I am currently close to N4 level. I took a language course 2-3 years ago for a while but I haven’t progressed my japanese since then. Now I dropped out of college, so I have lots of time. My plan is to study the language for approximately 4 hour per day. I know that learning takes time, and mass learning almost always fail. But I don’t think that 3 month is still a less time, if you carefully structure your program you should be able to memorize and have a grasp the language. In my opinion, language learning can be made faster by focusing on memorizing vocabulary, learning grammar and exposure to the content. I despise textbook exercises and don’t think they are valuable compared to amount spent to them.
1. Firstly, there are
“Essential Vocabulary for the JLPT ” book series , which I really liked. Unlike the other books ( nihongo sou matome etc.) it gives only the suitable kanjis for its level, and all other words are in hiragana. One of the worst thing when learning japanese was to struggle memorizing words if the words are given in harder kanjis.
2) I have been making a memrise course of these books ( I am not going to share this memrise course of course, so as not to infringe the rights of publishers/authors.) And I will learn 100 words per day by memrise course. It will take approximately 50 minute according to my calculations. There are also review cards from the past days. I currently think that if the learning part takes much time than 50 minute, I will just use speed review mode to lessen the time I use the app. So my plan is to finish 100 words, and review all the words from the past days only in 1-1.30 hour. I also muted sounds so as to review more flashcards per second without waiting for sound.
3) I bought some courses, and there are also some good courses on youtube. I am going to watch these courses on x2 speed. It is mostly intelligeble at that speed. For a time I thought that if watching in x3 could be good or not, but I think x3 is so fast to understand the content. For only 1.30 hour, I am going to watch 3 hours of content. Courses take apprx. 30 hours in total if I only study grammar. They will be finished in 10 days. After I finish these courses I am going to either started to read grammar books, and after a time maybe re-watch the course to memorize the grammar points. I plan to watch n1 level grammar before learning respective words in that level. Even if I don’t understand I’m going to review it in remaining days over and over.
4) I also have mock exam books. There are currently approximately 1000 question on each level for me to be solved. (minimum 5000 questions for all levels combined) One of the books is “500 practice question for jlpt book”, which also includes answers. The rest of the questions don’t have answers but I don’t think it is a big problem. I am going to solve 50 questions per day. If I solve one question in 1minute, it will take 50 minutes per day. That is more than I need. I won’t look up to a dictionary to solve the questions. If I don’t understand one of the questions, I will just pass that one and return back when I learn the words or grammar.
5) I also have three grammar books and I am going to read them from start to finish. ( at least I plan to read two of them) after finishing to watch all the video courses.
At first I thought that learning from shinkanzen master or sou matome would be great, but I don’t think any good reason to do that. I will just solve the exam problems instead. These textbooks give 20-30 words, but there are only 6 questions per chapter. So it is no different then bunch of word list and a few questions. Only reading comprehension books would be useful, but still I am going to solve the exam questions instead so as to get exposured to the language.
I will not study kanji seperately. I am going to make different memrise course to relate kanji with hiraganas. I’m going to first learn hiragana words, and then I am going to relate that word with its kanji representation in a different course.
Even if I don’t succed in accomplishing my mission only in 100 days. My plan is to learn 10.000 words and 2000 kanjis + all grammar points within a maximum of 6 months. If I study only 2 hours per day, it is possible.
11 comments
It’s great that you have a plan to study Japanese and a clear goal in mind. However, it’s important to keep in mind that language learning is a long-term process and requires consistent effort and dedication. It’s good that you have found resources that work for you, such as the “Essential Vocabulary for the JLPT” book series and creating your own Memrise course.
It’s also important to remember that grammar and vocabulary are interconnected, so it’s a good idea to study them together rather than separately. Additionally, while practicing mock exam questions can be helpful, it’s also important to practice using the language in context through reading, writing, and speaking.
