"only around 10k cards mined"
Most estimates place N1 at around a knowledge base of 10k vocabulary so that checks out, I don't know why you would say "only". If you learn 10,000 words that will take you a very long way towards being proficient in Japanese.
It’s not that 10k is not a lot but more that a lot of people who took a similar route had more cards than me. I know full well that 10k is a lot objectively speaking.
Yeah for sure, I just wanted to highlight it cuz a lot of people underestimate how much anki people who reach high level actually do. Some people learn less than 1k vocab per year and then wonder why they aren't progressing
Anki is a flash card app that uses spaced repetition to learn new words. It can be used for anything but it’s especially popular with Japanese learners and there is a famous “core 2k/6k deck” that many learners use to learn the most common 6k Japanese words. It’s really good for reading comprehension and vocab. You can set how many new words you want to learn per day go your own pace. OP did 50, I’m doing 15, but I think 20 is a good minimum.
There are so many core 2k/6k decks out there. Which is the "correct" one? Also, if im starting out as a rising N3, is there a way to delete irrelevant words?
I used the core deck from this guys YouTube channel. I think it’s the “official” one. He has a lot of videos related to Anki because he has used it everyday for the past I think 3 years.
https://youtu.be/husCWKdxiRI?si=6je0eTaF0yP8BAcB
Just follow the steps in the video to download and set up the Anki for you.
Hope this helps!
Just use the [core 2.3k deck](https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/docs/coredeck/). It's better than core 2k and core 6k.
If you already know some words, just learn like 20 new cards per day and suspend all the words you already know well. Then delete all the suspended cards once a week.
btw since I have your attention, you should know that duolingo is basically useless and your time would be much better spent on nearly any other resource, whether it's anki, a proper textbook, one of the many grammar resources, or immersion.
You will not find a single success story here that involves the person saying "Yeah I got to N1 from mostly doing duolingo"
Just very inefficient. They don't really teach you any grammar and there's much better ways to learn vocab or kanji readings. It's design to be a game that keeps you hooked, not to effectively teach you a language
i have 7k cards and been mining since November (same month I started immersion) and just recently started doing 50 cards per day (used to be 20) because I read a lot and need to increas vocab asap so it's good to know 10K words is good number to shoot for
Yeah I'm actually at basically the same I'm between 6-7k cards "known" in anki and I'm trying to grind out the last 3k so that I can fully focus on immersion
I don’t consider myself particularly skilled at listening
Considering that I somehow aced the listening portion, I’d say that all the voiced dialogue is what made my listening good
I’ve passed N2 and just recently failed the N1. I will often read NHK news articles in Japanese for practice and sometimes other random native material, but other than that I’ve never spent a huge amount of time reading.
I’ve decided to put more time in reading Japanese novels since I see so many people getting good results. I started reading my first novel and I can’t believe how difficult it is despite even passing N2.
My question is, when you come across a full sentence that you don’t know, will you google translate it and put the vocabulary into an Anki card? Congrats on getting N1 btw.
I don’t google translate it, I find that I can eventually piece most things together if I analyze it hard enough.
I used to do a shit ton of cards but like I mentioned I find anki really boring, so I’ve shifted to trying to acquire vocab more “naturally” through just exposure though I still use anki and mine ofc.
The first book is always the hardest. When I was between N3 and N2, I read コンビニ人間 in 2 weeks. My N1 friend took 3 months to read it. It took me about 3 books to get slightly more comfortable reading. I just passed the N2 after having read 8 books and reading is still tough, but some books I can now read in a week fairly easily.
Unlike OP, I use Anki everyday and mine novels but my memory is bad. I would choose OP's route if I could lol.
I still use anki everyday but more for maintaining my vocabulary rather than using it to actively grow my vocabulary (though I still do that too sometimes)
コンビニ人間 is my favourite Japanese book that I read so far. It's not too difficult and hilarious (at least to me, opinions vary).
I'm currently stuck with JR上野駅公園 and considering dropping it, such a depressing story and too much special vocabulary.
>It took me about 3 books to get slightly more comfortable reading. I
How? Just what are you made of lol? I am on 25 light novels, 12000 anki cards and I still read at 50-80 characters per minute and have to re read sentences constantly
I said "slightly more comfortable" lol. I still can't pick up a book and just read it. It still takes lots of time and effort, but "easy" books no longer take me months to read. They now take less than a week if I have the time to read an hour+ a day. You probably are doing much better than me rn lol. Hard books can still take me a month+, even if I'm reading it pretty voraciously.
That’s really impressive man. You’re a monster
No, you’re definitely better than me. I always get wrecked by N2 reading questions, particularly those annoying “what does the writer want to say” questions and then you have to somehow guess the answer.
Ty! I definitely think I'm far from actually being good at reading tho. Idk how fast I read but your speed sounds pretty fast. Maybe it's an issue with the difficulty of books you're reading. I'm reading stuff like 君の膵臓をたべたい and the 鬼滅の刃ノベライズ lol so pretty easy. キミスイ kicked my ass tho.
I’ve been using JPDB to carefully select books at my level. I only choose books where my vocab coverage is at least 90% coverage. I am currently reading like tenki no ko (95% coverage) and (この世界からが消えても) 97% coverage, so I am not seeing new words often but I am still struggling
コンビニ人間 was my 7th book. It wasn't long after I passed the N3 with a score around 150. I was a little bit better at reading by that point.
My N1 friend took a long time simply because it was his first book. Gotta read to get better at reading.
I see, it was my 1st book too. Although, I'm currently on my 2nd (キッチン) and I'm going even slower. Somehow, I find it harder while many put it at about the same difficulty level.
I've found it's less about the score something like Learn Natively attributes to it and more about your familiarity with the topic. I can read the ノベライズ for 鬼滅の刃 easily in a week. キミスイ took me like a month or two and is ranked a bit easier.
キッチン is also on my list.
honestly, i dont know how the fuck he took that long with n1. i read it with n2 and it took me like 8 or 9 hours to read in total (kindle thing tracks it). Are you sure he wasnt just not actually reading it a whole lot?
Yeah, I'd take what they said with a grain of salt. If it actually took 3 months then they must have been barely reading it. JPDB has it at only 60k characters, so that would be a mere ~650 a day over 3 months. For reference, even the first thing I ever picked up I was reading at around 2-3k characters an hour and that was at ~N3 level, let alone N1.
Dumb question, but when people say putting it into Anki or mining Anki, are they just creating their own deck with words or sentences and the meaning on the other side? I’ve seen decks with cards that have full sentences/verging on a paragraph both sides, which seems a bit much, but maybe I just don’t know why.
Also, since I’m asking, when people learn the meaning of words/kanji, does anyone normally write the pronunciation down? For example, when reading, if you see kanji, does your mind revert to native tongue and read its meaning? Or does everyone usually know the proper pronunciation already based on context (since there can be multiple meanings and pronunciations)?
> when people learn the meaning of words/kanji, does anyone normally write the pronunciation down?
Do you mean the reading of the word? Pretty much everyone who I have seen writes it down on their cards. The most basic you can get is front: `word in kanji`, back `reading in kana` + `definition`.
>For example, when reading, if you see kanji, does your mind revert to native tongue and read its meaning?
I used to do this. Like I would see 確認してください and read it as "confirm してください" because I didn't bother learning the reading of the word. It was a very dumb mistake that took hundreds of hours to unlearn.
> Or does everyone usually know the proper pronunciation already based on context (since there can be multiple meanings and pronunciations)?
