Hello! So this year ive decided to try and get to n3 level by the end of year. Why? Mostly because I feel I really need to put my head down and get things done. The main problem is that while I can read hirgana and katana and like 10 kanji not sure if its really realistic to go from next to nothing to n3 in a year but hey better to reach for the moon and land among the stars. If anyone has any recommendations on how to do this or anything else to help I’d appreciate it thank you!
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By that do you mean along the lines of 3 to 4 hours of dedicated study per day (or 5 to 6 per day if doing 5 day weeks) for the year. Certainly doable (not by me 
). I have know some people that have been able to do this (or comparable leveling up) but they all were enrolled in 5 day-a-week intensive language schools for most of the time paid for by their employer or a foreign worker in Japan recruitment/placement firm.
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Better attend intensive Nihongo classroom sessions then.
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How many hours do you have daily? In a year you can spend like 2/3 hours daily to reach N3 imo. Very doable
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last year in the summer i got kinda serious again about japanese (kind of a “if not now, when?” moment for me). at that point i had taken 4 semesters of japanese ~7 years ago, so i knew kana, like maybe 20 kanji, and most of the key bits of grammar but maybe only 200-800 words.
as part of getting “serious” i thought it would be fun to attempt the JLPT (although i don’t need certification for anything). initially i was gonna go for N4, but my duolingo score (lmao) suggested to me that i could try for N3 as a stretch goal, so I did. that was pretty motivating as a goal; it got me to put in work for WK, for instance, and to practice reading a lot. i hope that i passed, too, although it certainly won’t be a suuuuper high pass if so.
so: i say 頑張って！ just try to keep it enjoyable and don’t crash out if it’s harder than you expect.
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I hope to go from N4 to N3 with 2-3 hours a day in 2026. Can’t imagine doing that from almost 0. Then again I am a slow learner.
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Not a requirement, of course. But having to go to school for 5 hours each day, do and hand-in homework assignments and prepare for and take quizzes/tests tends to be more likely to get the time in than most peoples’ “I am going to study 5 hours every Monday to Friday”.
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Yep. Adjust and adapt and reset/change goals if/as needed. Regardless of where you end up, it will be much further along the journey than where you are now and that much closer to the end (whatever that is for you).
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I forgot you asked for recs. A word of advice, japanese in particular has lot of pitfalls that a lot of people fall into and end up not learning much in the end or spending way too much time. A few of them are Kanji, Anki, manual writing, pitch accent, perfectionism, decision paralysis, app overuse. So do your research on lots of opinions if you will (and lots of places too, people here and in other communities are very biased).
For what you can do, i recommend a base deck like kaishi 1.5k, or jpdb.io to learn initial vocabulary. For grammar, yoku.bi, tadoku, cure dolly and bunpro, all are free and bunpro is $5. Install yomitan browser popup dictionary, you can read manga with mokuro, free web novels, easy news, lots of options. For listening there’s some easy podcasts and lots of visual videos for learners as well.
For the first 6 months i basically only did jpdb, bunpro, read manga with mokuro, was more than enough for N4 level. Only spent with bunpro. Didn’t do any kanji dedicated study. Then read more LNs and manga to reach N3 in a few more months. Spent around 800h for this, with 2h30m a day, you get 900h in a year.
Don’t overcomplicate japanese, read a ton, listen a ton, don’t get trapped in pitfalls, course correct your path and keep going. The hardest part is keeping the rhythm.
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I can definitely do 2-3 hours a day no problem! Depending on my health and such I can probably get up to a full school day time wise.
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Your title is accurate, it is an unrealistic goal, but I think I’d say even more that it doesn’t really say anything about why you want to learn the language or what you want to do with it, and that makes it even more difficult. I would encourage you to think about why you’re learning the language, figure out what you want long-term, work backward from that and figure out what you need to do to get there. At the end of the day, the N3 (or any other test) is just a piece of paper that says you were able to answer a certain percentage of questions correct on a given day, which is of course a thing to take pride in, but if you have a goal that you’re anchored to emotionally rather than as a paper achievement, it’ll help on those days where you wake up not feeling it and staring down a big review pile.
Mind you, all of that is said in the spirit of support - and while I think N3 may be a bit over ambitious, audacious targets can sometimes trigger outrageous results! Instead of hardcoding a specific level, though, maybe figure out what you want to do long term, work your plan toward that, and as the registration time approaches for the JLPT look over where you’re at and figure out what level you feel like you’ll be ready to take in December. And never be afraid to ask for suggestions or advice here, there are a lot of people here who have done it quicker than either of us ever will, slower than either of us ever will, who went straight through, who stopped and started multiple times, and the amount of wisdom and compassion and just flat out awesomeness is humbling.
tl/dr: find your reason for learning, set a goal based on that, and you can do this!
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