Everyone’s journey is different, but I would question how much one can truly comprehend the entirety of N5 grammar points (including their use in listening and speaking practice) in two weeks.
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This is what practice will do 
You don’t only have to learn things, you also have to practice their usage, which is what I will be aiming for as soon as possible, and I want to get somewhat comfortable with N5 before starting with N4 anyway, so it doesn’t really matter whether I go fast or not, because I also intended to write a short and structured summary about N5 grammar, as I’ve noticed that doing so help me understand things better and faster
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Tbh, and I know I’m probably a little painful at this point lol, but I’m actually really cheering for you. I want to see you actually make it and achieve this monumental little goal of yours.
I’m working towards trying to become a doctor, and given my disabilities the odds are very against me being able to do that, but I guess that old “shoot for the moon” quote sort of applies here. A bunch of people told me I’ll never be able to do it too. But really, that only makes me want to prove them wrong.
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Thanks a lot 
And nah, you’re not painful at all 
You can achieve whatever you want if you just work hard enough for it 
Your disabilities only mean that you’ll probably have to work harder than others, but you can definitely do this, I believe in you 
Also, I know the feeling when someone claims that something is impossible and you want to prove them wrong
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OP what’s your native language? Also, I noticed after that I took exactly 14 days on N5 as well 
If you want, you can do it right now, it will just be easier with more and more grammar. If you wish, install yomitan on your browser, go to bilingualmanga.org and pick a very easy manga (like a comedy 4-koma, idk). I use a bunch of other tools, but this is the bare minimum.
However you probably will need to check every single word on the dictionary, since you apparently didn’t start your vocab learning yet. I started pretty early on, when I tried manga, i already had all Genki 1 vocab and a few more, totalling ~1k of vocab cards on jpdb.
If you want to speedrun japanese, you need to start vocab as soon as possible. Then you will feel the pain to juggle 3 SRS apps at once, but well, you don’t have much of a choice. Having lv60 on wanikani, but no grammar and vocab is useless.
Most people use anki, and there’s a lot of tutorials and posts everywhere that will recommend how to set it up, which decks and extensions to use, and how to set up vocab mining with all kinds of media. This is a pain in the ass for me, so I only use jpdb, and it’s the best for me. Check here about it. Bunpro also have a vocab SRS now, and it looks pretty good. Will probably use it myself later, to fill my gaps.
Also, I don’t know if you entered this rabbit hole deep enough, but learning kanji in the wanikani way is not really necessary. So I would just drop wanikani entirely, for myself it’s a waste of time, and you have “only one year”. You promised everyone that you will reach lv60 in a year, but if this will not actually help you in your primary goal, I wouldn’t worry not a single a bit about breaking this promise. But this is just my take on things, if it’s helping you, by all means, go ahead.
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German, I don’t live in Germany, tho, I live in Austria I have achieved a near-fluency level in English, tho, and thus have no problem with using English resources.
Lol, what a coincidence 
Ok, I will try that then, thanks a lot!
Yeah, I didn’t really start yet, I only know the Vocab from WaniKani so far, which appearently are about 400 words (close to nothing IMO).
I am actually already doing 3 SRS at once, but I am only doing WK so strict, as I think that one year for N1 Japanese grammar is fast enough, and I don’t have to do my lessons so strictly then or do my reviews as soon as they are available, I only need to do them regularly
My third SRS is KaniWani, which is basically a backwards version of WK for vocab, so I get an English word and have to type the Japanese reading.
Yeah, I’ve already thought about adding Anki to my routine, but I haven’t quite read through it yet. Thanks for the advices, I will definitely look into it today!
Maybe, but I really enjoy it, kanji as well as WK, and my journey of learning Japanese should remain fun, right?
Although it might sound like it is a lot of work to go at such a fast pace on WK, it actually isn’t. I do the reviews like 4 or 5 times a day, and I don’t need more to go at the fastest speed possible (yet)
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OP if you’re loving the SRS life and want to make sure you really get that Kanji, I recommend The Chase Colburn Kanji Study app (May be Android only?) on top of Wani Kani as it’s far more configurable and approaches it from a completely different direction, and I’m finding it a great companion to WaniKani. It also has graded reading which is great practice as an extra service, as well as a dictionary of kanji etymology so you can see exactly what makes up each character. And you can add writing and stroke practice which is my favorite just to do for fun. I’ll run writing drills as I learn the Kanji and it really helps retention.
