How fast is fast? - JLPT Grammar

[NeoArcturus]

@Buntebunpou

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.

Of course not I intended that speed only for N5 and N4, especially since I’ve heard that N2 and N1 are mainly “vocab”. Also, I kinda want to do at least a part of the vocab decks whenever I have time (I already enabled the “Vocab/Grammar only” split for reviews).

@Buntebunpou

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.

True lol I guess it’s because Japanese doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, so it’s automatically “harder” for many, so of course they have to complain how “difficult” it is

[zerohbeat]

Yeah, there are quite a bit of “Vocab”- like grammar points in N2 and N1.
The main struggle for me in N1 is that quite a few of the grammar points are either very similar to previous N3/N2 grammar points or used in spesific circumstances that I am not exposed to (eg very formal, old style)
It took me 2 years to go through all the grammar points on Bunpro. In a way it was a bit too quick as my reviews pilled up to 1000+ at one point lol