Celebration: Finished All Items Within 4 Years

Bunpro
#1

A couple of days after adding the last remaining N1 items to review, I got my four year badge. This kind of filled up my badges, so I wanted to make this celebration post :smiley:

Screenshot 2024-01-12 at 11.14.47
Screenshot 2024-01-12 at 11.14.471920×1129 210 KB

I am currently using the cram listening option for practicing spoken Japanese. Most N2 and N1 are too formal to be much of practical use for me, but it was too tempting not to continue adding items. As a result of not living in Japan and using Bunpro and Wanikani, my reading capabilities far outcompete my spoken Japanese, but I consider that as a luxury problem and I am not complaining about not having trouble reading kanji.

Screenshot 2024-01-14 at 22.08.27
Screenshot 2024-01-14 at 22.08.27758×806 51.6 KB

32 Likes
#2

Congratulations!! Well done :+1:.

I’m getting there, currently working on N1 grammar, so your post inspires me to keep at it.

4 Likes
#3

Congratulations!

I feel the same way but at the same time there’s a good chunk of N2 grammar that I encounter in the wild. It’s kind of the annoying spot for me, somewhere in the early-intermediate stage: there’s still a lot of relatively basic Japanese I need to learn, but also just blindly learning things from lists tends to load me with not-immediately-useful knowledge (unlike the N3 and below stuff that’s mostly used all over the place).

I feel similarly with kanji, I’m almost done with WaniKani but at this point a lot of the kanji I learn are of dubious practical utility, except that sometimes they are and it’s hard to guess ahead of time.

I guess ideally I should just “mine” the native content I consume for vocab, kanji and grammar to memorize, and I do that to some extent, but that’s a lot more work.

3 Likes
#4

Thank you, good luck! N1 was a bit sticky at times since some of the grammar points felt archaic, but maintaining a pace of adding new items gradually got me there.

3 Likes
#5

Congrats!
I agree, it does feel nice to have all the complete badges next to one another :smiley:

2 Likes
#6

Thanks!

I understand your issue. While getting to level 60 at Wanikani I was not even finished with N5, so I guess I was at a kind of similar spot as you.
I would think of it this way: Now you might be slightly squeezed between learning complex and rare kanji, and also not knowing some basic Japanese, but in not long you will be done with Wanikani and be a kanji master. Then you can finish learning the basic Japanese, while having the big advantage of being able to read kanji. Looking back later, this period will not seem that long.

I can also add that rare and obscure kanjis pop up surprisingly often. There are many vocabs I have never seen from Wanikani, but I think I have seen basically every kanji, and some more.

3 Likes
#7

Nice! I’m halfway through n2. I was going to stop once n2 is finished but honestly I’ll probably be the same way. Might as well right?

Congrats on sticking to it this long, dedication is a wonderful achievement :tada:

3 Likes
#8

I was only going to do about a third of N2, and I was definitely not going to do N1 at all… :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
#9

Congratulations! That’s a bunch of hard work right there in that screenshot :muscle:
What are you planning on doing now?

3 Likes
#10

Is then a point to doing it? I am wondering whether I should do it or nah

2 Likes
#11

Advanced Kanji: yes especially if you planning on living in Japan.
N1 grammar: meh. However, you get a lot of exposure to Japanese language by practicing N1, and I think that is more important than the grammar itself.

3 Likes
#12

A bit of speaking and listening practice, and eventually on to the next language :smiley: I am thinking Italian, maybe Spanish or French, we will see.

My hypothesis is that Italian will be super easy to learn now that I have learned Japanese first, and I am curious to which extent it is true.

2 Likes
#13

What “it” are you talking about exactly?

In general with all pre-made study tools there’s always a point where you hit severely diminishing returns, and in the case of Japanese in my experience so far I would say that the tipping point is somewhere around N3. Almost everything up and including N3 is “must know”, N2 and N1 are “you’ll want to know that eventually, but depending on what kind of content you consume it can be quite a while before some of this proves useful”.

But at the same time you’ll definitely encounter some subset of N2/N1/N0 grammar/kanji/vocab regardless of how you use the language, and not knowing that stuff will make it harder to engage with it.

Another way to look at it is just a numbers game: if you go from knowing 300 kanji to 400, it makes a huge difference. If you go from 2000 to 2100 it’s the same amount of work in absolute numbers, but relatively speaking it’s going to make a much smaller practical difference so it feels like you’re not getting as much out of it.

3 Likes
#14

Is Japanese your first foreign language?

I have learned English, Portuguese and Russian before starting with Japanese and while I do think it helps to some extent, it doesn’t fundamentally change the experience IMO.

