I think it’s theoretically possible but really hard. What’s your background in Japanese? Just classroom Japanese or have you been to Japan for extended periods?
Context: I was probably a good N3 last December and am aiming for N1 this December.
My only background is that I did WaniKani for a couple of months + Bunpro. I had some health issues and wasn’t doing my repetitions. Came back to a wall of items and lost the motivation to work through them. I did a couple hundred and realized my accuracy was horrendous.
Last October I flew to Japan for two weeks and fell in love with the country. I simply cannot stop thinking about going back. The day I had to leave made me super sad and I have been watching videos about Japan on YouTube every day since then. I am even getting a motorcycle license so I can tour Japan one day.
At the end of last year, after my trip, I had double jaw surgery and focused on healing most of the time after that. In April I decided to just restart everything from 0 and reset Wanikani and Bunpro and I have been very consistent since then. (I think I was mid 20s on Wanikani before the reset)
Because of the damn Wanikani API changes it looks like lost my streak but I do my reviews every day. Whenever I lose the streak it’s because I had to do the reviews on the phone. I even did them while I was in hospital after a motorcycle accident waiting for the doctor to literally stitch me back together.
I really had some tough days the last couple of months but I kept it going. Even Bunpro is looking great:
Should make it to N2 Grammar by December I guess.
Doing N3 this December and N1 December next year sounded more realistic to me but I was thinking maybe someone did N3 then N1 and could recommend it or share some experience.
Hahaha, I guess whoever did that will probably not read this thread anyway.
A guide I’ve suggested before that might help in answering this sort of question is that the JLPT organization surveyed participants and asked how many study hours people who passed each test had done:
| Level | Students with kanji knowledge (e.g. speakers of Chinese or Korean) | Other students (no prior kanji knowledge) |
|---|---|---|
| N1 | 1700~2600 hours | 3000~4800 hours |
| N2 | 1150~1800 hours | 1600~2800 hours |
| N3 | 700~1100 hours | 950~1700 hours |
| N4 | 400~700 hours | 575~1000 hours |
| N5 | 250~450 hours | 325~600 hours |
I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the absolute numbers – everybody is different, a lot of survey respondents probably just said how many classroom hours they’d had and didn’t count self study, estimating how many hours you’ve spent on something over years is really hard, etc. But you can look at the ratios between levels: to get to N4 from N5 takes about as many hours as it took to get to N5; to get to N3 from N4 is about the same number of hours again. But then to get from N3 to N2 takes almost as many hours as it took to get from zero to N3, and to get from N2 to N1 is as many hours as it took to get from zero to N2. So you can see that the gaps between levels start to get wider as you go up. And also you know how long it took you to get to N3 level, so you can use this as a very rough estimate of what timescale might be plausible for you to get to N2 and N1, assuming you keep studying at about the same pace.
At the higher levels the requirement most people seem to report as the difficult part is not so much individual grammar patterns, but rather the reading speed/fluency requirement implied by the test timing.
If it’s only that then it seems improbable. How many hours a day do you study? If it’s anything less than 2h of focused studying every day I’d say it’s impossible, and even beyond that I’m really unsure. Just a personal judgement based on what I’ve heard from others and my own experience.
Also consider the table @pm215 sent. I wouldn’t say it’s accurate all the time, but unless you’re extremely talented and/or spend a lot of time immersing (ideally living there) it doesn’t seem very realistic you’ll reach N1 in that time frame.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing though! Every hour you put towards improving Japanese will still push you forward. It just means it takes a lot of those hours to reach fluency, maybe more than you thought.
Ah yes, I remember I have seen that table somewhere before! I feel like you are right about the classroom hours. This is unlikely to be compared to something like what I do. I might be totally wrong on this but I feel like I am moving at a higher velocity due to focusing on Wanikani + Bunpro. I do some light reading on Satori Reader and watch Anime for some immersion. I do plan to add more reading and listening though. Going by the hours in the table I would need to make learning Japanese a full-time job to make it to N1 within a year (December 2025) let alone July next year.