I’m speedrunning N5-3 and WK as well as I was a Japanese major in college and lived there for a year but let it all rust, and have hit level 33 of WK like 8 years ago (so glad I bought the lifetime back then!) but while it’s great fun it doesn’t quite have the same sticky capabilities of the more traditional 360 class approach for Kanji, which I find Kanji Study much closer to. The graded reading practice is also a great way to start practicing that ASAP as well and learn a lot of natural phrases and usage.
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Thanks for the recommendation! However, I personally prefer working and learning via my laptop (also I can’t really get to my phone rn because… let’s say, my parents are taking care of it 
). But that sounds very interesting, maybe I can find a version of it for Windows, I’ll definitely give it a look! Thanks for the recommendation
You can get through all of N5 to N1 in a year with moderate studying.
However, JLPT is basically useless unless you plan to work in Japan. Even then, the value is pretty low depending on what job you’re pursuing. Unless you specifically need JLPT scores for something, it’s probably better to take your time and focus on conversational fluency.
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Glad to hear you love that app! Chase is my old colleague from iKnow.jp and he’s been working on his Kanji app for many years~
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That’s cool to hear and I believe it, the app shows a lot of love and focus on user experience and being feature rich! I love being able to access so much info and different types of practice for a single kanji
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It’d be cool if it had different versions/a web version I’d love to do the quizzes when on my comp! The kanji drawing practice would need a touch screen of some sort hmm
Good luck with your learning journey!
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Actually, I don’t plan on taking the JLPT exam (yet), as I couldn’t even do that in the next 10 years. I eventually want to take it, yes, but not now But I think JLPT is a good orientation to see where I am knowledge wise, at least it’s better than having no clue
Thanks a lot! I’ll look out for a computer app or a web version
OP, SRS provides a lot of structure and a feeling of progress and it is definitely something you can focus on when you start learning but try not to overload yourself as you may end up not having time to actually learn/use Japanese if you have to do 3 hours of SRS across multiple services each day. All the services mentioned in this thread have different strengths and weaknesses so there is no harm in trying them all but make sure to actually get some input and, if you want, do some output. Self-study can be pretty hard to manage at first as you don’t know if what you’re doing is “the right thing to do” but just stick with one or two SRS services that you get on well with and use the language and after some years you’ll be okay. SRS isn’t even strictly necessary, remember, so please do focus on what’s important (using Japanese). Good luck.
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To be fair, you could study japanese for 1 day and then take the JLPT N1. Doesn’t mean you pass, but you could say you took it after only one day of study.
good luck on your goals!
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Thanks for the advice! My two main focuses currently are WaniKani and BunPro, although I don’t do BunPro as intensly as WaniKani because it’s way easier to complete all lessons on BunPro in one year than to complete all lessons on WaniKani in one year. Of course, it is always important to remember that every lesson is going to be a future review, but I think as long as I only focus on these two, I’m good to go.
Additionally, I’ve also decided to add Anki when I really start getting into reading, as WaniKani certainly won’t teach me all the kanji I will encounter, and no service in general can teach me all the vocab I will encounter, too, so in order to learn them, I think it is a good idea to use Anki as well.
But, I think three SRS is all I am going to do, and I will also start to not only read, but also write Japanese as much as I can and as soon as possible. And over time, I will also finish the SRS, since there is only a certain ammount that I can learn from them (except for Anki, but I don’t think that I will use it a lot anymore when I am really, really good at Japanese and have a very extensive vocab knowledge, but that is far in the future, like years, if not decades)
Well, that is true lol, I guess I should’ve expressed myself more clearly but I didn’t say take tho, I said get to that level, which would usually mean that I would be able to pass the test
Thanks a lot!