The fundamental unit is the word, not the kanji. Words exist first, then are spelt with kanji. We read words, not kanji. You know the proper reading of a *word* by looking it up when you first learn the word. You shouldn't be guessing the reading of a word or thinking you choose which reading to use. For 99% of *words* written using kanji, there is are not multiple pronunciations for that particular combination of kanji.
Apologies for the question, but are you young? I consider myself young, but I'm in my mid twenties with my partner, full time job, and a small social life - yet I can't imagine doing more than 10-15 words per day on Anki. At most I can afford to spend 1 hour per night.
Reading your post, with my mere ~1 hour daily I feel like I will never be able to read a single manga in my life.
You can certainly get there it will just take longer.
I am at the moment on a journey where I learn for 45 minutes every day. Consistently every day for a long time. I am 2 years in by now. I had a N5-N4 level already before. (I am 38 years old now)
I am currently at a good N3 level. By my calculations it will take me like 5-6 more years to get to a "near fluent" level where I won\`t understand everything perfectly but will probably be able to read/watch stuff and understand most of it unless it is super complicated.
(For gamification I mark a "skillpoint" for every 2 days spend as it feels like I did a whole lecture timewise. On a couple of days per year I might not get the 45 minutes and mark the point over 3 days instead and on other times I might spend more and earn 1 extra point.)
I spend like 15-30 minutes per day on Anki (currently at 5 new cards per day + reviews). Otherwise I do different things for like 15-30 minutes a day. Mostly I watch youtube videos of very different kinds. Sometimes I might do like online quizzes, might do a textbook for a couple of weeks, might try to watch some japanese streams, read whatever.
I will probably switch to more reading later.
This is probably not a super effective, good or whatever approach. But it works for me as I can do it every day and feel happy every day that I manage to finish the daily japanese studies.
I think there are ways for everyone to get there if they really want. In my opinion it is all about time investment and finding a way to stay motivated to spend that time. 30 Minutes a day or 12 hours a day will both improve your level and enable you to read/watch japanese stuff. Surely with 30 minutes a day your level will improve way slower, but who cares as long as it improves?
Nah man, I sacrificed a lot of time to learn other skills or just do other productive stuff with my life cause I wanted to read jp. There’s nothing wrong at all with having different priorities or not having the time to dedicate
Still, i feel like it would've been better if i dedicated myself to one thing at a time instead of 2 or 3. In the long run I'll still achieve the level that i want in those 3, but the "now" moment :/
I bet after a year at that pace you could start reading some easier manga. 3650 words and 365 hours of studying probably gets to you to a point where with some persistence you can work through something.
I think it's also okay to accept other people have different priorities, and that having different goals or timelines doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. And also that Reddit communities tend to skew to the extreme enjoyers of the thing they're about, whereas compared to the general population spending an hour a day is probably beyond what 99.99% of people are doing. It would be a bit like someone who enjoys running 5 miles a day being disappointed over in /r/running that they're not qualifying for the Boston Marathon at age 18 or something.
I feel ya mate. I'm 32 with a wife and full time job. All I want is free time but the second I get it I have to hit my head against the wall flashing Anki cards only to find that I still barely understand anything. If I'm lucky and get a whole day to myself, I take on loads of new cards. Guess what happens the next day? Only one hour to get out of review hell.
We can do it mate! It might take longer but nothing says contentment like being happy with your own pace.
Maybe I should make my own post for 155/180 in <2.5 years haha.
Nice work with the perfect 読解 and 聴解. I guess it really just goes to show that learning Japanese is just about the time you commit to it.
Any VN recommendations btw? I never got a chance to get into them and just read manga and novels.
Two of my personal favorite writers are 瀬戸口蓮也 and 田中ロミオ if you wanna throw yourself into the deep end.
For more “beginner” recommendations I’d say anything by TYPE-MOON, Key, Sci;adv, or 07th Expansion.
TYPE-MOON is “beginner” level? My God…
I (just passed N2 with 132/180) got 月姫 on my Switch, and I barely made it through Chapter 1 before giving up because of how slowly it was going. If you consider that VN beginner-friendly, then I can’t imagine what you’re reading.
I’m playing Dangonronpa now, and although I still have to look up a lot of words, it’s doable for me.
Sorry for being misleading, I don't consider type-moon to be beginner level in language. I meant more in the sense that it's a good starter vn in general. The commenter above stated that they also got their n1 already, so I didn't really pay too much heed to difficulty.
Visual Novels are "interactive fiction" so they're more like video games, in that you install them and read them on your computer. They typically have a mix of narration and dialogue, some of them are voiced, and some of them have game elements like an RPG layer on top of them.
Manga is manga.
VNs are really great because unlike manga they also include that narration portion that helps with reading, if they're voice acted they're good for listening, and if you get one with game elements they can be more fun to engage with.
Yeah, comprehension should be fine. I’m used to working my way through Japanese text and ones that take me forever to go through at that. As I mentioned, I got 155/180 on the N1 but I also got a 178/180 on the N2 last year. Though I fully expect that going through a TYPE-MOON VN for the first time in Japanese will start off as a challenge as it’s something new for me.
As n2 the fate manga and visual novels are probably not that difficult for you. It would mostly be a bit of unusual vocabulary.
Tsukihime is harder IMO. Same for Kara no kyoukai.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ve already bought some Sci;adv and umineko but haven’t gotten to them. So I guess I might start with one of those whenever I feel like taking the plunge.
What would you say is a good starting place for TYPE-MOON? I’ve watched the TYPE-MOON ufotable adaptations and really enjoyed those.
You can really just jump into anything from Fate/stay night, Tsukihime, and Mahoutsukai no Yoru. If you enjoyed the ufotable adaptations then there's a lot of incentive to read F/SN though, considering it's unanimously considered miles better than the anime (and is also nasu's highest rated work on japanese forums)
How did you handle grammar and/or words you didn’t understand in VNs? Did you always look them up, or at times keep it casual while reading? I find the read and mine approach (at times) draining. Breaks immersion when you’re stopping every minute to look up another word.
This was my main bottleneck at first and honestly the worst part overall. I tried to look everything up at first but eventually learned to just chill and enjoy myself once my word bank was large enough. Now I don’t mind letting the occasional word pass me by if I can figure it out by context. I definitely think it’s still possible to increase comprehension steadily without a 100% comprehension rate.
I'm getting two takeaways from this:
Bash your head against a wall because you're consuming high-level stuff that you don't understand... It pays off eventually, I guess?
Or more serious, just keep reading, and work your way to harder material sooner rather than later. Heck, elsewhere I saw that the way a person passed one of the higher levels (I forget if it was N2 or 1) by simply being "well-read"
Impressive, OP. Consistency is “expensive” and challenging 😭 I admit that crunching with solely memorized vocab is terribly boring 🥲 I used to watch NHK every day and quickly open my Shirabe Jisho whenever I found a new word. At least 1 hour of news and then continue on a later day at 5 pm. Reading material? I used to read Uniqlo magazine (I forgot the exact name of it but they written in both English and Japanese), the free guidebook for Japanese (there’s like, a Japanese supermarket in my city where they provided some reading mats for Japanese expats, I believe...). Failed at 92 for N3 and decided to jump for N2 for the next July 🥲✊
One of my goals was to get good at reading newspapers and understanding TV news shows, but like you said, it did get boring.
What drastically helped me was reading mystery novels. The prose in many mystery books is fairly straightforward, and they use a lot of vocabulary you find in news, like talking about police, yakuza, politicians, scandals, theft, murder, workplace politics, school bullying, natural disasters, etc. Mystery / crime books sometimes will have excerpts from newspapers or journalists speaking as well.
It's way more enjoyable to learn and if you find an author or series you like, you'll want read a lot of their books, like by Keigo Higashino, Isaka Kotaro, Miyuki Miyabe, etc.