I do plan to increase the pace by immersing more after reaching a certain level (Kanji + Grammar).
I am currently focusing on Wanikani + Bunpro. The last couple of weeks were quite rough and that is all I managed. This means it depends on how many reviews I got that day as to how much I spend on learning. I do it every morning and evening. In the morning I quickly go through my reviews before work and after work, I do my reviews + new items if available. I would say this could be anywhere from 90 minutes to 3 hours (sometimes I discuss grammar points I don’t understand well with ChatGPT).
I have a ton of manga and light novels from Japan that I wanna read but I am not able to do comfortably right now. If I can get to a point where I can read comfortably even with some hiccups I will become the snow piercer of Japanese learning haha
But most likely this is just a load of bullshit coming from me as I am nowhere near a level where I can correctly judge how long shit will take. A couple of years from now I will probably laugh at how foolish I was to think I could do all this in the set timeframe on top of work + the rest of my life.
Which one of my suggested timeframes are you referring to? If you mean N1 by April then yeah that is probably true. But I hope you don’t mean December 2025 because that would break my heart haha
I am kinda eager to get there faster because I wanna go back sooner.
So, I specifically said “don’t pay attention to the absolute numbers, look at the ratios”. It doesn’t matter if you’re going 5 times faster than a traditional classroom student – if the classroom student took twice as long to go from A to B as it took them to go from B to C, then chances are it will also take you twice as long to go from A to B as it took you to go from B to C.
But it doesn’t much matter – by the time you get to the application date you’ll have a better idea where you are, and the worst case is it costs you an application fee and some time in a test centre.
Ahh, I get your point now. Yes, that would make way more sense to go by ratios instead of the total amount spent!
I have to start tracking my learning time. Are there any tools to do this?
Some calc by chatgpt:
BTW:
I feel I am somewhere close to the peak of Mt. stupid haha
The more vocab and grammar I learn the more I understand while watching anime. But I am kinda smart enough to realize I am on the mountain if that makes sense haha
I hope I can parachute off the mountain and over the valley of despair to the slope of enlightenment. Been there to many times and I don’t like it there.
I’m so curious, what did he do? Was it not enough to get red carded?
Howdy, I found the hardest reading parts to actually be the smaller ones. I thought the longer readings were easiest because they actually explained things using multiple sentences aka difficult in length rather than complexity. The smaller readings were full of analogies and hypothetical things and if your brain is good at that then it works great, but, for me, there were too many times I had to use the 注意 notes written at the end. That jumping back and forth made the smaller paragraphs harder for me because a few had back to back 注意 parts where by the time I finished the sentence I had retained nothing at all.
I just remember one reading was just literally analogy analogy analogy analogy and that’s why people are like that. Something about choices in life? I reread that one 5 times and I still don’t feel confident about it but I knew I was stuck between two choices. That was the reading I was staring at at the end to see if an answer came to me via epiphany.
You do sound like you’re in the honeymoon phase, but with consistent study, amazing things can happen. When I lived in Japan and was studying every day at the library, plus working at a izakaya in the evenings (speaking practice), I went from below N5 to around N3 (JCAT tested, not JLPT) in about 6 months.
Outside of that intense period of study though, my progress has been very slow because of lack of consistency and commitment.
He was inconsiderate the whole exam and they were too lenient with him.
While we were waiting for instructions, he was playing with plastic wrappers, making a really off-putting wet sound with his mouth (lol), and other incessant stuff that made it to hard to mentally prepare and focus. It was loud and everyone was kept turning to see what was going on/indicate it was bothering them.
The invigilators told us not to speak without raising a hand, but he’d speak up and interrupt the instructions to ask inane questions that were written on the board next to them or shared in the main email, or ask to leave to get water. When we were told to put down pencils, he kept instantly calling out after each section (while the papers/question books were still on the desks), “Can I look at my phone now?” “Can I leave now?”
