Enjoy those hyperfocus days, they are always so fullfilling aren’t they? Especially so if you even aquire a new skill 
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Yep, return my 2.5k hours of csgo)
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Rush B 
Rush N1 
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Playing a video game for 10 hours a day for 7 months, even if you don’t want to or are bored, is fulfilling? Those sounds like criteria for an addiction to me. It seems irresponsible to encourage someone who has said they are still in school to spend their time doing that.
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@TravisP: I don’t know you or the people around you, but my social circle is full of neurodivergent people, so this seems quite normal too me. And honestly, if someone construed their totally normal (but neurodivergent) behaviour as “addictive personality” in real life, I would give them a stern talking.
Sure, I don’t know if that’s the case here, but calling a person with hyperfocus “addicted” cause more harm than calling an addictive personality type “addicted” could ever do good ( cause addicted people don’t listen anyway).
In any case, I usually go with encouraging people in online spaces rather than trying to dish out life advice, cause words of encouragement are usually appreciated and makes their day just a little nicer. While life advise without knowing the person, their life, their circumstances, especially if noone asked is usually never appreciated.
And ahain, the folks I know usually enjoy their hyperfocus very much. yif it interfers with their daily tasks, they need to get professional help. Just like people with depression won’t respond to “have you tried not lying in bed all day” neither hyperfocus types nor addicted personality types responds well to “have you tried doing something else with your time”.
@loink : Please don’t feel bad about your hyperfocus, it’s basically a superpower. But keep in mind if it interferes with your life too much (forgot to drink and eat recently?), you should reevaluate what could help you to be more fit for regular life. Since you are still quite young, this could be parents, teachers or a professional.
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@Chimmsen, I’m not interested in getting into an argument about this with you, and I have nothing against you personally.
The comment that you replied to was directed at you, not at loink. I appreciate that you are trying to take a positive attitude and be encouraging to people instead of giving them paternalistic life advice. You are probably right that it’s ineffective to try and give direct life advice to strangers online anyway.
However, loink specifically used the words “I played all day every day even if I didn’t want to play or was bored”. When I said that these sound like criteria for addiction, I meant that very literally. I didn’t say that they were necessary nor sufficient criteria for a substance use disorder, nor did I say that loink has an addictive personality. I was recognize that to me, this comment flagged as a behaviour that could be potentially harmful.
You may be 100% correct that I am wrong and this is totally beneficial behaviour. I hadn’t criticized them because I don’t know about their life circumstances and they didn’t ask me for my advice. I deliberately criticized you, because I think that it was irresponsible to provide endorsement for that kind of potentially harmful behaviour. Encouragement is positive feedback that can reinforce behaviour too, even if you’re not directly telling them what to do.
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JLPT N1 takes on average 3000 - 4000 hours for those with no prior kanji or Japanese knowledge to pass. Assuming you did nothing other than study, that would imply about 10 hours of practice/day for a whole year.
That doesn’t include essential time for eating, sleeping, basic hygiene, and presumably maintaining social contacts (I mean, what’s the point of learning a language if you’re not going to use it to communicate?). I’ve been through medical school and residency, and have known some utterly brilliant and intense doctors, and not a one of them could keep up the schedule required to complete the task you propose.
I don’t know you, but I don’t think any human can accomplish this task.
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Looking on Reddit posts and time to learn 10000 words, finish all grammar, with good methods it looks for me more like sub 2000 and maybe some listening. I think it could take 3000-4000 if you do not like 2 hours a day but 15-20 minutes. Also my friends experience says that.
One more thing is that n1 feels quite low of a level, because to read with comfort most stuff you need like 30k words, and even though there will be unknown words quite frequently. N1 shouldn’t be too high
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Note that this is typically looking at people who are being paid specifically to learn the language too. it includes classes and practical excercises. if that is the study from the US military page that you are referring to. (fun fact, if you speak more languages, you get paid more every month in the US military, hence “being paid to learn the language”)
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As someone with several diagnosis’ under her belt(adhd being one of many others, but being the relevant one at hand), I’m not really sure it’s healthy to encourage a hyper fixation that will be prone to burnout and I can speak from experience will be greatly detrimental to the rest of their daily life. It’s certainly no surprise I’m on 40mg of adderall a day to maintain healthy patterns.
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That’s part of why I’m against “toxic positivity”.
Sometimes being positive about things people do can lead to a pattern of self-destruction. Just because a behavior “works” in the short term doesn’t mean it’s helpful long-term. I still struggle with procrastination due to the benefits of having a little extra free time used to outweigh the crippling anxiety that would come from having to rush projects and other things, and now after becoming an adult the stakes have only got worse.
It’s true that different people learn different ways, but it’s also true that there’s incorrect ways to do things.
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I’m in favor of just letting people go hard, burn out, and restart with a fresh mindset knowing better what their limit is. Either that or they don’t burn out and slow down a bit and go on to accomplish what they set out to do only slightly slower than their ambitions first were.
I spent 2000 hours my first year studiyng and immersing and I still wouldn’t pass N1. If someone wants to get good at this language in a few years time they have to make sacrifices. The good thing is those sacrifices are temporary, studying will be more and more replaced with using language which becomes a casual affair.
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I’m definitely not, I burnt out 5 months ago and I’m finally recovering from it. Many people will just straight up give up after burning themselves out. It’s just not healthy
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Just came across this post and the discussion is really interesting, I am also trying to reach N1 at the end of the year since I need that for taking Japanese courses when studying abroad. I don’t know if I can do it either but I will try my best. It’s really hard to find the time to succeed in Juni and get good at Japanese at the same time tho…
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My because they don’t really need it?
If you burn out from one hobby you can find another and just adjust.
I’m fully for going all in
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For the record, I think the plan is bonkers (it sounds like OP is a teenager who is still schooling, and I can think of much better ways to spend their time), but why is no one pointing out how badly thought out their plan is?
The JLPT doesn’t feature manga-style text or audio - at least, I haven’t come across it whilst taking the N5-N3, and neither in the practice tests for N2. Replacing reading One Piece with NHK news will make much more sense, and instead of watching Doraemon(?), there really has to be some exposure to “business japanese”/keigo? And there’s no mention of doing mock tests - instead of mining light novels, why not mine sentences from mock tests instead?
I get focusing on stuff that interests you, but in this case it doesn’t overlap much with the stated goal of passing the N1, and one year is not a lot of time to mess around with.
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Good point.
With exception of this:
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Although I do have a guilty pleasure of reading “N1 in xx Months” speedrun posts, as you are still in school getting better grades in your core subjects of Maths, Sciences, English etc. will benefit you several times more than getting N1 Japanese.
Best of luck to you though.
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Echoing @shankarsuresh, if you have serious goals of living and working in Japan, you’d be better off focusing on a skilled career path instead of investing more time than you need to on N1.
Japanese companies will rate your professional skills higher than your ability to communicate with them.
If your goal is Japanese studies as a major, you’d still wanna take it slow to make sure your overall grades are up anyway.
Also, honestly not sure why these kinds of posts never involve content from the actual test.
(Here’s a link to some sample questions: For Examinees: Let's Try Sample Questions! | JLPT Japanese-Language Proficiency Test)
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@loink - So, how are you doing anyway? Last update about your progress was 11 days ago with your plan. Hope it’s going well!
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