My journey from N5 to N2 in one year (Level 60 post 🎉)

[neoemonk]

I just hit level 20, and WK sent me an email and said I should read. I bought a book back in December for a book club but didn’t stick with it. The threads are still out there though, so I’m wondering if I can just follow along with those for now.

Two lessons a day in Bunpro is really good advice. I’m buried in reviews there right now because I added far too many. I haven’t moved forward in grammar study in months. Previously I had finished Genki II in a classroom setting and I bought a copy of Tobira.

I got here because WK emailed me a community summary. They really are persistent, which I appreciate. Thank you for your inspiring post.

[FlamySerpent]

@neoemonk

The threads are still out there though, so I’m wondering if I can just follow along with those for now.

You for sure can! Also, people are still here, so your questions will be answered pretty quickly. Right now there’s a reread of Kiki if you feel better reading with a group of people^^

@neoemonk

I’m buried in reviews there right now because I added far too many.

One other thing you can do is change the settings for ghost reviews to minimal instead of on. That helped me to get through 200+ review pile, when I felt like I would cheat to not get a ghost review. Now I have it enabled again because I don’t get more than 30-40 a day even with it

Good luck with your studies, I’m glad my post inspired you and I hope it helped a little

[Cristina-Z]

That’s a really awesome journey, as in “awe inspiring”, not just cool, but terrifying and wonderful. Thank you for sharing!

Edit: Oh and congratulations

[neoemonk]

@FlamySerpent

Good luck with your studies, I’m glad my post inspired you and I hope it helped a little

It did help! The 20 lessons a day thing is interesting. I tend to do all of my lessons when I unlock them and then get a chunk of those reviews wrong. Then I got swamped in reviews and burned out!

[FlamySerpent]

@neoemonk

The 20 lessons a day thing is interesting. I tend to do all of my lessons when I unlock them and then get a chunk of those reviews wrong. Then I got swamped in reviews and burned out!

I did the same thing xD I do recommend jp’s guide, it’s basically everything you would need to know about WK, that’s why I didn’t talk about it much at all xD

My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK )

Warning: quite a long post. Skipping it might bring consequences that are as bad as skipping your vocab lessons. It finally happened! Thank you for being on this journey with me [image] I’m finally level 60! I just want to start this post by saying that I’m very grateful for every single one of you. Whether we talk every day or whether we never talked before, thank you for being here on this journey with me One of the best things about Wanik…

[Victor866]

Congratulations!

I barely started but this kind of posts (and obviously my own motives to learn japanese) give me hope to reach level 60 one day.

You made it! Enjoy everything who comes with a languange knowledge

[neoemonk]

@FlamySerpent

One other thing you can do is change the settings for ghost reviews to minimal instead of on.

Thanks again for the advice. I reset them and then set them to minimal just to help with the burden.

[theCatMax]

nice work!!! thank you for sharing this story of burnout and then triumph. it’s super motivating. and thank you for sharing all those links to tools that have helped you! i’d like to give them all a shot. i haven’t started learning grammar yet but i figure i’d better start sooner rather than later, or all those items i’ve burned will eventually unburn themselves in my mind. like you, i want a language to last a lifetime. good luck on N1!!! keep us posted about that!

[johnDoe]

You really boost my will to hit N2/N1, thanks for your thread and advice.

[JackieFrett]

Thank you for sharing your experience and congratulations!

This 60 lvl posts are huge contribution to our common success - it helps us to realize it’s actually possible to get there!

Good luck on JLPT!

P.S.: Nechaeva’s book had made my eyes bleed as well. Even Minna no Nihongo, which is written entirely in Japanese, is simplier for understanding than her explanations.

[extremedonkey]

Thanks for sharing your journey dude, I just (barely) passed N4 earlier this year and have been looking at how I can improve my study technique and using N3 as a bit of a goalpost. I was heading over for a study / working holiday tour in July, but doesn’t seem so likely now!

My partner also bought me Tobirama for my birthday (although she got me the Grammar one only…), after reading your post and given I’m not under the same hurry for N3 that I was for N4 I think I’ll stick with that, and maybe flip to Kanzen master closer come exam time.