Anyway for the listening section, he raised his hand when the part started where there’s an arrow pointing to a person in a picture and you’re choosing their most appropriate piece of dialogue. He said, “I don’t understand what we’re meant to be doing”
The woman told him she can’t answer that and to please stop.
He got very frustrated about that, and started sighing and groaning. Over the next two questions he starts stomping the ground at a fast enough pace that you can’t really hear anything over it. The woman came over to tell him to stop halfway through the second question. He spends the rest of the section making the same distracting sounds mentioned in the first para, and sighing and playing with the paper loudly over the audio
Haha, I guess I am in the honeymoon phase with Japan not Japanese itself. That will probably change once I understand more and can consume more native content then it will be amazing!
When did you live in Japan? Did you join one of those language schools? How much time did you spend in school vs. working?
That dude sounds like a pain in the ass, I wonder why he wasn’t thrown out.
Today I filled out my application and sent it off! It will be my first time taking the JLPT in December!
I lived in Japan in 2019 and moved around a lot because I was on working holiday visa so could travel and work pretty much wherever I wanted. Stayed in Kochi for 6 months which is where I had the izakaya job; but I never went to language school. I did independent study at the library during the daytime because I was broke and didn’t want to spend money to run the air con haha. Most days I was doing about 3-4 hours with a mix of wanikani, reading, grammar from Tae Kim and Misa Sensei, and watching videos with JP subs.
Sounds great! Living there, studying on your own, and a bit of “baito” haha
I wonder why Kochi, I just had to look it up and see where it is. What was your motivation for going there? Did you go back or plan to? Sorry for all the questions I spend a lot of my free time watching ordinary people living in Japan or traveling through the country. Probably because I want to go back sooo badly.
I had a volunteer placement with a chef in the Kochi-ken countryside. At the end of the 4 weeks, a friend of hers offered me a role at his izakaya in the city so I moved over there and I really liked it, so I stayed :]
It has the advantage of being enough of a city that you can get conveniences, but far enough away from Tokyo/Osaka that you have to use Japanese every day. There isn’t really a gaijin bubble outside of the occasional ALT that you might bump into, so you have to learn Japanese to thrive.
That is interesting and a good choice in case you want to immerse yourself. I just can’t imagine how you managed the day-to-day. You said you were below N5 so barely any Japanese. Most of what you learned you learned there.
Woah, going through the wiki article I found that Nobuo Uematsu was born there!
Hi! I took the JLPT N3 this last Sunday, I think the vocab/grammar part was OK (especially being a lvl 60 WK user 
), but the listening was particularly painful! Anyone else experienced this? 
Also, they did not have A/C in the classroom we took the exam in in Valencia (Spain), and with the windows open it was not great for the audio… hope they put A/C only classrooms for next JLPT! 
Hey !
I will most likely sign up for the December exam in Paris but I don’t yet know what level to take. I’m hesitating between N4 and N3:
I looked at the sample tests and I see that I could very likely pass N4 with a high grade, but on the N3 test I could answer a few questions, but definitely not enough to pass the exam.
So my train of thought is that, maybe by December I will have improved and will be able to take the N3 test ? I genuinely do not know.
Is the N4 degree that useful in the first place ? Or does it start getting useful from N3 or N2 (I mean for employers, is an N4 something they can rely on so they can hire someone ?)
Thank you all very much
We are kinda In the same boat. I opted for the N3 due to the available time till December. According to my calculations, I will be Wanikani level 30 and Bunpro in the middle of doing N2 or even N1 grammar. How and what are you studying for how long per day?
I think that for companies in Japan, the JLPT starts to be relevant starting from N2. On top of that, you need a lot of business-related language knowledge that probably won’t be covered by the JLPT. There is even a separate test for that called BJT.
You won’t find any jobs with an N4 requirement. If you do, it’s probably the only one in the world. lol. You can find some that have an N3 requirement, but they are few and far between. Generally, N2 is the barrier to entry, but if you had to pick between the N4 and N3, the N3 will get you further.