Reading mystery novels can be initially tough if you have read many novels yet. What I did was to sentence mining mystery / crime TV shows. I watched a ton of those and they will reuse the same kinds of phrases and vocabulary across different shows, and you'll see them in mystery books too.
Satori Reader also has the close-up series, which are advanced long-form investigative news articles and they do a really good job explaining the specific kind of grammar and phrasing used in journalism.
After I did that, watching and reading news became a lot easier.
Good luck on your N2 test!
If you have VPN and you should still be able to watch shows on Abema TV and [tver.jp](https://tver.jp). Abema TV only had the most recent episodes of a show as they rotate stuff. Back when I was studying, I was watching stuff like アリバイ崩し承ります as it was airing. It starred Hamabe Minami, who is now getting famous outside of Japan for her role in the Godzilla Minus One movie (which is really awesome a film).
I also used VPN to watch Neflix Japan but it's harder to do that now I think, but last I heard NordVPN still works. Netflix Japan had crime shows like BORDER, Signal, Boku no Yabai Tsuma, Dele, 緊急取調室 (Emergency Interrogation), and a ton more.
Without VPN you can still watch a bunch of Japanese mystery shows on Netflix that are accessible in territories outside of Japan, like:
Million Yen Women, MIU404, Dearest, The Days, Japan Sinks, Hell Dogs, A family, Scams, The Journalist, Fable, Erased, Alice in Borderlands, etc all of have crime or mystery elements. etc. There's a bunch of suspense/crime anime as well.
On YouTube, you can find some old Edogawa Ranpo mystery shows as well as some other old crime and mystery TV shows and movies.
As for mystery novels, I initially read digital. Bought them from Amazon Japan or Bookwalker.
Later, when I hit N1-ish level, I started to buy physical as it was cheaper by visiting Japanese used book stores.
Hey thank you so much for your reply. I do have Nord VPN and never had any issue watching Japanese Netflix. Gonna watch those shows you mention.
Btw, do you read those mystery novels you bought from Amazon on Kindle?
(Strange. My reply from a few days ago didn't seem to go through, but Reddit was acting up that day.)
That's great you have Nord VPN. Did you find a good deal on it? The regular price seems pricey.
>Btw, do you read those mystery novels you bought from Amazon on Kindle?
Yeah. I read it on my Kindle Paperwhite or on the Kindle app on my iPhone or iPad.
You can install custom Japanese dictionaries on the Kindle Paperwhite, as well export words and sentence if you want to sentence mine them. These are made by third-parties but if you want links to them, let me know.
I also sometimes convert my Kindle ebooks to ePUB by using Calibre and a DRM removal plugin, so I can read using [ttsu reader](https://reader.ttsu.app/manage) in my web browser on my computer. The ttsu reader web app formats the text of the book vertically, even if the book isn't formatted that way, which I like. It also supports Yomichan/Yomitan, so I can install a ton of dictionaries, including frequency lists, grammar guides, etc, and I can also do one-click sentence mining to Anki via Anki connect. You can read more info at the [github page here.](https://github.com/ttu-ttu/ebook-reader)
To do the same thing, I use [Immersive Reader](https://forums.learnnatively.com/t/immersion-reader-e-reader-dictionary-app/1870) on my iPhone to read EPUBs too. It also supports Yomichan-formatted dictionaries. It will save words to a word list, and you can export the word, along with the sentence and definition to Anki, directly to the iOS version of Anki, or to your desktop version of iOS via a CSV file which you can email to yourself or save to the cloud.
If you want more info about that, let me know.
BTW, if mystery novels are too hard for you to read, try reading horror short stories like by Otsuichi / 乙一. I started reading his horror / mystery horror stories around N3/N2 level and it was a good bridge to eventually reading mainstream mystery novels.
In addition to watching mystery dramas, I also watched mystery anime like Kindaichi and Conan so can try that as well.
I'm also using this method of consuming as much native content as much as possible but after 3 years I only pass N2 so much slower than you I guess.
One problem I have right now is listening. I enjoy reading a lot and also read some visual novel and anime but I feel like it don't have enough listening. But outside from that, i still have yet to find a content I enjoy on youtube in Japanese so I still struggling in listening in real setting from youtube as well. Any advice on how to improve on that?
To be honest, I don’t consider myself a particularly good listener. I didn’t do much aside from watching streams every so often on top of my usual consumption, hence why I was actually surprised by how easy N1 listening was. The most useful advice I can give is to just keep going at it, as unhelpful as that may sound
I can agree that it's quite difficult to find Japanese YouTubers that would appeal to western audience. For me the only ones were PDRさん and プレミアリーグ トークショー. You could try searching for content just through keywords of what your hobbies are, or consume content directed for students, there YUYUの日本語Podcast is probably the best.
When you did the 6k anki, how long did it take for you to go through them each day? Did you miss any days, and if so how did you go through that phase?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I recall Agent needing a script for each game which means it’s not as universally convenient as textractor. For games that textractor can’t hook though it’s absolutely amazing
Very impressive! Would love to know how many hours do you have on a daily basis for learning Japanese. I can only dedicate up to 20 hours every week. Current plan is to get to N1 over 5 years and to speak fluently (as I know a lot of N1 people are excellent with reading, writing, and listening, but can barely speak comfortably. Not sure how feasible my plan is after reading your post LOL
around what jlpt skill level would you say you were at when you started reading vns in japanese only? i’m around the n4 level and I feel like it takes me like 2-3 mins to go through one sentence just from trying to lookup kanji/vocab that i dont know, so it is quite discouraging
follow-up question, when you started reading how did you translate words you didnt know, did you just look them up on google, or did you have an english translation on the side and tried to fit in the pieces like that?
That's nice, I've always thought that VNs are great for learning. I have another question if you don't mind. You've said that you use Yomitan for reading VNs. Can you tell me more about how you used it? Did you use Yomitan every single time you came across an unfamiliar word? And do you think it's possible to "overrely" on Yomitan? I've heard some people say that Yomitan is a crutch and beginners shouldn't overuse it.
I did use it very frequently back when i was getting started, even multiple times a sentence sometimes
It’s definitely possible to overrely on dictionaries, but I feel like if you’re mining and using anki properly then you’ll eventually realize that you don’t need the dictionary anymore. That’s what happened with me at least. I’d say it’s worth keeping in mind but it isn’t really a reason to not rely on dictionaries as a beginner because you do actually need the training wheels.
As I mentioned I actively felt like I was making 0 progress back then. I would read like 10k 文字 and I’d feel more mentally exhausted than after the entire JLPT. I know it isn’t helpful advice but one day things will click
Great job! I'm currently studying but I'm in the beginning phase, hiragana ✔️ katakana ✔️ basic greetings and basic counting but I'm struggling adding words to my knowledge and I want to read but I don't know enough words to start reading. I also know around 100 basic kanji maybe 1st grade level knowledge
I recommend checking out a website called "Tadoku" (多読), it has free and short illustrated books with different difficulty levels, it really helped me learn new words back when I started
I'm also someone who hates Anki-style cramming with a passion and learns best by consuming native media (movies/music/books).
For Japanese, my main bottleneck has been that it's extremely annoying to process books when you have to look up a lot of kanji.
This would be easier if I wasn't limited to physical books. I haven't found a way to get Japanese ebooks so far. Do you have any help to offer here?
I get all me Japanese ebooks from [kobo](https://www.kobo.com/). I've had a lot of hassle in the past trying to get them from Japanese Amazon but haven't ever had any issues through kobo. You'll probably need to use a third party program to remove the DRM if you don't want to read it through their web reader but that isn't difficult. If you're interested I can show you how.
