother time with those speed bumps if you set goals at a more sustainable pace?

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#59

Yeah I don’t feel like quitting or anything, just more determined than ever to gitgud and invest more time into it.

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#60

If you’re looking on italki I can recommend my tutor there, nice and casual atmosphere, tries to teach you actual daily Japanese rather than simply textbook stuff. I also take grammar focused leasons based on Genki II with Shun from Japanese with Shun podcast which has been a massive help. He’s considerably more expensive than my main tutor though. 🥲

1 Like
#61

Sorry, this has been in my drafts for 2 weeks
After Genki there are 2 textbooks published by Japanese Times
Quartet A Review of "Quartet: Intermediate Japanese Across the Four Language Skills vol. 1"
and AIAIJ.
Quartet is considered to be the “easier” one.
I went through the vocab, grammar, listening and reading comprehension alone. watch anime and read manga so it was easy enough- took me 6months learning 5 a day (I’m going way slower than you).
I have done two essays with a tutor.

1 Like
#62

Here’s my progress after ONE MONTH of getting back into studying Japanese and Three Weeks of steadily using BunPro after its reset!

The plan was:

and that is exactly what I did.

When it comes to what I’ve said last week:

I haven’t really gone through much of the Genki II deck, since during the weekend I got carried away and mostly forgot about studying (I almost missed my reviews entirely on Saturday), but I did finish off the N5 Vocab deck, which was more important.

Here’s the activity graph where for the Saturday to Friday period I averaged 284 reviews per day with a minimum of 19 (Saturday) and maximum of 514 (Monday).

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I’ve decided to start going through Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar and A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar again that I’ve had just chilling at home, and cross reference with the entries in BunPro and Imabi to see if I can’t figure out a way to intuitively wrap up a starting foundation for myself in forms of notes that I may or may not publish when I’m done with them.

I also increased the amount of comprehensible input I listen to per day to around an hour and got back into writing as I find it helps me remember things easier.

Here’s the current state of my decks:

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This week I’m going to start seeing a tutor for conversing in Japanese and will also start going through An Integrated Approach to Intermediary Japanese at a pace of a chapter a week. The plan for March is still to go through 28 vocabulary and 4 grammar entries of JLPT N4 content per day but my initial plan was:

so if it ends up feeling like too much studying for me I might take it easy and go with this goal instead of end of March, which will let me halve the new entries to 14 vocab and 2 grammar per day.

I still feel hopeful that I can keep this pace up and so far my enthusiasm hasn’t diminished, so hopefully this month alone would be enough, and worst case scenario I’ll take all of April to recover and fully consolidate JLPT N5 + N4 and focus on listening and speaking primarily.

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