jazzy’s post is gone

4 comments

1. That’s a damn shame. He really is the GOAT of Japanese learning. I know a lot of people here doubted his claims, but I have no doubt he was telling the truth because of my own experience doing the same thing with fewer hours per day. Everyone here should take his advice to heart when in doubt about what to do: “Just read more”.

2. I don’t think so, but thank FUCK I saved it before the reddit strike thing, so I still have it on a notepad document, here’s the full thing split up since I can’t post the full thing in one comment:

   Hi everyone! 👋 My name is Jazzy and as the title suggests – I took the JLPT N1 in December 2021, got my result back earlier this week and was pleasantly surprised to find that I’d gotten a full score of 180/180! 😄 I started learning Japanese from 0 on March 18th 2021, and in just over 8.5 months I managed to get to a point where I was able to get full marks on the N1 without doing any specific JLPT study and without having ever been to Japan – by consistently immersing in native content that interested me.

   Especially from people who weren’t there to see my progress from the beginning, I’ve received a lot of questions about what I did at different stages of my journey as well as advice/a reflection on what worked well and what didn’t. Also, really happy about how well the test went and I felt this would be a good opportunity to reflect on my journey thus far. Hence the purpose of this post. Pretty new to Reddit but I felt this platform would be a good way to reach more people – hopefully you find something useful in this post. ^_^

   Side note: just as an aside because sometimes I also get people asking me about this, I do not know Chinese or Korean and Japanese is the first language I’ve tried to learn. A bit more about my background, I’ve lived in the UK my entire life and my native language is English, although ethnically I’m Pakistani so I can speak a little bit of Urdu and my listening is also decent (but I cannot read or write it) as a result of family.

   Why and How I started learning Japanese:

   As I’m sure is the case for many others, I had a lot more free time opened up as a result of COVID-19 restrictions. Alongside my university degree (currently a Physics undergrad student 😄), some of the activities that usually took up a lot of my time were training (as I’m an amateur boxer) 5 times a week, and taking part in/holding various events as a committee member of different societies at my university. Due to various quarantines and lockdowns I was unable to do either of these for quite a while and also found myself indoors a lot more often due to not being able to go out with friends as frequently.

   In addition, when I was younger I used to read a lot and I’ve always loved a good story but during high school and while at uni I haven’t done much reading for pleasure at all. Thus I figured it would be a cool idea to learn a language and read enjoyable material in that language, as a fun and productive way to use the extra time I’d gained. As someone who used to watch anime/read manga when they were younger, Japanese was the obvious choice for me.

   I spent a couple of days researching different language learning methods until coming across the AJATT website. Upon reading through it, the idea of learning a language by immersing with content I enjoy sounded very attractive to me and is also something I realised I’m already familiar with. In my household I’ve always grown up speaking English to my parents but they speak a mix of Urdu and English to me, however, despite hardly ever using the language otherwise, when I visited relatives in Pakistan once every few years I found I was able to hold basic conversations with a pretty good accent purely because of the listening input I’d received from my parents. Therefore, it definitely didn’t seem like a far-fetched concept to me however the idea of sacrificing all my time every day for Japanese was definitely not something I was going to do, but I decided to just have fun with it and try to immerse as much as I can alongside my main responsibilities (by using my time efficiently). I came across many other websites/blogs talking about a similar immersion-based learning approach and so decided to just get stuck in – marking the beginning of my Japanese learning journey on 18th March 2021.

   First ~2.5 Months (18th March 2021 – 31st May 2021):

   My first day was spent learning the hiragana and katakana – I did so by grinding an Anki deck for each of them and also repeatedly writing out each character about 10 times. I then left it there and decided I’d just hammer them in long term by seeing them in my immersion – quite the brute-force method for sure but it got the job done lol. Next, I used a Core 2k vocab deck that I found on Anki to gain an initial base of vocab (examples of good decks are the Core 2.3k Deck https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/docs/coredeck/ and the Tango decks). I continued the deck for 20 days doing 50 cards a day (which took me about 45 minutes a day at the time), dropping it after hitting 1000 cards at which point I decided to start mining (i.e. creating my own anki cards out of unknown vocab in my immersion material).

