Thanks!
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Who is She is a bit more difficult, but the story is… Certainly something.
I don’t know a lot of people who have read it so I always like hearing people’s reactions.
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Ok I’ll read it!
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It’s really cool that you are so dedicated to learning and can put a lot of time into this. Like others I would like to give you a quick word of caution but also with something to think about.
When learning a language (or anything new) it is very important to think about what your ultimate goal is. Why are you learning this thing? What do you want to be able to do with it? These questions will greatly influence shorter term goals and the general direction of your learning.
For example, if someone is learning Japanese with the primary goal of being able to watch anime without subtitles, then they are going to want to focus more on listening comprehension. If someone’s ultimate goal is to connect with their parent’s/grandparent’s culture then they might focus more on more casual language that would be used between family members. If the ultimate goal is to go to university in Japan, then focusing on academic language becomes important.
In all of these examples though, it is very important to form a strong base as each new thing learned builds on the rest. Any singular method will not be enough for this. Bunpro and other SRS tools are very good for developing your long term recall of things; however, this does not actually mean that these will be accessible in context. Even if you do not want to join a class or get a tutor, finding a study buddy either in person or online who you can practice with is invaluable to create usability of the language.
I also saw in one of your earlier posts that you are not focusing as much on vocabulary and instead are focusing mostly on kanji and grammar. I would not recommend this as vocabulary is necessary to be able to use kanji and grammar. All of these seemingly separate areas when studied with each other instead of separately reinforce each other which is why all textbooks will have grammar and vocabulary for each chapter rather than separating them out.
I don’t want to say that it is impossible to go from nothing to N2 in the amount of time you have provided but it is not a realistic goal for the vast majority of people and might hurt your learning in the long run. You have to learn to walk before you can run. If you go too quickly you might find it impossible to make any progress later on.
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This one is hard) I am mainly concentrated on methods for efficient learning, then actual goals. If it wasn’t Japanese it would be another language (Italian I guess, because I’ve lived here for almost 3 years and still don’t know it. Live for me is basically the same as in the time of covid). I think I just love self-education, it was the main line for me for the past 5 or 6 years.
Also, I love anime, and that’s why I’ve considered learning Japanese over Deuich, for example. But it’s not the main goal, because I know that on a decent level, I’ll be able to watch them with no problems.
It’s hard to say, so it’s definitely a grate question to ask.
I actually have a mentor to assist me in bad times (which are not now I think), and we have a meet every week!
A plan was (and is) to learn all kanji at one so remembering meanings wouldn’t be a problem, I’m 1500 in, and maybe I would have stoped, but this is hiezegs order, so I basically don’t know 1/3 of all n5/n4/n3/etc. kanji so I think finishing them is the right choice, considering ill take only 2 weeks.
Vocab - yes I gave up on learning it, but past few days I’ve been doing anki for 10-20m. I hope to reach 1h till the end of this week and 2 hours after 15.09 (time from kanji added)
Do you think it can be the case for language learning? Of course it sounds scary, and considering another plan in this case would have been a nice choice, but I can not see how this is worst then full immersion that many people do, in a long run. Even if I know all the grammar, kanji, and words before doing a bit of immersion, it shouldn’t be the problem, because learning and acquiring is 2 different things, and learning should help acquiring I guess 
If you share what are your particular concerns about it will be very helpful!
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Also I’ve got some questions!
For people who do 5 topics / day.
How many reviews do you have?
How many ghosts?
Immersion is a more efficient use of time once you have basic grammar and vocab down. You will naturally pick up and internalise more as you go on.
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I’ll be able to do as much immersion as I want after I finish n2, kanji, and a few thousand words.
I think it will work much better for me because I can do a lot of concentrated work.
Maybe immersion with something like lingq would work because you can track everything weel, but I feel if I know what roughly all the grammar mean I’ll be able to understand stuff much better, and learn faster in a long run. Of course it’s hard to go though grammar with no input, but I’ll try to include bare minimum so I can continue.
So I think immersion and comprehensible input are a bit overrated.
Also you gave it as a fact, which is just not how it works here!
