Experiments log (starting N1 preparation)

homa · June 15, 2026, 3:39pm

Yesterday it’s been 100th day since I started my 毎日Ankiチャレンジ

Strategy with adding no new vocab is working so far. It seems like each time I do anki, I know it will take less time, and therefore I concentrate better. Yesterday I’ve managed to complete all the reviews in 11.5 minutes! I wonder how much time it takes for it to consistantly take only 5 minutes? What kind of graph progression will there be in 10/20 days If you have any decks where you folks did something simmilar, could you share how did the graph went down?

One thing I want to try is to lower my desired retention. Now it’s set to 90%, but I feel like I have some 余裕, becase now I can recognise all the kanji when I see them very easily, and I feel like maybe forgetting how to write them is not that bad in a long perspective, as recognition remains for a much much longer time. But for now I’m sticking with 90% just to see how the graph goes down.

Some achivements

This week was full of new achivements!

I’ve invited my Japanese neighbour and we talked for two and a half hours, I’ve even managed to speak teineigo all the time, of course regularly forgetting to add です or ます, but othrewise it went pritty well!
After the 茶会 I’ve asked what she thinks my week points are, and she said that it’s mostly builing teineigo on another teineigo ますのです. I myself feel pain every time I say it. Another the biggest one is 硬い言い方, by which she ment things like me saying 脳みそに刻きざまれる instead of just 脳に入れる. It’s true, till this day I want to use 姉上あねうえ instead of お姉さん. Thanks Gintama.

But also she said that my usage of vocab is good enoguh! Eat that Gemini!
I found 幼稚園WARS a manga I like!
It has a few intresting previews, and its アニメ化 is coming out in 2027. I picked it up because it has Sakamoto Days managa feeling, which I like a lot!
It does not have any furigana, but when I read, I do not notice any words I don’t know! Well, there were three, and I’ve leared them already:
お遊戯おゆうぎ - 殺し合い
遊具遊具 - 遊びの道具 (that can be used to kill some people, but it’s not the main meaning)
極秘ごくひ - 極端に秘密的な
And I now when I try to recall there were a few new as well that I’ve leared, but I cannot remember what specifically those are.
Of course, there are probably more words I don’t know then this, but it feels like my basics, got really good at this point, so I don’t really notice them. It feels like a big progress!
On learnnatively 幼稚園WARS is L25. Acording to my sense of humor raised by stuff like Monty Python this is super funny ラブコメ

Cool PV!

PV with a song I cannot stop listening!

I found myself getting excited about not understnading content! Then I also got excited because I understood that it means I usually understand most stuff without thinking about it!
And ye, I have times where I kind of “oh I don’t seem to be able to read that, shchit” but it goes more unnoticed now, more simmilar to english.

The 謎のコンテンツ is

I’ve been subscibed to this channel for a while, and it’s still a rock to climb, which I’m exceited about! Even a radio about which I was talking earlier now seems like a doable thig if I decide to crack it.

Yesterday, I wanted to do some French in the evening, but ended up watching youtube, reading comments, reading manga, talking on italki, all for 6 hours (23:00-05:00 あんまりに酷いな〜) and everything in Japanese!

I feel that this week was really good one! I’ve even managed to make a post not at 1am but before leaving for the language exchange!

Anyhow, thanks for reading, and good luck everyone in your studies!

homa · July 13, 2026, 1:23am

It’s been almost a month since the last post, but I’m here again!
First of all, today I finally got the courage to take the N1 mock test, and here is the result

It’s a ギリギリ pass

Of course, I know the N1 tests here are much easier then the real ones, but still, going from mock N2 75% to mock N1 71% feel kind of good!

The Vocab&Grammar parts were definetly okey, I didn’t know everything but It wasn’t bad. Reading was the easiest part for me, probably it has to do a lot with me doing a lot of random reading with no lookups lately, so it was kind of flowless for the most part (it was one of my recent accivements, that my base reading spead is now listenable).
Listening was really tough though! 40% of what was there I understood perfectly, but threre were so many dialogs that used some field specific words that I don’t know in each sentence! Primarily the vocab used at the office, at work, or 10 sorts of sakura tree in another dialog (sorry for this small spoiler). Listening is a peart of Japanese with which I have problems, I would go as far as to say it’s the best one maybe, as I regularly listen podcasts, watch youtube and anime, talk to people on italki (the last one is not often but if I do I speak a lot), so I was a bit surprised! Probably, it has to do with listening section being on a higer level in respect to another one, as some other users has already mentioned. If you are this July N1 passer, could you please share your experiance with Mock tests vs the real one? How much time did each take, what was the score at the end? Would be super thankfull!

Anyhow, from now on I think I’ll be getting myself prepared for the upcoming December JLPT! With this result as a base 140 days before the exam, I think I might have a pritty good chance at succeeding!

As for my 毎日アンキデッキ it now looks like this:

As you can see I’ve missed two days. I just to do reviews then due to treveling and having so much new stuff.

Reviews are getting down but not that fast. Usually now I do reviews for 10 minutes everyday, and there were two days with 6 and 8 minues respectively. Usually there are 20 cards to repeat a day.

On this graph we can see that after 3 days it will go down to 11-14, wich will probably take 5-7 minutes at first. The goal is to get the that spot of less then 10 cards a day, and then I might change the alg a little bit to make reviews more rare, and will start adding 6-7 cards a day, just to see how it goes (again, when it gets to more then 15 minutes I’ll probably stop)

So ye, for now it’s all, I don’t really feel like writing for now, but that could change easily, so who knows!

Good luck everyone