After seeing a few posts about how people are achieving N1 in ~2 years, I wanted to share my experience as someone who’s sorta on the opposite end of the Japanese learning spectrum. After about 4 years of studying, I’m around N4 level.
I started studying in March of 2020, so I’m almost at the 4 year mark. I spent the first year or so just learning how to learn. I wasted a lot of time on apps and constantly bounced between different resources. I started with Genki, got about a quarter of the way through and stopped. I did Duolingo for a while and also tried a bunch of other apps I don’t remember. I’ve also taken Japanese levels 1 through 4 at my college (covered N5 and some N4).
The only things I ended up sticking with are Anki and Bunpro. In my opinion, the “best” way to study is to do some kind of SRS for vocab/grammar and then just consume native material slightly above your level. Obviously there are other ways to learn and what works entirely depends on the person, but I think doing that as a base will be effective for most people.
Also, hot (lukewarm?) take, don’t study individual kanji, learn vocab and you’ll learn individual kanji as a side-effect.
*On average,* I probably study about 10 minutes per day. Some days I’ll study for 20-30 minutes, other days, nothing. There have been a couple times where I’ve taken a month long break.
My daily studying routine consists of Anki (10 new cards a day) and Bunpro (3 new grammar points a day). That’s literally it. I make no specific effort to do anything else. When I’m feeling spicy I’ll try reading a graded reader or do some active listening practice by watching some Japanese youtube.
I’ve done literally zero writing practice (and I don’t really think I’ll ever learn to write unless I have a need to).
I also want to mention that I’ve completely reset/started over on Anki/Bunpro a couple times. Like I said above, I’ve taken a couple breaks, and by the the time I got back into it the number of reviews were insane so I just said fuck it and started over. So I’ve learned/releared N5 and N4 Japanese about 3 times now.
Because of the way I study (pretty much only vocab/grammar/reading), my reading skills are decent (for my level), my listening skills are pretty bad, and I basically can’t speak at all.
So to answer some questions/potential comments:
*You’ll never become fluent by studying this little*
Maybe? Despite how little I study overall, I can tell I’m improving. I surprise myself sometimes when I watch/read Japansese content and understand stuff I didn’t before. I do think I’ll eventually hit a wall and have to change up what I’m doing if I ever want to feel like I’m actually fluent. Particularly, I need to put in the effort/time to do some real listening practice, sentence mining, etc.
*Why are you studying so little?*
I’m 25 and in no rush to become “fluent”. I’m mainly doing it for fun and because I want to be able to speak and understand a second language (eventually). If it takes me 20 years to get to N2 or N1 that’s fine, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far.
Anyway, I wanted to share this because I know it can be discouraging to see how fast other people learn Japanese (no ill-will towards those that do, it’s awesome). In 4 years, I’ve probably studied as much as those people did in 3 months. Learning Japanese is like climbing an infinitely tall mountain; you can climb a bit each day, sometimes you’ll slide a bit back down, and you’ll never reach the top, but after a while you can look out and see that you’re higher than you ever were before.