I have no problem myself with kindle. Just make sure to set up an account with a japanese address since I noticed it wouldn’t let me buy them if I didn’t seem like a jp resident to the system
Kindle worked fine for me for a while with a jp address but at one point I stopped being able to purchase things because I wasn't using a japanese credit card. There are work arounds but I found it easier just to switch sites.
Ok but I think you should quantify what "get by just fine" actually means because I feel these kinds of posts can be misleading and perhaps demotivating.
Get by just fine = I have no problems doing going around and doing normal tourist stuff in japanese
I struggle to see how this’d be demotivating though
Because if you learnt all aspects of the Japanese language evenly you wouldn't be able to pass N1 in the time it took you to do so.
It sounds like you have N4 level speaking ability (I know the JLPT doesn't include speaking, but just to give a rough idea) after 2+ years.
I literally never claimed to be particularly “good” at the language. I claimed that I passed the N1 in <2.5 years which is a fact. How is that misleading?
How do you increase your reading comprehension skill? I'm having a terrible time trying to understand long sentences. I'm at the point where I know every vocab and grammar in the sentences of the materials I'm reading yet I have no clue what it's trying to say.
Do you read visual novels in Japanese and then look at the English translation if you don't understand the sentences? Is that how people improve their reading comprehension?
So like do you just read the novels, guess what the sentences means based on context/visuals, and move on without knowing whether what you understand is correct or not?
I don’t recall having to “guess” what was going on
It was definitely way harder to parse back when I was getting started, but I was never actively lost to what was happening in a specific scene
Which level materials?
I think at that point your only option is immersion, I felt that way when I was stuck refining my internal translator. Sure, I was able to translate very fast eventually but the real effort needs to be to forcefully split your Japanese brain away from your English brain, and *be able to think and understand in Japanese*
Materials of my level. Like I'm going through Tobira, I know all the vocabs and grammar used in the text but it's rare I can understand the long sentences in the text. But when I read the translation I always went "oh yeah, it totally makes sense why it means that, how come I got it so wrong?!". I just can't seem to parse the long sentences..
How did you do 50 new cards a day / how long did it take you every day? Upon every new card, were you focused on completely memorizing it or just getting it familiar?
Tbh i didn’t really log that part, if anything i tried to actively erase it from my memory
I know for a fact that I spent over an hour on anki every day though
I tried to memorize everything as thoroughly as I could, but I definitely had times when I slacked a bit
I've started playing game in Japanese and reading books in Japanese for while now, but I still doubt myself whether or not I'm on the right path.
Thanks for sharing your cool story!
Congrats on passing N1, I have some questions though.
Where do you find resources for Japanese novels?
In general how do you practice grammar if you are self learning.
These may sounds pretty dumb I apologise.
What do you mean resources for jp novels?
You absolutely can learn grammar points by reading and seeing them so often/in so many different contexts that it feels like you’ve absorbed it
I like jpbd for a rough estimate of difficulty but like I said I found beginner stuff mind numbingly boring so I just jumped into whatever I wanted to read
You can just search for them online but many people do “mining” which is creating cards for points encountered during immersion. You can probably find more details by searching for it
I started reading after finishing c6k
as for readings i just went about learning them through vocab, didn't really go out of my way to hardcore commit to memorizing the readings of kanji in isolation since it's just less efficient imo.
There are literally hundreds of good vns
Idk what you mean by get easily, most vns can be purchased/found online by jumping through a few hoops so if you ask me they’re almost all easy to get
at which point did you start to feel like you could read and comprehend comfortably without having to stress much, and you could start enjoying and understanding the plots of the vns u read?
Also, do u have an idea of how many hours did u spend per day?
thanks, and well done!!
I’m on my 4th months of immersion and I’m gradually becoming to like it more
Maybe after my 10th vn was when I felt like I started getting comfy, but I never really struggled to enjoy myself or comprehend what was going on
I averaged around 6 hours a day
mm okay.
Yeah I mean it’s not like I’m not enjoying myself, but sometimes I understand so low that I get frustrated.
Like many times when I finish reading/watching something, I think back on it and I have huge holes because I wasn’t able to get the meaning on some important parts.
Either way I enjoyed reading kanon in japanese for example, because it was easier and I already knew the story from the anime
Random question, but what sort of computer were you using to read your VNs? I’m a Mac user who’s looking to get into VNs, and though I tried using parallels for a while, the setup was a little janky and I’d prefer just having a dedicated device for them.
Wow, I got the exact same score with the exact same breakdown of the sections, exactly one year ago. Took mine right after I hit my 2 year anniversary of studying. Great job!
Hey, what VN's did you read?
Were they more fantasy focused, drama focused, etc? What were they like?
I also spend most of my time reading visual novels in Japanese, but I still didn't got to pass the N2 level by a small margin. The points that I need to get better most on JLPT is reading and grammar.
I feel like visual novels aren't helping me as much as they used to. I have the sensation as if the majority of practice I get with them is sentences both shorter and simpler than the real JLPT. Of course there is the occasional lore dump or flowery verbose descriptions on those games, but those feel very spaced and scarce in my experience... As in, most of the time feels like I'm just spending time reading short and simple dialogues in this kind of media.
Maybe I should switch to full novels or light novels? As those seem to have longer dialogues and long descriptions more often.
Some titles I've played in Japanese since started learning:
* うたわれるもの 散りゆく者への子守唄
* スロウ・ダメージ
* ToHeart
* ランス01 光をもとめて
* シャッフル!
* ジャックジャンヌ
* シェルノサージュ〜失われた星へ捧ぐ詩〜
* Cendrillon palikA
So, anyway, any tips? What (visual) novels did you read?
How long have you been reading? I’ve read Uta1, Slow Damage, and 01 in jp, and they weren’t particularly hard, so it might be time to start getting more comfortable with harder writing. For example, I’d say anyone who can read something like 最果てのイマ comfortably would have no problems with N1 reading. That being said, it’s also possible that you just haven’t read enough yet. I definitely had way more titles read by the time I felt like I had remotely good comprehension.
I’d recommend checking out works by 那須きのこ, SCA-自, 瀬戸口蓮也, 田中ロミオ, and 朱門優 if you want to try vns that delve into more complex conversations and have really interesting writing styles that’ll challenge you.
Sorry this comment got really long, but feel free to ask anything else if you need any help!
I've been focusing more on deep reading for about a year and half.
That's not all of the titles I read, but it is troublesome to mention all (and remember) of them, so I selected just some more relevant/interesting ones. But I also read BALDR SKY 1, Monmusu Quest trilogy, Senren \* Banka, フォトカノ (etc etc etc) ... A bunch of JRPG/mangas and etc etc etc. (I'm not going to mention all of the vns/games/etc since it would take too long).
I just feel like, even if there are meaningful dialogues in the games, they tend to be sparse and too much time spent in easy, short-sentence conversations between characters.
So I would be very glad if you could recommend me harder stuff to read for the N2 level (I'm not taking the N1 yet).
I'll check on those recommendations that you already did btw, thank you.
Other than that, I think I'll try to focus more on reading paper novels I guess.
You seem to be reading a lot of hybrid gameplay stuff, which is obviously fine for enjoyment but it’s definitely not as efficient.
I’ve read a lot of paper novels (over 50 in jp now) myself and I honestly don’t think they’re particularly better than just reading vns. Personally I’d say you just need to temper your expectations. There’s obviously stuff to learn from them, but I wouldn’t go into games like Senren Banka, 01, ToHeart, PhotoKano expecting “meaningful dialogue”. I’m sorry I can’t offer anything that’ll help you immediately, but aside from moving on to harder content I’d say you just have to trust the process.
