And what was going on in JLPT thread a few years back?)
Totally understandable feeling.
I also think that is doable!
Just to be clear, the point I was trying to make is that 6.5 hours of SRS a day for 2 months (plus hours a day after that period in order to maintain everything) is not a great idea, in my opinion.
I agree. Getting familiar with N5-N4 material from the start, even without a deep understanding of it, is super helpful just to have some mental map of how things fit together. I did something similar myself. I was “only” doing about 2 hours of SRS a day, including vocab, though so it was a lot more reasonable. Can’t say I enjoyed it and these days 20-30 minutes a day is the limit for me before I start skipping days. Some people are absolute SRS fiends apparently so who am I to judge 
They are talking about this thread in which someone declares they will take the JLPT N1 after 6 months of study but they don’t seem to understand what that entails. They obviously then don’t do that and seemingly quit. I would say your goals are a lot more reasonable and your attitude is not the same though - you can definitely go through the N5 and N4 material in a couple of months if you’re careful how you go about it and you have that much free time.
Once you start learning don’t be afraid to post questions about things you don’t understand, by the way. More than happy to help, especially as some concepts are not immediately obvious.
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Basically what @CursedKitsune wrote… Somebody declared something and yeah nothing happened…
I also agree (hope) that things are different this time. My main light worry is that you may hurt your foundation. N5 and N4 are quite important building blocks that are used in N3 / N2 / N1 grammar points. Maybe just review things after completing your challenge before going further. Just in case.
Challenges are great!
Supposedly quite a lot of people get N3 ready in 8 months by going to Japanese language schools. So what you are aiming for is quite realistic in a way if you have the free time…
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Wow, that thread finished in one day…
Talking about plans I was thinking about registering for n2 in December 
6000 words in 3.5 month is quite a lot + 3h grammar as well as reading and listening 
mb if it was 9h/day, but I still have no clear idea about this language so I think I’ll decide in a both if I even want to take any tests, or just learn language in way I like and it makes sense for me.
First goal is just unlock anime or at least YouTube. I can watch anime with my 1500 words in Italian with decent level of understanding, but from my experience with English, 4000 is where YouTube fluency comes and about 7000 is where fluency for almost all shows comes.
Ye, it’s time to sleep and I’m trying to response, so I’m sorry that it’s unstructured and brings not much sense to the conversation…
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In this case, apply for the N4 this December. Most locations around the world are opening up registrations right now. There is still chance if you apply quickly while there are still open spaces (some locations fill in minutes).
Japanese is very different… There are a lot of ways to say the same thing, different speech patterns are used in different places. Some vocabulary on the N4 (or any JLPT exam) may not be that common.
On the JLPT exam, there no time, you need to answer and read quickly. Just passing the N4 in 3months and a bit would be impressive.
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Wow, didn’t knew that it is so problematic to get to jlpt.
But I think I’ll register for n3 in case I want to.
I can agree that grammar is hard to understand, but vocab isn’t n4 vocab includes around 1200 most common words + a few hundreds topics related words? I’ve been aiming to finish my core 2k deck in the next 45 days. Of course I need to practice them with reading and listening and I’m trying to do it at least for one hour, but after I learn kanji I’ll have 2 additional hours for this, and I think it should be enough
Your plan is ambitious, but doable I think. I’ve been grinding 5 grammar points a day on bunpro, and I started with N5 already done, so at the rate I’ve been going, it’ll take around 5 months to finish all the grammar, which means your goal of N5/N4 in 45 days is totally doable if you devote more time to it.
I also agree with what you’re saying in terms of vocabulary. After I learned the Kaishi 1.5k deck, I was able to start playing my first video game in Japanese (it’s a JRPG, bravely default 2). And my ability to understand anime with Japanese subtitles went from like 10% to like 50% after around 5 series post Kaishi 1.5k, so I agree that 1.5k words is more or less enough to get the basic understanding.
I started with N5 grammar already completed, and it’s been around 2 months now (I started in June).
The video game I’m playing I’m now understanding most sentences, with the amount of vocab lookups necessary gradually decreasing, so it’s possible to hit N2 by the end of the year I think.