I recommend you to start learning vocab a little even without going into reading yet. The 1k most common words appear basically everywhere, so you really save yourself A LOT of dictionary lookups, and it’s also makes easier to read even example sentences.
no service in general can teach me all the vocab I will encounter
It’s true in general, but I use a lot of premade decks on jpdb, and even generate my own decks using other tools, so I can learn the vocab of an anime or a manga before starting to read it. But I don’t learn every word, since there’s a lot of words that appear only once, I normally leave them alone and look them up in the dictionary when I find them in the material.
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I’m mainly motivated by speed so I’m using Bunpro faster than it would be good but that’s the only way to keep me going. 16 months after starting it I completed N2. I’m pausing at the moment to fix the damage.
N5 and N4 can be done quite fast because you are not in synonym hell yet and you’re dealing with what I would consider real grammar.
N3 and N2 is just a gigantic amount of fixed phrases and you’ll get countless synonyms (you’re going to hate the words “even” and “only”, believe me). In that phase your problems will increase massively and you will also make much more mistake with the N5 and N4 stuff because you’ll start to confuse them with synonyms from N3 and N2.
For N3 I reduced my daily new items to 2 and for N2 to 1 because the amount of reviews wasn’t manageable anymore otherwise. I also sometimes had to take breaks for one to three weeks to get the amount of reviews down to doable level. I’m postponing N1 now for a while to really understand the nuances of all the endlesss synonyms.
My recommendations would be:
- make sure you really understand everything with all its nuances (the Cure Dolly YouTube channels helps a lot with that)
- make a list of the synonyms and try to find out how you can distinguish them
- disable ghosts to keep your reviews lower, after my experience the ghosts are useless anyway as you have to understand grammar and not getting it shown multiple times per day
- if your reviews pile up, immediately stop learning new items, reviews in Bunpro pile up much more faster than in other SRS like Anki, after two days you will be completely overwhelmed with 300 reviews per day and more
- if your native language is not English, write a translation in your language into the comment of your item, that helps for items that are much more confusing in English than in your native language
Reviews piling up will be your main problem with a high speed at N3-N1.
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Thanks for the awesome tips!
My plan was to finish Bunpro in one year, this means go through every grammar point they have (perhaps also the vocab, but that is just additionally, my main focus on Bunpro will be grammar). For N5 and N4, I wanted to finish both of them within one month. I’ve already done N5 within 14 days, and now I plan to do N4 in 10 days (I could’ve done N5 in 10 days as well if I hadn’t skipped 4 days because of being lazy lmao), and then, I’ll take N3 to N1 more relaxed. I want to go through N5 and N4 so fast because I want to have a base of grammar knowledge that I can work with. This means I could do N3, N2 and N1 in a period of 11 months, which is pretty managable I think (if it’s not, I’ll definitely notice that )
I’ve actually already thought a few times about doing this a few times, as Japanese and German seem to have some similarities. For example, while there is no polite form in English, there is one in German. And I’ve already read somewhere that (even though I hadn’t noticed that up until I read this) German is a particle heave language, just like Japanese.
Don’t get to excited by the speed you can reach in N5 and N4. I started in August 2022 and went on vacation in Japan in March 2023. After starting in August I thought that I would easily be done with N2 until my trip to Japan and maybe even finish N1. In the end I managed to reach around half of N3 until then. N2 alone took me six months. You can’t keep up the speed of N5 in higher levels. Especially because of the synonyms, they are by far the biggest problem after N4.
I‘m also German and I see English as transfer language between Japanese and German as a problem, there’s a lot of stuff that would be easier in German, especially when the synonym hell starts. There are even some Japanese phrases in N3 and N2 that are complicated to translate to English while a literal translation to German works perfectly. Thinking about it and writing down a German translation into the comment field helps a bit. But in the end the example sentences in the reviews are English and you can’t compensate that. But understanding how to say it in German still helps.
It’s also kind of funny that German has different speech levels where we use different words (e.g. begeben instead of gehen, speisen instead of essen etc) and nobody ever talks about it while in Japanese everybody makes a big fuss about how complicated all the speech levels are and that you have special vocabulary like nasaru, goran etc.
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