I’ve learned about Bunpro and Kitsun from your post and they both close big gaps I’ve had in my approach. The last is probably actual conversing with Japanese people, I’m thinking about trying a few people on italki, although my conversational ability is trash.

My only question now is how to juggle WK, Kitstune and Bunpro in a nice daily routine on top of everything else in life!

So yeah just wanted to say thanks, you obviously spent a lot of time writing this and it has been helpful

And well done on your own journey smashing everything out, that’s amazing progress in a very short amount of time! Good luck with N1!

[Alexjapan12]

This is a really late response but I just wanted to ask how many hours were you doing a day to achieve this? I want to try and get to n3 from where I’m at now(n5) for the end of year jlpt so I’m using genki and wanikani rn and ill switch to tobira after but given the speed you were doing genki chapters at it seems I should maybe be doing it fast to achieve my goal. Also when did you start reading japanese material?

[FlamySerpent]

I think I spent basically the whole day working on Japanese, but it did help me to get an hour break during lunch and stop later in the evening, excluding reading. So it’d be around a couple of hours for SRSing on WK, Bunpro and Kitsun, a couple of hours for reading and then a couple more+ for grammar studies in the middle of the day. I really love learning languages, so I tried and try spending all my free time on them

I started reading almost immediately, but that was very painful xD I didn’t mind looking up basically every single word but it can be really daunting and discouraging. I’d recommend looking into this amazing thread - Comparison of Book Club Picks and see the comparisons^^

I started with Yotsuba (with the help of the vocab list) and 時をかける少女, which gave me a biiig boost. You can see the books I read and the order here if you’re interested FlamySerpent - 読書メーター But I’d recommend reading whatever interests you, some people like NHK easy, for example, or playing JRPGs, to each their own!

[Alexjapan12]

Thank you for the reply, props to you I have qn abundance of free time rn but i dont think I could be that disciplined, out of curiosity do you think theres a point of doing kitsun for vocab for the early jlpts?, when I went on there and saw the lists there were so many words that wanikani teach eventually and I’m currently going through genki to see the non kanji words

[phairyn-rose]

Not the person you asked but I think it’s up to you if you find it helpful to drill those vocab or not. If you want a vocab deck that excludes them, you can use Torii, which has a setting to turn off all vocab taught through WaniKani.

[FlamySerpent]

@Alexjapan12

out of curiosity do you think theres a point of doing kitsun for vocab for the early jlpts?

I’d go for the 10k deck, which is what I did, it has a WK tag so you can hibernate all of those if you want, or go by L1-L60 tags which are the words that contain kanji from those levels. I was adding words specifically from N2 this spreadsheet (Wanikani vs JLPT - Full Data - Google Sheets) that were above my level before JLPT

10k also has great audio questions and sentences cards where you can practice your listening (and reading too for the latter). That helped me a lot with leeches from WK and I think with listening on JLPT too

[Alexjapan12]

Apologies but I promise this is the last question lol. I’ve decided to try something similar( start studying around 6 hours daily) how did you allocate your time? I’m not sure whether I should spend most of this time going through textbooks or using anki seeing as I dont want to start reading native material until I’m around n4

[FlamySerpent]

No worries! I’d say that both grammar and vocab are equally important, maybe grammar is a bit more needed in the beginning. After you go through N3, you are mostly done imo, the majority of common grammar points are in N5-3 levels. I do encounter N2-1 grammar points sooometimes, but very rarely and mostly in fixed expressions, I think They are probably more common in novels if that’s your goal:)

Looking up grammar while reading was so much harder because I didn’t know if it was a word or a grammar point and where did it even start So being familiar with those makes vocab your only problem (kanji is taken care of by WK, so you’re good ) and that’s not that bad imo, that’s basically just like any other language^^ My “speedrunning” way had its ups and downs, I’m not really able to use any of those grammar points that I learned and I know them only superficially, but that was never my goal, I just wanted to read:D

Hopefully it goes well for you! Don’t forget to take breaks and make it fun for yourself, having a goal of doing something in Japanese helped me a lot, like playing some games or reading manga in it

[dz4vr]

Ну что ж, привет

[bksiddharth]

Omedeto gozaimasu.