No need to get defensive. You can look at countless examples of people attaining a high level of Japanese or other second languages via immersion. You also learnt your native language via immersion. Bunpro is good for introducing grammar concepts, but until you encounter them repeatedly in real life, they are not really acquired.
It’s certainly a fact that comprehensible input is the only way we acquire a language.
Are you actually claiming that we learn languages from messages we don’t understand?
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I think what you’re doing is fine. I go through 5 topics a day on bunpro, which is about 70 reviews a day now and I’m on n2, I do 40-50 new words on anki per day, and I try to immerse as much as I can with the rest of the time. I finished bravely default 2, a JRPG, as my immersion, and now I’ve moved on to Steins Gate 0 for immersion now. I think once you finish all the kanji, you’ll free up a bunch of time that you can use for immersion.
I think dedicated kanji study is not necessary. You can naturally learn the kanji through vocab, at least past the first 500-1000 kanji. I already knew 1k of the jouyou kanji from knowing Chinese, so I never did any dedicated kanji study in Japanese. I of course did dedicated kanji study while learning Chinese.
So overall, your goal is ambitious certainly, but your methods are fine I think. Yeah you’ll need to immerse more, but you’re already reading on lingQ, and then as soon as you finish your kanji study (it’s only 2 more weeks you said for you, so I guess you might as well finish it), you can start immersing more. I recommend you start immersing in native material as soon as you finish kaishi. Kaishi is highly optimized to get you immersing on native material, such that once you finish, you can watch anime, play games, and read manga and understand them all to a reasonable level of competency.
I think the record btw for 0 to passing N1 that I know of is 8 months; somebody on reddit (or maybe it was discord) claimed they had done it. And several people have done it in a year.
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Thanks!
Your 5 topics + 40-50 words / day is a lot of time as well!
I’ll be watching anime for sure) But I think I’ll do it mostly when I won’t need to look up words, before that importing something (YouTube I guess) on lingq sounds as an enjoyable plan)
All ~900 points on bunpro + 10k words sounds very doable even in 6 months of study, but the question is how long it will take to acquire your all that stuff) I hope to be good n3 in listening + reading who completed n2 grammar and learned 6k words at the end of this year. If becoming n1 in 8 months is humanly possible I probably can do that, but I don’t know if I want to study extra 3 months after new year for this) (also I don’t think there is a test in those dates)
Why is this sooo 
On the second photo I got 30 for 1 correct, on the first 60 for 21/4
How does this work? Does it give less ex for ghosts, or maybe the items’ level is matter?
Well, 8 months for N1 is the record, and I don’t know if that person had a Chinese background as well to skip some of the kanji learning.
And that’s basically the limit that I know of, of course there could always be more talented people with better memories and higher IQs that could do it even faster, but I don’t what those people are like or how fast they learn them.
I do know that the smartest person alive today (besides Terrence Tao) learned 5 languages by the time he was 2, knew calculus when he was 3, and had published his first book when he was 3. So of course the ceiling is very high. Kim Ung-yong - Wikipedia
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Wow this is actually crazy!
Anyway, I just did some “calculations” on this topic.
for example person possesses 6 hours every day (like I do, but some people have more) its 1280 hours.
- 120h for kanji
- 350h for grammar
- 400h words (can be much less if speed is larger then 25w/hour + just reading can give a lot of words, if not all. especially on lingq I guess)
- 410 hours remain for input. I think when input is well calculated, only content that is hard enough taken, with full concentration 410h is a really really good number! At least in other languages, it’s a lot.
Also for example I do a lot of procrastination-listening when I turn something on and I do my home stuff, or just relaxing from doing things. I think after certain level (I think about n3) it’ll be possible to do it in Japanese, and its a lot of additional hours a day!
Also changing forums to Japanese forums… Ok it’s just basically imersion, but I can not see what can go wrong, especially with 410 hours of concentrated input (I assume its text + audio so person can get every structure down when general meaning was understood)
What can you say about It from your experience?
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410 hours is not that much when it comes to Japanese. Obviously it is a reasonable amount and more than lots of people ever manage but generally that is nowhere near enough to pass the N1. Having said that, 410 hours of reading at the perfect level and with full concentration will get you to a reasonable place.