The way it helps:

  • You know what’s ahead of you and have a better understanding of the whole process and how long it’ll take. People who learn their first foreign languages often tend to be, in my experience, overly optimistic in how fast they’ll get results.

  • Similarly we know that language learning is not a smooth process, there are ups and downs, gooddays and bad days, sometimes it can feel overwhelming. If you’ve succeeded at least once it’s much easier to keep your confidence because you know that it’s part of the process and if you keep on pushing you’ll make it eventually.

  • You get better at gauging your progress and whether what you’re doing is working or not. Often on these forums you see beginners wonder how many lessons they should do per day etc… But for me that was never really a question, I’ve been using SRS daily for well over a decade now, I know my limits and I can feel when I’m overdoing it or, conversely, when I can up the tempo.

  • Being able to think in two languages, helps too. I often see monolinguals focus too much (IMO) on finding precise mappings of foreign grammar onto their mother tongue. Like what は and が mean exactly etc… But if you know two languages you know that this is a bit of a fool’s errand, in practice languages can’t perfectly be mapped to one another in a simple way, even very similar languages like French and Portuguese for instance. At some point you have to let go and just get a feel for it. I think already knowing multiple languages really helps with that.

Beyond that there’s no silver bullet. Of course learning a language helps a lot if you then decide to learn a somewhat related language (like how learning Japanese probably helps to learn Korean or Chinese for instance) but if you learn completely unrelated languages like Japanese and Italian, it won’t do much for you IMO.

Also generally for an English speaker, Italian will be massively easier to learn than Japanese regardless of other factors. The vocabulary, grammar and cultural frame of reference are vastly more familiar.

6 Likes
#15

Congratulations! You’ve reached legendary status!!

It was interesting to read your post too. I’m also studying Japanese while not actually living in Japan and always find it encouraging to read about how others find a way around that to learn the language.

2 Likes
#16

That’s interesting, why do think so? :thinking:

Edit:
Also, I’m not sure why people often say N2-N1 material is rare or not worth it. There are a lot of points in both that I continuously see during immersion :sweat_smile:
まくる、〜てみせる、〜てやる、とは、あくまで、etc. etc. I even see lots of a archaic speak (though that’s because I am playing Persona 5 right now).
It’s true that N1 has points that are rarely used, but there are plenty that are. JLPT levels aren’t that neatly organized…

2 Likes
#17

That’s kind of the point for me, it’s common enough that you want to know it, but also uncommon enough that you will encounter some points very rarely depending on what you read.

Like ものの for instance. I think I have encountered it exactly once in “real life” so far. So it is useful because without knowing this I couldn’t make sense of the sentence, but it’s so uncommon that you get very little return for your study.

Meanwhile when you learn something like the が form you basically encounter it every other sentence.

That’s what makes it frustrating for me. On one hand I clearly need to learn ものの but on the other hand it makes very little practical difference on my actual ability to use Japanese since I will encounter this construct extremely uncommonly.

And that’s true for every aspect of the language. A kanji like 分 is obviously useful and knowing it makes a significant difference to your ability to read Japanese. Meanwhile a kanji like 霧 is also useful enough that you want to learn it, but in practice you could easily spend a month without seeing it even if you immerse in the language. Or you could see it every day if you read the weather report.

So it is worth it, but it’s less worth it and it’s a bit more frustrating as a result.

1 Like
#18

I get what you mean, in that obviously the grammar learned in the first levels (N5 - N3) are going to be the most common and thus the most useful. No arguments there.

What I feel is misleading is when people make it sound as if learning N2 and N1 grammar is almost pointless because they are so rare, when I’m noticing them more and more in manga and anime, such as 進撃の巨人 “Attack On Titan” (I find that name so silly, btw lol). And not just in the media mentioned, but obviously also news articles and literature. So unless the plan is to remain at middle school level, I think that N1 is necessary if you want to reach fluency in Japanese.

4 Likes
#19

I think JLPT levels aren’t that neatly organized… sums it well up.

I would say about a third of the N2 grammar points are very useful, and maybe 5-10% of N1. If one like to read the newspaper and literature, probably 80% of the N1 grammar points would be useful.

It depends on the use-case, but N1 is in general tuned to a very old, formal and written type of Japanese most people dont actually get much use for. On the other hand, there are plenty of grammar points and expressions that are common, but not in JLPT at all. However, progressing in the JLPT levels will still make one better at Japanese.

4 Likes
#20

Yeah absolutely, it’s “rare” relative to the N5 stuff, it’s not rare in absolute terms. You’ll still encounter N2-N1 vocab/grammar/kanji dozens of times every hour you consume Japanese content. It’s just that in the same interval you’ll encounter N5-N3 items thousands of times.

So it’s small in proportion, but still significant enough to be well worth it.

5 Likes