Reflections on 100 days of Clozemaster sprinting

[Original post on r/Clozemaster](https://www.reddit.com/r/clozemaster/comments/12i6v2i/reflections_on_100_days_of_clozemaster_sprinting/)

Following up on my previous posts ([1](https://www.reddit.com/r/clozemaster/comments/zl9t4f/which_language_should_i_livestream_myself/) [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/clozemaster/comments/10039xr/clozemaster_sprint_goes_live_tomorrow_jan_1_at/) [3](https://www.reddit.com/r/clozemaster/comments/10eqohr/attempting_to_read_a_childrens_book_after_two/)) about completing the entire Japanese fluency fast track in one year with no prior knowledge of the language, I thought I’d post a follow-up on my thoughts so far as I hit the 100-day mark. [Proof](https://imgur.com/2pHWEI0.jpg) & [profile](https://www.clozemaster.com/players/cstuartroe)

I gave up livestreaming after about a month because it wasn’t garnering enough interest from others and I no longer felt I needed it to stay accountable and on track. Nonetheless, I persisted with the challenge and now have a lot of thoughts about the experience so far.

How much have I learned? I’ll try to quantify it in a few ways:

– 6000 sentences (30% of the course) played and about 5000 mastered
– I estimate that my passive vocabulary size is about 1500-2000 words, and my “active” vocabulary is probably 600-800 words, although it’s really hard to estimate because I haven’t actually practiced language production
– I have made my own [kanji guide](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VF7_q4iHaLuQwG8X_wjFgWGxx4NxD_4X/view?usp=sharing) by scraping the course with Python, and by auditing myself I estimate that I can recognize about 1000 kanji, although the number is fuzzy because I’ve noticed there are many kanji I recognize in most contexts but not if I just see the character in isolation. This has also been sped by the fact that I took Chinese in college to the point of knowing probably 800 or so characters, though obviously not all of those are commonly used in Japanese.
– I have taken some online practice tests and think I could definitely pass JLPT N5 and maybe N4 at this point. In CEFR I’d say this corresponds to a weak A2, although probably only in reading.
– I’ve tried to read some easy books and have pretty good general comprehension, but still don’t know a word every two or three sentences.
– When watching videos in Japanese, I often pick up on phrases but usually not entire sentences.

I think this amount of progress is both encouraging and leaves a lot left to do. The only languages I’ve reached a high level in are much easier (Dutch, Esperanto) so I’m not well-calibrated for how fast I should have expected to learn Japanese, but my guess is that it’s pretty fast progress with the caveat that it’s really only my reading skills that are being built. Subjectively, it does feel like Clozemaster has been an extremely time-efficient learning method – I’m basically ingesting new vocabulary as quickly as my brain can possibly absorb it, and compared to every other study method I’ve ever used it’s hard to imagine a faster way to build reading vocabulary. I think that if I stick with the challenge for the entire year, I’m on track to finish with a solidly B2/JLPT N2 reading level, but to have any confidence with listening or speaking I’ll need to supplement with watching TV and getting a speaking partner at some point. I’m not sure how much of that I’ll actually do, but I would like to try the JLPT N2 in December so maybe I’ll try to build a listening practice routine at least.

In terms of amount of work, it’s held roughly steady for me at about two hours per day. It turned out to be true that my increasing speed more or less canceled out the steadily increasing number of reviews per day. I was extremely slow at the beginning because I was looking up most of the kanji with each exercise, but now I generally know the kanji in new vocabulary items, so that’s sped up considerably. I hope it stays sustainable as I keep accumulating ever more material to review, but I’ve observed that re-reviewing already-mastered sentences is usually very fast. At this point, I’m doing 60 new sentences per day, as ever, and about 350 reviews.

Even though I’ve mostly been laser-focused on learning vocabulary, I’ve been acquiring grammar incidentally pretty well. The general pattern that has emerged is that I see a grammar pattern in a bunch of sentences and develop a general sense of how it works, then find a resource that explicitly explains grammar rules and read about the ones I’ve seen before, which helps me get a more concrete sense of how the pattern is used, then when I see the pattern again later I connect it with what I read and it solidifies pretty well in my mind. The advantage of this is that the additional time I spend dedicated specifically to learning grammar is pretty small. (This really only applies to grammar rules about specific sentence patterns, e.g. 〜たことがある; to learn verb and adjective conjugation in the very beginning, I kept the relevant Wikipedia pages open and referred back to them constantly.)

What has changed from my original plan:

– I changed my review intervals to be much more frequent. I changed the settings so that I see a sentence for the third time only 4 days after the second time, for the fourth time only 12 days after the third time, and after mastering I see it every 30 days (with the 50%/100%/200% setting enabled.) I did this because I found that with the firehose of new vocabulary I was getting, the default intervals were too long to reliably recall words.

– I thought I might change at some point from multiple choice to text input, but I don’t think I ever will both because text input would take so much more time and because it’s too hard to remember what specific word choice was used just from seeing the English translation. Also, I find that once I’ve seen a word 5-10 times it’s no problem to remember it actively and be able to say it, so I don’t think I would gain much benefit from text input.

TL;DR I’ve been very satisfied with the rate of learning vocab, having learned 1500-2000 words in three months. I think Clozemaster is obviously pretty lopsided towards only building reading comprehension, but is an awesome language learning tool if your learning strategy is to speedrun to the point where you can read books and watch TV with subtitles.