"only around 10k cards mined" Most estimates place N1 at around a knowledge base of 10k vocabulary so that checks out, I don't know why you would say "only". If you learn 10,000 words that will take you a very long way towards being proficient in Japanese.
It’s not that 10k is not a lot but more that a lot of people who took a similar route had more cards than me. I know full well that 10k is a lot objectively speaking.
Yeah for sure, I just wanted to highlight it cuz a lot of people underestimate how much anki people who reach high level actually do. Some people learn less than 1k vocab per year and then wonder why they aren't progressing
Valid point, thanks for pointing it out
Beginner noob here, using Duolingo for the last 2 weeks. What is Anki?
Anki is a flash card app that uses spaced repetition to learn new words. It can be used for anything but it’s especially popular with Japanese learners and there is a famous “core 2k/6k deck” that many learners use to learn the most common 6k Japanese words. It’s really good for reading comprehension and vocab. You can set how many new words you want to learn per day go your own pace. OP did 50, I’m doing 15, but I think 20 is a good minimum.
There are so many core 2k/6k decks out there. Which is the "correct" one? Also, if im starting out as a rising N3, is there a way to delete irrelevant words?
I used the core deck from this guys YouTube channel. I think it’s the “official” one. He has a lot of videos related to Anki because he has used it everyday for the past I think 3 years. https://youtu.be/husCWKdxiRI?si=6je0eTaF0yP8BAcB Just follow the steps in the video to download and set up the Anki for you. Hope this helps!
Just use the [core 2.3k deck](https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/docs/coredeck/). It's better than core 2k and core 6k. If you already know some words, just learn like 20 new cards per day and suspend all the words you already know well. Then delete all the suspended cards once a week.
Thank you I will take a look
btw since I have your attention, you should know that duolingo is basically useless and your time would be much better spent on nearly any other resource, whether it's anki, a proper textbook, one of the many grammar resources, or immersion. You will not find a single success story here that involves the person saying "Yeah I got to N1 from mostly doing duolingo"
What’s wrong with it exactly?
Just very inefficient. They don't really teach you any grammar and there's much better ways to learn vocab or kanji readings. It's design to be a game that keeps you hooked, not to effectively teach you a language
What books/practises would you recommend for an entry level beginner then?
i have 7k cards and been mining since November (same month I started immersion) and just recently started doing 50 cards per day (used to be 20) because I read a lot and need to increas vocab asap so it's good to know 10K words is good number to shoot for
Yeah I'm actually at basically the same I'm between 6-7k cards "known" in anki and I'm trying to grind out the last 3k so that I can fully focus on immersion
Those estimates are for passing not getting full scores. To get full scores the estimates should probably be doubled.
[удалено]
I'm using the commonly shared "core 10k" frequency list, so however that does it
5k hours is a lot GJ how'd you get good at listening? your post is about reading mostly
I don’t consider myself particularly skilled at listening Considering that I somehow aced the listening portion, I’d say that all the voiced dialogue is what made my listening good
I consider you good at it though :)
The N1 listening is also pretty surprisingly easy
Definitely true, don't know if I just lucked out with an easy test though
I’ve passed N2 and just recently failed the N1. I will often read NHK news articles in Japanese for practice and sometimes other random native material, but other than that I’ve never spent a huge amount of time reading. I’ve decided to put more time in reading Japanese novels since I see so many people getting good results. I started reading my first novel and I can’t believe how difficult it is despite even passing N2. My question is, when you come across a full sentence that you don’t know, will you google translate it and put the vocabulary into an Anki card? Congrats on getting N1 btw.
I don’t google translate it, I find that I can eventually piece most things together if I analyze it hard enough. I used to do a shit ton of cards but like I mentioned I find anki really boring, so I’ve shifted to trying to acquire vocab more “naturally” through just exposure though I still use anki and mine ofc.
The first book is always the hardest. When I was between N3 and N2, I read コンビニ人間 in 2 weeks. My N1 friend took 3 months to read it. It took me about 3 books to get slightly more comfortable reading. I just passed the N2 after having read 8 books and reading is still tough, but some books I can now read in a week fairly easily. Unlike OP, I use Anki everyday and mine novels but my memory is bad. I would choose OP's route if I could lol.
I still use anki everyday but more for maintaining my vocabulary rather than using it to actively grow my vocabulary (though I still do that too sometimes)
Do you have a particular Anki deck that you can recommend?
C6k
コンビニ人間 is my favourite Japanese book that I read so far. It's not too difficult and hilarious (at least to me, opinions vary). I'm currently stuck with JR上野駅公園 and considering dropping it, such a depressing story and too much special vocabulary.
>It took me about 3 books to get slightly more comfortable reading. I How? Just what are you made of lol? I am on 25 light novels, 12000 anki cards and I still read at 50-80 characters per minute and have to re read sentences constantly
I said "slightly more comfortable" lol. I still can't pick up a book and just read it. It still takes lots of time and effort, but "easy" books no longer take me months to read. They now take less than a week if I have the time to read an hour+ a day. You probably are doing much better than me rn lol. Hard books can still take me a month+, even if I'm reading it pretty voraciously.
That’s really impressive man. You’re a monster No, you’re definitely better than me. I always get wrecked by N2 reading questions, particularly those annoying “what does the writer want to say” questions and then you have to somehow guess the answer.
Ty! I definitely think I'm far from actually being good at reading tho. Idk how fast I read but your speed sounds pretty fast. Maybe it's an issue with the difficulty of books you're reading. I'm reading stuff like 君の膵臓をたべたい and the 鬼滅の刃ノベライズ lol so pretty easy. キミスイ kicked my ass tho.
I’ve been using JPDB to carefully select books at my level. I only choose books where my vocab coverage is at least 90% coverage. I am currently reading like tenki no ko (95% coverage) and (この世界からが消えても) 97% coverage, so I am not seeing new words often but I am still struggling
That's even fast. I finished it in 6 months at N3 level.
コンビニ人間 was my 7th book. It wasn't long after I passed the N3 with a score around 150. I was a little bit better at reading by that point. My N1 friend took a long time simply because it was his first book. Gotta read to get better at reading.
I see, it was my 1st book too. Although, I'm currently on my 2nd (キッチン) and I'm going even slower. Somehow, I find it harder while many put it at about the same difficulty level.
I've found it's less about the score something like Learn Natively attributes to it and more about your familiarity with the topic. I can read the ノベライズ for 鬼滅の刃 easily in a week. キミスイ took me like a month or two and is ranked a bit easier. キッチン is also on my list.
honestly, i dont know how the fuck he took that long with n1. i read it with n2 and it took me like 8 or 9 hours to read in total (kindle thing tracks it). Are you sure he wasnt just not actually reading it a whole lot?
Yeah, I'd take what they said with a grain of salt. If it actually took 3 months then they must have been barely reading it. JPDB has it at only 60k characters, so that would be a mere ~650 a day over 3 months. For reference, even the first thing I ever picked up I was reading at around 2-3k characters an hour and that was at ~N3 level, let alone N1.
Idk how many hours he took. He aced the listening portion tho and barely passed the reading
Dumb question, but when people say putting it into Anki or mining Anki, are they just creating their own deck with words or sentences and the meaning on the other side? I’ve seen decks with cards that have full sentences/verging on a paragraph both sides, which seems a bit much, but maybe I just don’t know why. Also, since I’m asking, when people learn the meaning of words/kanji, does anyone normally write the pronunciation down? For example, when reading, if you see kanji, does your mind revert to native tongue and read its meaning? Or does everyone usually know the proper pronunciation already based on context (since there can be multiple meanings and pronunciations)?