My schedule has been:
5 grammar points on Bunpro per day (probably 45 mins total counting all the SRS, since it’s 15 mins of reading the grammar points and 30 mins to do the 55 reviews per day)
50 words in anki (takes around 45 mins)
rest of the time immersion with native material (right now only JRPG, but I did anime and books before too, total maybe 2-4 hours a day)
However, one caveat is that I already had some kanji knowledge from knowing some Chinese, so I didn’t have to spend as much time memorizing and distinguishing kanji. Of course still difficult since readings, vocab usage, traditional/simplified, Japanese only kanji, etc. means Chinese knowledge doesn’t help as much as you would think, but still probably saved a couple months from the total learning time.
Good luck!
Wow, 50 words in 45 minutes is amazing!
How do you do that? I mean is it kanji on the front page and kana or/and sound on the other page?
That is incredible speed, do you use any technical for this? Now I’m learning my second hundered words (just crossed 100 I would say) and it is like 15 words/hour. Of course this is one-kanji words which means they can sound similar and when it will be 2-3 kanji words it should become better + it’s easier to learn words with existing vocab, but still 50/45m is furious!
Also thanks for good words!
Lol I’m literally you but two months in the future. About to finish N2, still going strong. I believe in you. 
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anki speed focus add on is so clutch. it probably doubled how fast i did my reviews. it makes it so it flips a card automatically. 50 new words in 45 minutes is too fast for me, but i can do 25 new words in 45 min to an hour pretty easy. you can get it here:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1046608507
basically, you can set it to play a sound and flip the card after a certain amount of time. i have mine set to 3 seconds for the sound and 5 seconds for flipping the card, but yours might vary. it is the best thing i would recommend to someone with a lot of anki reviews. you might get a slightly lower percentage correct, but it will speed up reviews so much.
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Yeah I put kanji on the front and reading and definition on the back using anki. I don’t do anything technical, but it only takes about 5 secs to review a card. So it takes about 45 mins to get through all my reviews for the day, counting the previous SRS and the 50 new words.
I think it should get faster as you get practice, it was a lot slower at first, but is getting faster. I started out at like 8-9 secs/card, now I’m down to 4.5-5 secs/card.
The more kanji you recognize, the easier it is to learn future vocabulary as well. Even just knowing one of the kanji in a 2 word compound helps a great deal since it gives you half the reading and a clue to the meaning.
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Nice addon, unfortunately I use iPhone for all my studying (bought one for 50$ and it helps to concentrate hugely)
But I was already thinking about making a flash drive with a separate oc to study without instructions on my laptop.
When I was doing Italian I was going 25/hour on the peak (I still know only about 1000-1500 words so it wasn’t the best form yet). I hope to get to this number in a few week in Japanese as well.
Anyway, they started to stick at least.
Wow that is huge.
I just finished my first 100 words in the deck (it was like 6 days since I started doing it) and I have avg time of 21s/card.
On deck with Italian I have 12s/card.
But actually, mb auto timer or just not thinking about the card if it immediately doesn’t appear in mind is the way to go
I did too much knaji and now my brain works only to remember them
Yeah pretty much I don’t spend much time on a card, if I don’t get it within a couple seconds, I just fail the card and move on. I think that’s a better strategy and helps you learn more cards faster. 4.5-5 secs is far from the peak, for my other deck that’s all review (the kaishi 1.5k deck, which I highly highly recommend, since it’s highly optimized to teach you all the most common words to use in native media for immersion purposes), I’m down to 3.5 sec/card, and I’ve heard of people online who can go down to 2.7 sec/card.
If you’re at 21 sec/card and you’re doing 15 words/hour, then that means if you get down to 5sec/card, you could do 60 word/hour, which is the same pace as me at 50 words/45 mins, so really the key difference is just to reduce the average time taken per card.
