I’ve seen other such charts or guidelines around the internet, but this one from Coto Academy says it generally takes about 3900 hours for those without prior kanji knowledge to pass the JLPT N1.
I’m taking the N2 this year and I have studied a total of 1600 focused hours over the course of almost 10 years to this point. I am generally shooting for the guideline listed here of about 2200 hours by December, which should be doable. But then I’d like to take N1 next year and I don’t feel like I can make the jump from 2200 study hours to 3900 study hours in a single year.
- Do you have a rough estimate of your study hours prior to passing N1?
- If you took both N2 and N1, were you able to pass N1 within one year of N2? How many N1 attempts did it take to pass?
- Do you think these hours studied guidelines are helpful or trash?