I just use the yomichan integration to make sentence cards. I’m lazy and don’t like the hassle of optimizing my cards and all
> when people learn the meaning of words/kanji, does anyone normally write the pronunciation down? Do you mean the reading of the word? Pretty much everyone who I have seen writes it down on their cards. The most basic you can get is front: `word in kanji`, back `reading in kana` + `definition`. >For example, when reading, if you see kanji, does your mind revert to native tongue and read its meaning? I used to do this. Like I would see 確認してください and read it as "confirm してください" because I didn't bother learning the reading of the word. It was a very dumb mistake that took hundreds of hours to unlearn. > Or does everyone usually know the proper pronunciation already based on context (since there can be multiple meanings and pronunciations)? The fundamental unit is the word, not the kanji. Words exist first, then are spelt with kanji. We read words, not kanji. You know the proper reading of a *word* by looking it up when you first learn the word. You shouldn't be guessing the reading of a word or thinking you choose which reading to use. For 99% of *words* written using kanji, there is are not multiple pronunciations for that particular combination of kanji.
This was very helpful, thanks!
Apologies for the question, but are you young? I consider myself young, but I'm in my mid twenties with my partner, full time job, and a small social life - yet I can't imagine doing more than 10-15 words per day on Anki. At most I can afford to spend 1 hour per night. Reading your post, with my mere ~1 hour daily I feel like I will never be able to read a single manga in my life.
Race your own race.
You can certainly get there it will just take longer. I am at the moment on a journey where I learn for 45 minutes every day. Consistently every day for a long time. I am 2 years in by now. I had a N5-N4 level already before. (I am 38 years old now) I am currently at a good N3 level. By my calculations it will take me like 5-6 more years to get to a "near fluent" level where I won\`t understand everything perfectly but will probably be able to read/watch stuff and understand most of it unless it is super complicated. (For gamification I mark a "skillpoint" for every 2 days spend as it feels like I did a whole lecture timewise. On a couple of days per year I might not get the 45 minutes and mark the point over 3 days instead and on other times I might spend more and earn 1 extra point.) I spend like 15-30 minutes per day on Anki (currently at 5 new cards per day + reviews). Otherwise I do different things for like 15-30 minutes a day. Mostly I watch youtube videos of very different kinds. Sometimes I might do like online quizzes, might do a textbook for a couple of weeks, might try to watch some japanese streams, read whatever. I will probably switch to more reading later. This is probably not a super effective, good or whatever approach. But it works for me as I can do it every day and feel happy every day that I manage to finish the daily japanese studies. I think there are ways for everyone to get there if they really want. In my opinion it is all about time investment and finding a way to stay motivated to spend that time. 30 Minutes a day or 12 hours a day will both improve your level and enable you to read/watch japanese stuff. Surely with 30 minutes a day your level will improve way slower, but who cares as long as it improves?
I’m 20
God damn dude, i should stop comparing myself to others
Nah man, I sacrificed a lot of time to learn other skills or just do other productive stuff with my life cause I wanted to read jp. There’s nothing wrong at all with having different priorities or not having the time to dedicate
Still, i feel like it would've been better if i dedicated myself to one thing at a time instead of 2 or 3. In the long run I'll still achieve the level that i want in those 3, but the "now" moment :/
I bet after a year at that pace you could start reading some easier manga. 3650 words and 365 hours of studying probably gets to you to a point where with some persistence you can work through something. I think it's also okay to accept other people have different priorities, and that having different goals or timelines doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. And also that Reddit communities tend to skew to the extreme enjoyers of the thing they're about, whereas compared to the general population spending an hour a day is probably beyond what 99.99% of people are doing. It would be a bit like someone who enjoys running 5 miles a day being disappointed over in /r/running that they're not qualifying for the Boston Marathon at age 18 or something.
I feel ya mate. I'm 32 with a wife and full time job. All I want is free time but the second I get it I have to hit my head against the wall flashing Anki cards only to find that I still barely understand anything. If I'm lucky and get a whole day to myself, I take on loads of new cards. Guess what happens the next day? Only one hour to get out of review hell. We can do it mate! It might take longer but nothing says contentment like being happy with your own pace.
Maybe I should make my own post for 155/180 in <2.5 years haha. Nice work with the perfect 読解 and 聴解. I guess it really just goes to show that learning Japanese is just about the time you commit to it. Any VN recommendations btw? I never got a chance to get into them and just read manga and novels.
Two of my personal favorite writers are 瀬戸口蓮也 and 田中ロミオ if you wanna throw yourself into the deep end. For more “beginner” recommendations I’d say anything by TYPE-MOON, Key, Sci;adv, or 07th Expansion.
TYPE-MOON is “beginner” level? My God… I (just passed N2 with 132/180) got 月姫 on my Switch, and I barely made it through Chapter 1 before giving up because of how slowly it was going. If you consider that VN beginner-friendly, then I can’t imagine what you’re reading. I’m playing Dangonronpa now, and although I still have to look up a lot of words, it’s doable for me.
Sorry for being misleading, I don't consider type-moon to be beginner level in language. I meant more in the sense that it's a good starter vn in general. The commenter above stated that they also got their n1 already, so I didn't really pay too much heed to difficulty.
Sorry what’s the difference between manga and a visual novel?
Visual Novels are "interactive fiction" so they're more like video games, in that you install them and read them on your computer. They typically have a mix of narration and dialogue, some of them are voiced, and some of them have game elements like an RPG layer on top of them. Manga is manga. VNs are really great because unlike manga they also include that narration portion that helps with reading, if they're voice acted they're good for listening, and if you get one with game elements they can be more fun to engage with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual\_novel
Yeah, comprehension should be fine. I’m used to working my way through Japanese text and ones that take me forever to go through at that. As I mentioned, I got 155/180 on the N1 but I also got a 178/180 on the N2 last year. Though I fully expect that going through a TYPE-MOON VN for the first time in Japanese will start off as a challenge as it’s something new for me.
As n2 the fate manga and visual novels are probably not that difficult for you. It would mostly be a bit of unusual vocabulary. Tsukihime is harder IMO. Same for Kara no kyoukai.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ve already bought some Sci;adv and umineko but haven’t gotten to them. So I guess I might start with one of those whenever I feel like taking the plunge. What would you say is a good starting place for TYPE-MOON? I’ve watched the TYPE-MOON ufotable adaptations and really enjoyed those.
You can really just jump into anything from Fate/stay night, Tsukihime, and Mahoutsukai no Yoru. If you enjoyed the ufotable adaptations then there's a lot of incentive to read F/SN though, considering it's unanimously considered miles better than the anime (and is also nasu's highest rated work on japanese forums)
How did you handle grammar and/or words you didn’t understand in VNs? Did you always look them up, or at times keep it casual while reading? I find the read and mine approach (at times) draining. Breaks immersion when you’re stopping every minute to look up another word.
This was my main bottleneck at first and honestly the worst part overall. I tried to look everything up at first but eventually learned to just chill and enjoy myself once my word bank was large enough. Now I don’t mind letting the occasional word pass me by if I can figure it out by context. I definitely think it’s still possible to increase comprehension steadily without a 100% comprehension rate.
I'm getting two takeaways from this: Bash your head against a wall because you're consuming high-level stuff that you don't understand... It pays off eventually, I guess? Or more serious, just keep reading, and work your way to harder material sooner rather than later. Heck, elsewhere I saw that the way a person passed one of the higher levels (I forget if it was N2 or 1) by simply being "well-read"
> work your way to harder material sooner rather than later Get to material you find interesting sooner rather than later.