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I like to study for a long time too, but the vast majority of it is comprehensive input instead of SRS. I’ll happily struggle through a comic for 5 hours but the most I can do on Bunpro is 2 lol. It’s a wonder I haven’t burnt out studying so much, I’ve already been warned of it under my study log. I think it’s because I’m not afraid to just do less in a day when I realize I’m getting tired of it. A lot of people who get burnt out are the ones who force themselves through day by day, so make sure to avoid doing that. Good luck
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Definitely +1 to burnout issue. Having burned out from Wanikani a few years ago (same reason - forcing myself through so many reviews), I think it’s good to trust your own feeling as to when is it too much and dial down the lessons or even not finish all the reviews — though would recommend doing the latter only after dialing down lessons to 0.
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The hardest thing about the N3 test when I took it was the listening. There is a portion of the test where it has blank pages with only A B C D. You listen to the conversation and the question they ask. Then you listen to the answers read out loud. If you can not take notes, remember what was said, and write the corresponding A B C D answers down before choosing the correct letter to fill out; do not take it. You also can only listen to the recording once. There are no repeats, at least for me there wasn’t :’) I somehow passed but listening was my worst score, because I expected them to repeat the recording twice like N4. Nope
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I’ve made a decision to a study log from this thread, at least for some time, so here is an update.
About me and Japanese
I started learning Japanese on the 23.07.
Learned kana in the first 3 days as well as all radicals in the next 3 days after kana.
After that I was wondering what am I gonna do next while reading on lingq so I got the basic understanding of grammar (like the first 5 or 7 topics of Bunpro)
Then I decided to do a challenge and learn all 2200 Heizig’s kanji meanings in one month then I was learning 80 kanji/day until 13.08 (with breaks on Sundays). This challenge was ok, but I decided that I wanted to learn the language as well, and this wasn’t achievable with 80/day mark, at least not in the temp I wanted to go.
Kind of start of the log? - present
So after 11.08 I decided to move to more balanced studies (but gave up 80 kanji/day only on 13.08) and now I’m sitting on something like:
40 kanji meanings / day
2 hours anki words / day
7 topics Bunpro / day
Results for first week (10 days)
- added the first 62 topics out of 126 in n5 grammar (20 - beginner; 42 - adept)
- added 160 words - this deck
- Right now I have 999 kanji (one short but I know some more radicals so we can count it as more than 1000), added about 230 this week so a bit short again.
- watched the whole Frieren in the original while doing other things
The plan
I don’t have time right now to write about it, and I’m not totally sure about it as well. I think I’ll continue doing the same stuff.
Reading as well as other input is lacking, but I decided that it can wait despite all the comprehensible input hypotheses (which I like). I just feel this way right now. Also I read Tadoku Stories but very little.
What are my thoughts
The hardest part is time management.
The second hardest part is words which readings are not sticking.
The first I manage with the Pomodoro method + book with my timed plan for the next day.
The seconds, I think is already better, the more words I know better associations I can make within the language. But my brain started coming up with interesting associations outside of Japanese, but most words for know are just a bruteforce meaning/hiragana or sound. So I hope improve and move from adding 20 cards / 2 hours to 35-50 cards / two hours.
Next
So ye I’ll try to write an update after I finish n5 grammar, or just when I have time (on Sunday for example).
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Nice, suprised you can learn so much kanji, but not as many words. I think at 1000 kanji learned, you know enough kanji that you can stop dedicated kanji study and do only vocab. I highly recommend the kaishi 1.5k deck, it’s a highly optimized deck designed to maximize your coverage of the most common words seen in Japanese native media.
After kaishi 1.5k, you can basically start doing Japanese native media such as anime / video games / manga/ books and get enough understanding to use that as your main source of learning and immersion. It should only take 1-2 months to get through kaishi.
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Wow that’s a nice deck! And I see that I can enable Pitch accent somehow. But I don’t know if it is good idea to switch right now, in the process of learning that one.
About stopping learning kanji, the problem with Heisig is that you need to learn all of his kanji because they are sorted in radicals way. So I basically know like 1/2 of most commonly use kanji but only 1/2 of n5, 1/2 of n4 and so on… anyway when I know kanji it is much easier at least with words’ meanings so I’ll just continue for 40 more days to get all most common.
Though, I’m planing of finishing 1500 words until the end of next month no metter what. I beleve as well that it should be enough for understanding a good part of language! (I have this kind of vocab in Italian and watching anime is quite comfortable)