It’s great that you have set a specific goal for yourself, but it’s also important to be flexible and adjust your plan as needed. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t achieve your goal within the timeframe you set. Remember that progress is progress, no matter how small. Good luck with your studies!
no offense but you will not, you need to set way more reasonable goals. selecting an arbitrary thing like this and some bare minimum effort requirement for it is really not going to work.
on top of it all, only a leisurely 2 hours a day? all at, as you said, a completely arbitrary double the speed other people manage? assuming every item is a single minute? with no overhead or context switching time? and all in siloed learning blocks like putting off kanji as though it’s independent? with perfect recall and zero time spent needing to look things up or ask questions from anyone?
oh my sweet summer child
start learning in a normal way, at a normal pace, and adjust as you go. there’s literally no point in trying to plan out this far in advance because your needs and goals will require adjustment as you go many times. and because your concept of what you even need to do won’t even be remotely accurate until you’re well into it.
I love when someone makes a post like this. If you can pull this off, I will be incredibly impressed. Please write some follow up posts like 30 days in so we can see how you are doing. You can do it!
Holy shit, I thought this was satire. Your comment history is unreal. This is going to be a new circlejerk copypasta, calling it now.
Saving this post for future reference
It took me 300 hours of SRS to get 10k vocab post RTK and after a fair amount of reading to learn and mature the cards over a period of 2 months. I spent 4+ hours a day on SRS. By week 4 I was getting over 1k cards to review before hitting the next goal. At over 150 words a day, only 60% stuck for me first time round, I did 80-85% once they hit ‘known’ – the problem was not actually the first 2 months – it was basically as I hit the 80-100 days when all the other cards came due and I ran into – not kidding either, 2500 review cards a day. It became too much and I had to coast and spend many hours on just (re)learning the vocab. Took about a week to manage, and I had 3-4 days where I would not clear the backlog entirely – so I would pass 6000+ old cards a week before struggling out another new 300 on my weekends with 8-12 hour study days. I would fail 400-500 cards a day and have 4-5 passes just to get them pushed to the next day via SRS. It was insane and I would deliberately ‘easy’ some fails to push them to next day if I made a stupid recognition mistake just to avoid seeing the card at the 10 min / 30 min intervals.
Grammar I already knew and picked up a lot before ever starting the pure vocab part – I was about N3. You trying to do this atop… not happening on 2 hours a day. I pretty much stopped studying outside of SRS, 20-30 minutes of reading a day or whatever I had the energy for while at work. The SRS is perhaps the only thing which you would honestly be able to make considerable progress on – and your grammar and reading will improve, but you are looking at 3-5 hours a day after about the 2 week mark and that’s just on reviewing.
What are you going to do when you get n1? Stop Japanese? Say, “I did it!” and have a cookie?
If you think only about the progress you can cram in the short term, you’re going to burn yourself out before you even get to the long term. Even if you do manage to stick to it and you get 10k words and 2k kanji and all the grammar done on flash cards, you’re still not going to be able to speak comfortably or read comfortably or listen comfortably because your knowledge has no depth and the actual skills involved with knowing a language will not have been practiced.
Pick something reasonable, and acknowledge that, not only is it going to many more than 100 days, but it’s OK to take longer BECAUSE language is something you use for years and years. Find things you like to read or watch in Japanese, and devote a lot more time to using those things and developing those skills than to going over flash cards.
At this point, I don’t even think people like this should be encouraged or positively engaged with in any sort of way. A post like this is not written so as to get the feedback of other learners, share valuable information or learn something. It’s purely done to brag… about something you haven’t even done yet.
> I will wage a religious war on korea and make 4 of the Twice members ( Jihyo, tzuyu, sana, momo) my wives after returning back to middle east after the campaign. The rest of the team will be my mistress. There is no sharia law that limit the women I can take so they will be my chattel and suck them till I die. After the death of mine, I will be put in heaven by all mighty God and make all the team drain my unlimited seed-packed balls to eternity
Found in this guy’s comment history. Absolutely incredible.
Jfc, I can’t tell if people are serious or sincere half the time in this subreddit.
You will fail unless you spend 8 hours a day studying like a full-time job and you have to practice reading, listening, speaking, and writing all equally. You have to learn about 3000 kanji, memorize their meanings/readings/common vocab, completely separate from the grammar and reading/listening comprehension. You’ll also be wasting time actually finding all these resources it sounds like, because you don’t have the reading material or flash card decks or Youtube playlists ready yet; that’ll be a couple days’ work gone already just to assemble it and set your personal cirriculum.
You can probably do it for the winter JLPT if you are spending 4+ hours a day, five days a week, and you already passed the JLPT N4. By the summer JLPT is just legitimately impossible.