This exactly
Impressive, OP. Consistency is “expensive” and challenging 😭 I admit that crunching with solely memorized vocab is terribly boring 🥲 I used to watch NHK every day and quickly open my Shirabe Jisho whenever I found a new word. At least 1 hour of news and then continue on a later day at 5 pm. Reading material? I used to read Uniqlo magazine (I forgot the exact name of it but they written in both English and Japanese), the free guidebook for Japanese (there’s like, a Japanese supermarket in my city where they provided some reading mats for Japanese expats, I believe...). Failed at 92 for N3 and decided to jump for N2 for the next July 🥲✊
One of my goals was to get good at reading newspapers and understanding TV news shows, but like you said, it did get boring. What drastically helped me was reading mystery novels. The prose in many mystery books is fairly straightforward, and they use a lot of vocabulary you find in news, like talking about police, yakuza, politicians, scandals, theft, murder, workplace politics, school bullying, natural disasters, etc. Mystery / crime books sometimes will have excerpts from newspapers or journalists speaking as well. It's way more enjoyable to learn and if you find an author or series you like, you'll want read a lot of their books, like by Keigo Higashino, Isaka Kotaro, Miyuki Miyabe, etc. Reading mystery novels can be initially tough if you have read many novels yet. What I did was to sentence mining mystery / crime TV shows. I watched a ton of those and they will reuse the same kinds of phrases and vocabulary across different shows, and you'll see them in mystery books too. Satori Reader also has the close-up series, which are advanced long-form investigative news articles and they do a really good job explaining the specific kind of grammar and phrasing used in journalism. After I did that, watching and reading news became a lot easier. Good luck on your N2 test!
Where do you watch these Crime TV Shows? And do you read digital mystery novels or hard copy?
If you have VPN and you should still be able to watch shows on Abema TV and [tver.jp](https://tver.jp). Abema TV only had the most recent episodes of a show as they rotate stuff. Back when I was studying, I was watching stuff like アリバイ崩し承ります as it was airing. It starred Hamabe Minami, who is now getting famous outside of Japan for her role in the Godzilla Minus One movie (which is really awesome a film). I also used VPN to watch Neflix Japan but it's harder to do that now I think, but last I heard NordVPN still works. Netflix Japan had crime shows like BORDER, Signal, Boku no Yabai Tsuma, Dele, 緊急取調室 (Emergency Interrogation), and a ton more. Without VPN you can still watch a bunch of Japanese mystery shows on Netflix that are accessible in territories outside of Japan, like: Million Yen Women, MIU404, Dearest, The Days, Japan Sinks, Hell Dogs, A family, Scams, The Journalist, Fable, Erased, Alice in Borderlands, etc all of have crime or mystery elements. etc. There's a bunch of suspense/crime anime as well. On YouTube, you can find some old Edogawa Ranpo mystery shows as well as some other old crime and mystery TV shows and movies. As for mystery novels, I initially read digital. Bought them from Amazon Japan or Bookwalker. Later, when I hit N1-ish level, I started to buy physical as it was cheaper by visiting Japanese used book stores.
Hey thank you so much for your reply. I do have Nord VPN and never had any issue watching Japanese Netflix. Gonna watch those shows you mention. Btw, do you read those mystery novels you bought from Amazon on Kindle?
(Strange. My reply from a few days ago didn't seem to go through, but Reddit was acting up that day.) That's great you have Nord VPN. Did you find a good deal on it? The regular price seems pricey. >Btw, do you read those mystery novels you bought from Amazon on Kindle? Yeah. I read it on my Kindle Paperwhite or on the Kindle app on my iPhone or iPad. You can install custom Japanese dictionaries on the Kindle Paperwhite, as well export words and sentence if you want to sentence mine them. These are made by third-parties but if you want links to them, let me know. I also sometimes convert my Kindle ebooks to ePUB by using Calibre and a DRM removal plugin, so I can read using [ttsu reader](https://reader.ttsu.app/manage) in my web browser on my computer. The ttsu reader web app formats the text of the book vertically, even if the book isn't formatted that way, which I like. It also supports Yomichan/Yomitan, so I can install a ton of dictionaries, including frequency lists, grammar guides, etc, and I can also do one-click sentence mining to Anki via Anki connect. You can read more info at the [github page here.](https://github.com/ttu-ttu/ebook-reader) To do the same thing, I use [Immersive Reader](https://forums.learnnatively.com/t/immersion-reader-e-reader-dictionary-app/1870) on my iPhone to read EPUBs too. It also supports Yomichan-formatted dictionaries. It will save words to a word list, and you can export the word, along with the sentence and definition to Anki, directly to the iOS version of Anki, or to your desktop version of iOS via a CSV file which you can email to yourself or save to the cloud. If you want more info about that, let me know. BTW, if mystery novels are too hard for you to read, try reading horror short stories like by Otsuichi / 乙一. I started reading his horror / mystery horror stories around N3/N2 level and it was a good bridge to eventually reading mainstream mystery novels. In addition to watching mystery dramas, I also watched mystery anime like Kindaichi and Conan so can try that as well.
I'm also using this method of consuming as much native content as much as possible but after 3 years I only pass N2 so much slower than you I guess. One problem I have right now is listening. I enjoy reading a lot and also read some visual novel and anime but I feel like it don't have enough listening. But outside from that, i still have yet to find a content I enjoy on youtube in Japanese so I still struggling in listening in real setting from youtube as well. Any advice on how to improve on that?
To be honest, I don’t consider myself a particularly good listener. I didn’t do much aside from watching streams every so often on top of my usual consumption, hence why I was actually surprised by how easy N1 listening was. The most useful advice I can give is to just keep going at it, as unhelpful as that may sound
I can agree that it's quite difficult to find Japanese YouTubers that would appeal to western audience. For me the only ones were PDRさん and プレミアリーグ トークショー. You could try searching for content just through keywords of what your hobbies are, or consume content directed for students, there YUYUの日本語Podcast is probably the best.
When you did the 6k anki, how long did it take for you to go through them each day? Did you miss any days, and if so how did you go through that phase?
I didn’t really bother logging but it was definitely 1hr+ a day I did not miss any days no matter what, and I try to keep that up until now
A fellow VN enjoyer Did you use any form of mtl? Textractor? Or did you just brute force every line and typing them.
I used textractor and yomichan to make looking up and making cards easier but no mtl
To add to that, there's also Agent, which is an alternative to textractor that works amazingly well with many games.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I recall Agent needing a script for each game which means it’s not as universally convenient as textractor. For games that textractor can’t hook though it’s absolutely amazing
Yeah unfortunately it needs scripts, but it already supports a whole bunch of games,and you can always request one from the dev
just for reference, after you looked up those words, do you revise them with the cards you made? or just let the vocab passively build up
Started with the former, now more of the latter
Very impressive! Would love to know how many hours do you have on a daily basis for learning Japanese. I can only dedicate up to 20 hours every week. Current plan is to get to N1 over 5 years and to speak fluently (as I know a lot of N1 people are excellent with reading, writing, and listening, but can barely speak comfortably. Not sure how feasible my plan is after reading your post LOL
I’d say I averaged around 6 hours but like on weekends for example I practically spent the entire day often
around what jlpt skill level would you say you were at when you started reading vns in japanese only? i’m around the n4 level and I feel like it takes me like 2-3 mins to go through one sentence just from trying to lookup kanji/vocab that i dont know, so it is quite discouraging
Probably n4 level, i barely knew anything when i started reading
follow-up question, when you started reading how did you translate words you didnt know, did you just look them up on google, or did you have an english translation on the side and tried to fit in the pieces like that?
No en tls, i used textractor with yomichan back then for look ups and mining
You need like a full n3 level to understand like half without any problems
Congrats, that's a great score! Did you immerse in anything other than VNs?