For people who don’t already know kanji the regular range of immersion hours for passing the N1 is from 1500 up to a whopping 4000 hours. It depends on the quality of those hours and what you consume, obviously, but 1500 is seemingly the fastest one could expect. People who pass with that amount normally have squeezed it into a year or so there is probably some bonus from that. All these people tend to be students and have no other responsibilities (most I have seen did it during the covid lockdown period so there was little else to do as well). In any case, people who get to that level at record speeds do a massive amount of reading/listening - SRS only makes up a small portion of their time normally.
Even if by some miracle you managed to pass the N1 by doing SRS focused study it is very likely you would struggle to actually understand things properly and would have passed essentially by making educated guesses. You need a functional reading speed to pass the N1 as well which may be a struggle if you haven’t done enough regular reading.
Ambitious goals are good but I would recommend to take it one step at a time (get to N4 then reassess then get to N3 and reassess, etc). I enjoy watching people succeed when they have ambitious plans and I would be curious to see what will happen if you manage to do as you say so genuinely I wish you luck!
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Even 1500 sounds like a bit too much
I don’t actually know, and never asked people about hours they spent, but I think reaching n1 level of listening and reading should take me around 400-700 concentrated hours, using content that is quite hard every time.
I don’t have any researches, but in questions like this I usually rely on my intuition, and it works quite often really well 
There is a high chance that you are right, but also it just doesn’t makes sense in my head… I think after a few month I’ll see if my skill growing according to my imaginary line. One thing is that ill probably do a bit of hands-free input with anime and YouTube in time I’m doing routine (dishes, cooking, cleaning I guess), so I need to track that as well.
Anyway, 400 hours or 4000 it’s not going to change my routine, so I guess it’s more about realistic expectations, but I’m not going to believe anyone, just my own experience will tell if this my expectations are valid (nah, maybe there are good arguments against me, but I can’t come up with them right now)
Thanks for your support!
It’s great to hear that you have a mentor to assist you!
My biggest concern with studying everything before beginning immersion would be that doing both memorization study and immersion can help propel you faster and create more solid connections in your brain when done together. They reinforce each other. This is why a lot of textbooks will put in dialogues/readings that utilize the grammar/vocab that they present in a given chapter. I have found that by utilizing both bunpro and interacting with native Japanese media that finding things I’ve learned on bunpro (and other study methods) out in the wild helps me remember them better and that I there are things that I already have an instinctual awareness of before encountering them on bunpro/other study methods because I had already heard/seen it so much in native content.
Of course, everyone is different and honestly my best advice is to just do whatever you can to keep moving forward. I have gone through so many different study methods over my 10+ years of learning Japanese (some of them more effective then others) but because I was able to keep my goals in mind, reevaluating them when needed, and kept finding ways to keep my motivation from disappearing, I’ve been able to keep on.
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Assuming you spent 8 hours a day to go N5 to N3 over 2 months (60 days)
522 Grammar Points
4200 Words
~80 Items a day, ~10 items an hour, 1 item every 6 minutes
Just learning, no reviews. No Kanji (you don’t have time) and no radicals. 一生 一, 一回, 一日, 一人 and 一つ will be learned by rote without consideration for what 一 represents (and notably, all of these are before Wanikani level 5, and one of these characters isn’t a Kanji and if 力 is a Kanji, you may not have time to figure that out)
Reviews in a 2 month period will include:
4hrs, 8hrs, 24hrs, 2 days, 4 days, 8 days, 2 weeks, 1 month - 8 different encounters
So conservatively, multiply by 4 encounters and we get - 320 items a day, 40 items an hour, 1 item every 1.5 minutes. You’ll at least need to review all items this may times, and this assumes 100% accuracy.
And forget dropping immersion words into your SRS. 絆 and 羈縻 appeared while you’re watching Violet Evergarden? Forget about them! Watch ゴジラ? 怪獣 is N1! Doing calligraphy? Forget 丿乀!! Okay… actually, let’s forget that 
It was the question only about the grammar -_-
Provided you know all the vocab it’ll be pretty easy. I’d do 80 a day and get it done in under 2 weeks.
Just use this to shore up all the conjugation issues you run into - Don's Japanese Conjugation Drill
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