Hello everyone, I’m new to Wanikani and I started my language journey in late September. My goal is to reach N4 by December 2024 for the JLPT. I wanted to ask if this plan is doable or if I should wait another year and try the N3 in 2025.
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Ahoy!
How doable it is depends on how much effort you put in and how quickly you pick things up really, but N4 in about 10 months doesn’t sound outlandish at all. I never took an official test, but I did self-score an older N4 exam and passed quite comfortably, I think about a year into my Japanese learning journey with honestly not too much effort spent.
You’ve already got material for listening practice at least, that’ll help 
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Thank you so much for the feedback! Also, yes yes that is true! 
My plan is to focus on kanji first then move on to grammar and vocab (I saw on the Tofugu guide that it recommends you to reach level 10 on Wanikani before starting grammar studies). P.S. Nice to see a fellow Holofan on here 
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Ignore that. There’s really no reason to put it off.
If anything, I’d probably advise going for basic vocab and grammar over kanji, early on - your goal is to be able to understand written and spoken Japanese, not to be able to recognise individual kanji. Learning kanji can help that, but it’s not the main goal, so why make it the focus of your studies?
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That is true, thank you once again for the feedback! I was thinking of using Bunpro as my main grammar resource, but I read that many people prefer to use Genki instead (so I am lost as to what resource to use lol XD). What source would you recommend a beginner to use when starting grammar studies? As for vocabulary, I am thinking of using Anki or Kitsun as I’ve heard good reviews from both applications.
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Just to make sure: JLPT is held on the first Sunday in July (and December fwiw) so August would be a tad too late 
For everything else I agree with what @yamitenshi said 
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Bunpro worked pretty well for me up until halfway through N3 - and it’s not really that it stopped working for me, I just kinda lost interest in it 
It’s not the best at teaching, I’ll admit, but it’ll teach you to recognise grammar points at least. Then once you get some vocab under your belt too you can supplement it with reading, learning grammar in context is going to be way better than what any textbook is going to give you.
That said, the most important thing is to find something that works for you. Just because Bunpro worked for me, that doesn’t mean it’s going to work just as well for you.
For vocab, Anki or Kitsun are going to work just fine. Grab one of the core decks (Core 2.3k/Core 6k/ Core 10k/ whatever versions there are) - they’re the most common however many words, in order, from most common to least common, so you’re going to learn the most useful stuff first. No point going the whole 10k, IMO, but getting 1000-1500 words down gives you a decent foundation to start learning by immersion - reading stuff, listening to stuff, and looking up what you don’t know basically. You can then add that to an Anki deck or Kitsun deck if you want to, but I never bothered with that personally. Would’ve made the learning faster, but I could just never be arsed.
Though all in all, the most important thing is that you pick something, anything, and just do it. You can always switch methods if something doesn’t work with you, but anything is going to teach you more than doing nothing will. Time spent worrying about the best way to learn is time spent not learning.
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Ohh thank you for letting me know! My goal is n4 in December then 
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Thank you so much again for the advice! I will make sure to note this in my study plan!
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Love this line! Also this is so true for me
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100%, but it is worth revisiting and revising your methods once in a while. God knows my self-built SRS is an ungodly frankenstinian creation at this point, but it does work.
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Oh absolutely. That it’s time spent not learning doesn’t always mean it’s not time worth spending. But it’s so easy to get bogged down in wondering what to do that you don’t end up doing anything, and… honestly, if you’re just starting, it doesn’t really matter what you pick, because the only way you’ll find out what works is by doing something.
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I agree 100% with this as well!
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Yes, I agree on this too!
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Yes, I realised this recently with vocab - I was getting so caught up on ‘completely’ mining various manga that I was missing the point that I could just start digging just about anywhere and still be finding ridiculously common words it was ‘worth’ incorporating into my memory corpus, and I wouldn’t get hella bored.
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Yeah, it really is easy to get lost in the rabbit hole of knowledge
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tl;dr Learning too much is better than learning too little, even if you ended up forgetting some.
Also, don’t build an SRS T_T
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The old adage holds true everywhere - perfect is the enemy of good
I’m guilty of that myself - I’ve got a tendency to be all or nothing about everything, but that also means it’s easy to not realise when something’s good enough, and instead if I can’t do something all the way, perfectly, I end up not doing it at all. Which is silly if you think about it, but somehow that’s how it ends up if I’m not very careful and constantly reminding myself it’s okay if something’s just good.
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The Japanese Language Education Center claims an estimated 575-1000 hours of studying is needed to reach N4, assuming no prior kanji knowledge. Theoretically, you could comfortably hit N4 in one year only studying 2 hours a day! N3 by comparison would typically take 950-1700 hours.
Totally doable goal 
I used Genki + Bunpro, Bunpro has a specific path for Genki so you can reinforce grammar as you learn it there.
Genki is so popular that many people have made great tools to go along it. Those tools are so great, that I ended up using them and not really opening the actual book anymore. (So basically you can skip the step where you buy the book and use the resources for free). Also the kanji always come with furigana (the hiragana on top to know how to read them), so no need to worry about your Wanikani level, you can start the grammar now and do Wanikani on the side at your pace.
The way to do Genki, without buying Genki, is as follow.
For each lesson, first watch the video of TokiniAndy on youtube go through it:
Then do the exercises for the lesson on this website:
Then next lesson
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