   Throughout these first ~2.5 months I was immersing using native content, right from day one. At first it was largely through Japanese-subbed anime (tending to more slice-of-life style series which I still found interesting, as they usually use more basic vocab) – of course, in the beginning I couldn’t understand much at all so it mostly just served the purpose of getting used to reading hiragana/katakana, getting used to listening to Japanese, hammering in the Core vocab I learnt through Anki as well as being a source of new vocab (which I would pick up by stopping to look up words every now and then as well as by being exposed to common words many times in different contexts).

   After the first couple of weeks I started diversifying my immersion sources – for listening I was using a whole range of native podcasts, youtube videos, audiobooks, dramas, reality TV, etc. I would look up a word if I heard it used a lot or it stuck out to me but otherwise I wouldn’t pause and just focused to try and pick out as much as I could. One podcast I highly recommend is the Sokoani podcast https://sokoani.com/, a series which discusses different anime shows – I found this useful because by watching the podcast episodes for anime I had already seen I would have more context as to what they’re talking about and would be able to pick out more. A youtube channel that I also really liked was NO GOOD TV https://www.youtube.com/c/NOGOODTVOFFICIAL, a podcast-type channel hosted by 錦戸亮 and 赤西仁 where they do a bunch of different things and have natural conversations on random topics (they also get guests on there often) – but overall there were a broad range of different channels I watched from.

   As for reading immersion I started reading a lot of manga, initially going for more slice-of-life series and manga that used furigana before branching out into other series – I found manga and subbed anime to be a great gateway into reading because the visual aspect gives you more context to understand what’s going on and the heavy inclination towards dialogue over narration means the sentences you encounter are usually simpler as opposed to a novel. I was still watching anime but I started splitting my anime immersion in to 2 different types. With half of the anime I watched I would use it for listening immersion by not using subs and rarely pausing to look stuff up. With the other half I would have Japanese subs on and would pause a lot more frequently to look up words I didn’t know, more so using it as reading immersion. During this period all the cards I mined on Anki were sentence cards (since the websites/blogs I’d come across usually recommended sentence cards) and I was repping between 30-40 new cards a day, which usually took around 40-50 minutes.

   For quite a while my comprehension was not that great and a big reason for that was grammar. I never did any sort of grammar study and still have not to this day. I briefly watched 3 or 4 Cure Dolly youtube videos but quickly got bored and stopped. However, eventually just by seeing different grammar patterns frequently in my immersion in different contexts I started being able to understand basic grammar patterns – slowly I started understanding much more of my immersion. Sure, perhaps I could’ve sped this up by going through a grammar guide like Tae Kim or the Cure Dolly videos but I enjoyed the route I took and even if I could do it all over again I wouldn’t change it.

   I’ve had questions regarding how to go about grammar study and my view is that I do think it can be a good idea to go through Tae Kim or Cure Dolly to prime yourself for seeing the grammar in your immersion, however, I personally don’t think actually grinding grammar (e.g. by doing a grammar deck in Anki) is a very effective use of time as you won’t truly understand what a grammar pattern means/how it’s used until you see it many times in context while immersing – will come on to this a bit more in the next section. In terms of the immersion time I was putting in – from 18th March up to early May I was averaging about 3-4 hours a day (was usually skewed towards weekends so around 2-3 hours on weekdays and then 5-6 hours on weekends), after which my uni summer holidays started and I did ~6-7 hours a day for the rest of May. That brings me to the end of the first (just under) 2.5 months.

3. Try if wayback machine works cause my phone has some issues and I can’t: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/sedr0m/how_i_got_180180_on_n1_in_85_months/

4. Wayback machine to the rescue:

   [https://web.archive.org/web/20220128005821/https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/sedr0m/how_i_got_180180_on_n1_in_85_months/](https://web.archive.org/web/20220128005821/https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/sedr0m/how_i_got_180180_on_n1_in_85_months/)