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

[KurokawaMasumi]

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:

@KurokawaMasumi

• Completely go through JLPT N5 by the end of February.

and that is exactly what I did.

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

@KurokawaMasumi

• 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.

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).

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:

@KurokawaMasumi

• Do the same for JLPT N4 by the end of April.

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.

[TavisP]

Nice job hitting your objective of finishing JLPT N5 in Feb! I can relate to almost missing your reviews on the Saturday; I’ve definitely had panic moments at 11:50 PM where I realize I haven’t done my reviews yet for the day (so far on a 375 day anki streak though, and almost a 1 month streak on Bunpro post-reset!).

[KurokawaMasumi]

Quick update:

I decided to deprioritize JLPT N4 and N3 vocab and go for Core 2000 and Core 4000 most frequently used words instead as it more closely aligns with my goals.

I’m going with my initial goal of hitting JLPT N4 before end of April instead of March for that reason and will probably take longer for N3 as well as a consequence if the vocabulary doesn’t overlap sufficiently well with most commonly used terms.

[KurokawaMasumi]

Quick update:

I’m going to change the frequency at which I make fuller logs from once a week to twice a month.

In part because I happen to spend every second weekend heavily socializing (this one included), and in part because I don’t like how months are not divisible by 7 and I want to be able to neatly wrap every month up at the end.

I’ll note however that my accuracy went down from 98% to like 95%, which is not a great sign. I’m thinking about spending some time on making custom decks and start using them with BunPro’s cram feature that I have so far just been ignoring.

I also bought a tablet (Lenovo Tab Plus + Pen) because I wanted to start using Skritter, and for now I’m just going through whatever content they have available for free before deciding if I want to actually pay for it or not (it’s kinda expensive). So far it’s been decent.

[Brux]

@KurokawaMasumi

Hopefully having set a crazy goal, I realistically expect to worst case scenario at least be halfway through JLPT N2 instead, but Imma prove y’all wrong cause I know y’all don’t believe in me like that.

Correct. Good luck.

[Chimmsen]

@KurokawaMasumi

months are not divisible by 7

I feel this so much The real problem is weeks having 7 days. Want to do something every second or third day? You are doomed to cycle through the days. Whoever decided to make the number of days in a week a prime really wanted to make sure you get a day of rest per week. I resorted to completely ignoring the date or day for personal things and only use it with other people now.

I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors