Passing N1 With a Severe Language and Mental Disability

Hey!Ｉ just passed the JLPT N1 in 5 years. I know that that is very normal, especially given that my score was kind of poop (118/180, 40/40/38). I am not here to say that I am one of the greats. But I do see a lot of people here who respond to these people (Doth, Jazzy, Matt, Khatzumoto, etc) by asking if their methods are worth it when you can’t do it for 8 hours a day, people who say “anything works if you do it 8 hours a day”, etc. I thought it would be good to share my perspective on the results I got and the struggles of a less-than-perfect immersion learner who is only doing Some Japanese Some of the Time.

My start: My Japanese class online at school was awful. We were told to go to the computer lab and then watch/respond to pre-recorded online lessons, which I eventually could not do because some guy hacked my account and started sexually harrassing other students. I learned of this when I got an email apologizing me for all of the negative things the teachers were saying to me every video after catching said man– I wasn’t aware this was a thing that was happening, as I never actually watched the videos because I was busy looking at world of warcraft stuff and skipping. I eventually stopped taking the class and decided I would try again in college. At the time, I was bullied for speaking weirdly. Sometimes, I would never talk at all, ignoring people who were talking to me. Other times, I would simply stop talking in the middle of a question. Other times, I would respond to what people told me by going on very long tangents that were often completely unrelated. My parents thought it was ADHD, but as I grew older, we learned it was something a little… different.

By the time I did try again in college, I began developing the telltale signs of a mental disorder called schizophrenia. For those of you who don’t know what schizophrenia is (there are many misconceptions), schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness with several major symptoms such as disorganized thought, catatonia, and psychosis. I had had my first full psychotic break around the time I was 17 after a failed suicide attempt (I didn’t know melatonin wasn’t the kind of sleeping pill that kills you), and by my first year of college the hallucinations had gotten more frequent. I was seeing tall, oblong grey men walk by out the windows, hands reaching into my house to grab things, UFOs that breathe people in through their mouths (not trying to spoil any movies here, but if you know the movie I’m talking about I was very surprised to see someone else had thought of that). Sometimes I would come home to find my mattress was a piece of meat. Some of my hallucinations are more mundane. To this day, I will see people down the street only for them to fade away in front of my eyes. Sometimes I will be sightseeing with a friend and point out something that they don’t see. These hallucinations are less frequent now than they used to be (apparently those kinds of symptoms get less severe with age), but at the time they were deeply distressing. I would lose sleep, fall asleep suddenly, have stress convulsions… the lack of sleep then caused me to have increased rates of sleep paralysis, which caused me to, of course, hallucinate more.

This, combined with my increasingly disorganized speech patterns and catatonia, made Japanese class a nightmare for me. Most of the other people in the class made fun of me (it was a weird mix of ex/current navy people who were posted in Japan and, of course, weeaboos. I’m obviously not in the army). My teachers simultaneously thought I was faking it and thought I was crazy. I would skip several days of class just because I was catatonic (if you don’t know what catatonia is, it has a lot of different forms but for me was basically just sitting still doing nothing for several hours– think Shinji Ikari in the beginning of the Evangelion finale), and eventually decided I would drop out again. I transferred colleges to go somewhere in a town where my family’s medical insurance was accepted, so I had to go somewhere without a Japanese class anyway.

I still wanted to learn Japanese, though. The language sounded beautiful to me, and everything I had ever known was Japanese. My first word as a baby was “dinosaur” and like any rational person would, my mother bought me Godzilla movies to watch as a kid. I grew up in the 1990s, so the next big things in my life were obviously Mario and Pokemon. My parents both had Hondas. By the time anime entered my life, I would almost say I liked it because it was Japanese. I learned that English teaching was a way to enter Japan, and so I changed my focus from Japanese learning to English teaching, and joined a linguistics program, where I worked my way into a few of the graduate-level TEFL teaching theory courses.

It is here that I had first learned of modern paradigms in language-learning, starting with the work of American linguist Stephen Krashen. Explanations are not always necessary, doing textbook drills is largely a waste of time. With the right input, a student can figure out what something means by themselves, and our job as teachers was to give a variety of example sentences in the most natural way we could, so that students could develop their figuring-it-out muscles and eventually move on to reading and listening and figuring things out themselves. It was important for students to figure things out themselves– Krashen’s i+1 model meant that a structured, rigid curriculum was only going to hold students back. Even if we all forget things, I am going to forget different things than you are, and the deeper we get into language learning, the less a classroom helps at all and the less a specific list of words and grammar points is going to help you with your individual needs. I needed the ability to determine for myself what sentences I could or couldn’t read, and I needed to develop the skills to process input myself. Input and autonomy.

I then worked dead-end jobs for a few years and forgot what I had learned in college before being accepted to work at my first eikaiwa English teaching job in November 2016. When I moved to Japan, I had forgotten about 1/3rd of the kana and only recognized the kanji for 1-10. I had weird-ass beliefs about grammar– I thought ga was like, a second auxilliary wa that you put into a sentence if a WA was already present. I’m sure they explained it in class but as I said above I was born to trip balls involuntarily so I didn’t remember any of it. I arrived in Japan in December with the thought of “ok, now that I live here I’ll just pick it up”.

I learned, to my horror, that most people here do not, in fact, “just pick it up”. I joined a weekly Japanese class that was provided by the company and learned very quickly that, not only did none of the staff (neither my foreign coworkers nor the Japanese teacher) have ANY background in language teaching, many of them were still learning N4-level grammar once a week after living in Japan for over a decade! They would often get frustrated as their Japanese friends railroaded conversations back into English, or their Japanese partner would refuse to teach them Japanese. There was a belief in the gaijin bubble that that was the secret– if you had a Japanese boyfriend or girlfriend, that was the ticket to N1 town. So I went fuck it and downloaded Tinder.

This is when I had my first breakthrough. Tinder profiles were hard to read, but you obviously have to read a woman’s profile if you want a chance because, well, that should be obvious. Suddenly, the TEFL training I had received began to flow back into me. What if I just… looked up the words and figured it out myself? I began to look everything up. Street signs, tinder profiles, advertisements, more tinder profiles (look as I said above, I’m a psycho, it’s not like women are waiting in line to date me OK), tinder messages… all had words, but sentences were still out of reach. I went and picked up a few volumes of OnePunchMan, which I had watched and loved in English, and began reading. I think this is a great way to start studying– take something you have already seen in English and begin going through the Japanese, This wasn’t exactly that– I saw the anime in English and then read the manga in Japanese, but this was close enough. I also used i+1 to determine my lookups. For kanji, I had something I call the 3-kanji rule:

\-If there is a word with 3 kanji in it

\-And I know two of those kanji

\-Then that third kanji is the next one I will learn and my anchor word will be that word.

I suddenly found I was improving significantly faster than anyone else in the company Japanese class, and stopped going altogether. I began to feel like I had found some kind of magical, secret spell– wait, you can just go up to words you don’t know and look them up?! Sometimes you can figure out what they mean and sound like before you even whip out the smartphone? Guys, students, teachers, I just found something that’s going to revolutionize the– it turns out our school was deliberately providing a service with the knowledge that students were not going to do that. My boss pulled me aside and said “we are giving something like weekend piano lessons, not training Beethoven”. Oh. Well, I tried to tell all my coworkers and friends at the bar that this could really help them with the Japanese struggles they were hav– “店内？？？What are those words you’re learning you’re never gonna use those”. Oh.

I eventually moved to Tokyo, where I had a job for a “black company” that had me work for sometimes over 75 hours a week with over 20 whole hours of unpaid overtime work. My immersion time was limited, and the usefulness of Tinder was wearing out. Every profile said the same stuff, and it’s not like I had time to date anyone, and it’s not like anyone would want to date a guy who was both always working and broke as fuck. I needed a new strategy. I had heard people talking about a method called AJATT, and an app called anki. This took my strategy to the next level. I could read manga on the bus and train, take pictures of the panels with stuff I didn’t know, and then sneak a few anki flashcards in during my break time, and then drill those cards when I got home. This was called sentence mining, and I did it by hand, and most of my early anki cards were shit. I could (this is still true) only stomach reading on the bus and train, though, as the antipsychotic medication I used to take has left me with a semi-crippling nerve disease called akathisia, where sitting still or doing a calm, single task for more than 10-70 seconds at a time makes me want to scream. Even writing this post, I get up to walk around about twice per paragraph. But I didn’t let that stop me. Even if I had no time, or couldn’t stomach doing anything, I was going to do WHAT I could. Where a lot of people would “take a break” or just burn out and quit, I decided hey, fuck it, 15 minutes a day isn’t going to make me fluent but 0 minutes a day won’t either. It’s better to do a little here and there than it is to do nothing.

When I left that job, I suddenly found, to my surprise, that all of the “weird” “useless” words I had learned looking stuff up allowed me to read newspaper articles and even watch anime with JP subs pretty comfortably. Anime was harder than manga, but that was because it was in real time and I didn’t know a good mining set-up. By the time covid hit, I was watching Hunter X Hunter all day and I got what I thought was a good amount of it (80%\~, absolute garbage compared to now) and then one of those days spiders were everywhere and I don’t really remember that part of my life too well. It was what we in the language learning business call “a malaise”. In 2020 I stumbled my way through the N2 test in 2020, which is 3… or four years? I moved to Japan at the end of 2016 so like, is it . The night before taking N2, I had finally met a lady on Tinder, but there was a twist. She was a foreigner who matched with me because my Japanese impressed her. She was N1. She had passed in 2 years– man what was she doing being impressed by some guy like me? But more importantly, she liked kaiju. She once got beaten up by her big sister because she woke her up at 5AM to watch Ultraman. I thought to myself, “oh man, I’m getting pretty fuckin good at this Japanese thing”. It’s easy to feel like a big fish in a small pond, even in Japan (you should see how small some of the fish here are dude).

That’s when a man named Doth rocked my fucking world.

He passed the N1 test in less than 2 years and was able to enjoy Japanese content at a level I literally couldn’t even imagine. He was reading whole Japanese novels and VNs at a pace I couldn’t even read that stuff in English! I joined TMW and began to prepare for the N1 test. Other people talked about tracking and whitenoising, but I thought, pfft. Whatever. I can just do what I always did, go with the flow. I spend sun-up to sundown doing anime sometimes. That’s 8 hours and 8 episodes, what can be more AJATT than that, right?

I failed the December 2021 JLPT, and immediately after I made my sob post about failing, a man in the very same discord channel was shocked and surprised to learn that, not only had he passed, but he had achieved a 180/180! His name was Jazzy. I thought, eh, I got 91/180, he had only been studying for 8 months. He was certainly impressive, but I didn’t need a perfect score and with my “years” of inputting I could totally pass the next test no problem. I couldn’t read super-well.

Spoiler alert: I failed again. That’s when I went back and looked at what they did. It was really easy to look at, because they logged their input hours: what kind of thing they were doing, how much they were doing. This was the final piece of the puzzle for me. I could SPEND 8 hours “focusing” on immersion, but the log made me see myself as I really am. I was doing maybe an hour, or an hour and a half per day, tops. I fucked the listening section up the most, so I would focus on that. Between August and December last year, I watched at least 2 hours of content a day (sometimes 3), half of that was anime, the other half was… random other stuff. I did about 12,400 minutes of raw listening, between when I started tracking and when I learned I passed this Sunday night, and most of that was in September, October, November, late August, and early December.

At first, it was news, because everyone says the news is important for understanding the N1, but as someone who has both taken the test multiple times and (technically) passed it, I don’t really think that’s true. It has a lot of N1 grammar, but so did the Pokemon Adventures manga I was reading on the train. The important thing here wasn’t what I watched or listened to, but that I kept the pump flowing. Whenever I had time to, I would sneak in a 10-minute Youtube video, or get out an extra episode of anime. I never sat down and then, 3 hours later, finished my study. I found I had a lot more time in my day than I thought. I had done some passive listening when I felt an (increasingly rare, thankfully) episode of catatonia coming on, but I never logged that. When one thing started to get boring, I would put it down and get something else. I started the year having read nothing. When I failed the July test, I had 4 books half read and one book finished. By December, I had fully read 2 books. Now I am on book number 5. Tracking myself forced me to push myself to a level where I was actually improving. I went from understanding most of an anime to hearing every word of dialog in an unsubbed episode clear as day. I got a 38/48/48 on my one practice test, a copy of the 2010 December JLPT N1 (I forgot how my gf calculated that in from the raw score but I will edit that in here when I ask her tonight), and walked into the test room confident.

I left a nervous wreck. I thought I was gonna fail again. I got an A/A in the raw scores of the vocab section in July, so I thought I didn’t need help there. Turns out they decided to put all the words I still didn’t know on this test. The listening was also, as always, a test of my fucking stamina as much as it was a test of my listening ability. Remember, I can barely sit down for a minute without wanting to scream. At least that’s the excuse I am going to make here. One of my friends tried to get me some ritalin for the test but my girlfriend stopped us. Probably for the best.

Well, I didn’t really get a good score, but it did work in helping me pass! I got a 40/40/38 (I will edit the proof in when I get home tonight), seeing improvements of over 10 points in all 3 areas. Not as good as the practice test I did, but good enough to say I have N1. I know from the leaked results (and from the fact I know the words) that I got a perfect score in the kanji portion, which probably helped me get a 40 despite the fact that, as I said, the vocab section had a bunch of vocab I didn’t know. I was shocked to see I also got A/A on the raw scores this time as well. I’ve never done RTK or WaniKani or anything. I go out and talk to Japanese friends on the regular and work in positions where I am the only English speaker, I make do in Japanese. My spoken Japanese could be better, but I can talk pretty comfortably on most topics and my rate of mistakes is going down as I notice the things I said wrong and quietly make a mental note not to say that again. People have told me my Japanese ability skyrocketed after covid. I think there’s something about not talking for a while that helped me.

I don’t have any specific advice to anyone other than, I dunno, just go read and listen to stuff and look things up. You don’t need to spend years doing ineffective stuff to “build a foundation”‘; my foundation was shit but I still made something out of it. I think if I went back and started over, I might do something like TaeKim or Cure Dolly, but I definitely would not waste so much time doing drills and filling in the blank and saying WATASHI WA ____ GA SUKI DESU 10 times with random words substituted in. On the other hand, if you know you’re not going to do be Doth, I don’t think you need to be him for input to be helpful. Just keep going, do extra stuff if and to the extent that it is helpful, but remember that the focus is on listening, reading and trying to figure it out. Don’t overthink it. You don’t have to be the smartest or the most disciplined person in the world to reach N1. I see no reason to doubt Doth or Jazzy now. Just turning the dial up a little bit gave me so much progress in such a short amount of time that I believe anyone who can do the things they did would easily be able to achieve the results they got. And even if you can’t, do what you can here and there and you’ll get something out of it.

Even a trainwreck like me can do it. Fuck I think I’m gonna be late for work now.