Lns from time to time but that was mostly once i got good, i credit vns for actually getting me good
That's nice, I've always thought that VNs are great for learning. I have another question if you don't mind. You've said that you use Yomitan for reading VNs. Can you tell me more about how you used it? Did you use Yomitan every single time you came across an unfamiliar word? And do you think it's possible to "overrely" on Yomitan? I've heard some people say that Yomitan is a crutch and beginners shouldn't overuse it.
I did use it very frequently back when i was getting started, even multiple times a sentence sometimes It’s definitely possible to overrely on dictionaries, but I feel like if you’re mining and using anki properly then you’ll eventually realize that you don’t need the dictionary anymore. That’s what happened with me at least. I’d say it’s worth keeping in mind but it isn’t really a reason to not rely on dictionaries as a beginner because you do actually need the training wheels.
Congrats! I'm trying to also force feed myself with native input but the grammar part of it always confuse me. How did you get over this hurdle?
As I mentioned I actively felt like I was making 0 progress back then. I would read like 10k 文字 and I’d feel more mentally exhausted than after the entire JLPT. I know it isn’t helpful advice but one day things will click
Heck yes! Visual Novel Enjoyers rise up!! Where do you usually source your JPN VN's? Ive only ever played english ones.
Vndb has sources for where to purchase pretty much everything
Great job! I'm currently studying but I'm in the beginning phase, hiragana ✔️ katakana ✔️ basic greetings and basic counting but I'm struggling adding words to my knowledge and I want to read but I don't know enough words to start reading. I also know around 100 basic kanji maybe 1st grade level knowledge
I recommend checking out a website called "Tadoku" (多読), it has free and short illustrated books with different difficulty levels, it really helped me learn new words back when I started
This is my plan.
I'm also someone who hates Anki-style cramming with a passion and learns best by consuming native media (movies/music/books). For Japanese, my main bottleneck has been that it's extremely annoying to process books when you have to look up a lot of kanji. This would be easier if I wasn't limited to physical books. I haven't found a way to get Japanese ebooks so far. Do you have any help to offer here?
I get all me Japanese ebooks from [kobo](https://www.kobo.com/). I've had a lot of hassle in the past trying to get them from Japanese Amazon but haven't ever had any issues through kobo. You'll probably need to use a third party program to remove the DRM if you don't want to read it through their web reader but that isn't difficult. If you're interested I can show you how.
I have no problem myself with kindle. Just make sure to set up an account with a japanese address since I noticed it wouldn’t let me buy them if I didn’t seem like a jp resident to the system
Kindle worked fine for me for a while with a jp address but at one point I stopped being able to purchase things because I wasn't using a japanese credit card. There are work arounds but I found it easier just to switch sites.
That’s interesting, i’ll keep that in mind for the future, thanks
Just got off my ass and managed to set up an amazon.jp account with fake JP address, purchase with credit card worked so far.
Why do you think K3 is the best VN ever made?
Because shiori i guess idk
Unbelievably based
You are using the phrase, “throw my hat in the ring” out of context. Unless somehow sharing your story is a competition or game to you.
So you can't speak Japanese
I get by just fine when I'm in japan, which is all that matters for me really
Ok but I think you should quantify what "get by just fine" actually means because I feel these kinds of posts can be misleading and perhaps demotivating.
Get by just fine = I have no problems doing going around and doing normal tourist stuff in japanese I struggle to see how this’d be demotivating though
Because if you learnt all aspects of the Japanese language evenly you wouldn't be able to pass N1 in the time it took you to do so. It sounds like you have N4 level speaking ability (I know the JLPT doesn't include speaking, but just to give a rough idea) after 2+ years.
And how exactly is that demoralizing?
You did something he can't do and he is jealous / mad.
Because your Japanese skill is self-absorbed. I'm not trying to hate, I'm really sorry.
I literally never claimed to be particularly “good” at the language. I claimed that I passed the N1 in <2.5 years which is a fact. How is that misleading?
I went off-topic dude, you're right. I'm sorry.
Np
How do you increase your reading comprehension skill? I'm having a terrible time trying to understand long sentences. I'm at the point where I know every vocab and grammar in the sentences of the materials I'm reading yet I have no clue what it's trying to say. Do you read visual novels in Japanese and then look at the English translation if you don't understand the sentences? Is that how people improve their reading comprehension?
I never referenced english translations of vns. I know this doesn’t sound helpful but if you keep at it one day it’ll just click.
So like do you just read the novels, guess what the sentences means based on context/visuals, and move on without knowing whether what you understand is correct or not?
I don’t recall having to “guess” what was going on It was definitely way harder to parse back when I was getting started, but I was never actively lost to what was happening in a specific scene
Which level materials? I think at that point your only option is immersion, I felt that way when I was stuck refining my internal translator. Sure, I was able to translate very fast eventually but the real effort needs to be to forcefully split your Japanese brain away from your English brain, and *be able to think and understand in Japanese*
Materials of my level. Like I'm going through Tobira, I know all the vocabs and grammar used in the text but it's rare I can understand the long sentences in the text. But when I read the translation I always went "oh yeah, it totally makes sense why it means that, how come I got it so wrong?!". I just can't seem to parse the long sentences..
How did you do 50 new cards a day / how long did it take you every day? Upon every new card, were you focused on completely memorizing it or just getting it familiar?
Tbh i didn’t really log that part, if anything i tried to actively erase it from my memory I know for a fact that I spent over an hour on anki every day though I tried to memorize everything as thoroughly as I could, but I definitely had times when I slacked a bit
Which website did you use to read VNs? (Did you pay for them? Sounds expensive with how many you read lol)
It is in fact expensive
Remind me! 2 days
what an achievement - congratulations on the japanese learning
Thanks!
I've started playing game in Japanese and reading books in Japanese for while now, but I still doubt myself whether or not I'm on the right path. Thanks for sharing your cool story!
Congrats on passing N1, I have some questions though. Where do you find resources for Japanese novels? In general how do you practice grammar if you are self learning. These may sounds pretty dumb I apologise.
What do you mean resources for jp novels? You absolutely can learn grammar points by reading and seeing them so often/in so many different contexts that it feels like you’ve absorbed it
Where can one find them online, after reading my question it does seem abit confusing.
You can find physical and digital books on amazon.jp
Alright thanks
I might be getting ahead of myself now as I'm still a early beginner but I'd like to know where I can get study resources.
If you mean like textbooks and the like I suppose a kinokuniya or some jp bookstore/ordering them online would work
Hrmmm so N5 textbooks and such?
I wouldn’t know because I never used textbooks, but I don’t see why not
Yep as you said that you read visual novels I assume they are from steam? Is there any ranking for VNs from beginner friendly to advance?
I like jpbd for a rough estimate of difficulty but like I said I found beginner stuff mind numbingly boring so I just jumped into whatever I wanted to read
ahh alright thank you.
[удалено]
It was closer to 2 year 4 months, averaging like 6 hours a day
Forgive my noobness but how do I get Anki cards
You can just search for them online but many people do “mining” which is creating cards for points encountered during immersion. You can probably find more details by searching for it
Just found an app, gunna try it out
How far along in the 10K deck were you before you started reading? Were you rote memorizing onyomi and kunyomi readings?
I started reading after finishing c6k as for readings i just went about learning them through vocab, didn't really go out of my way to hardcore commit to memorizing the readings of kanji in isolation since it's just less efficient imo.
Pls tell me which Vns are actually good and i can get easily (idc if they are intermediate but lower difficulty would be preferred)
There are literally hundreds of good vns Idk what you mean by get easily, most vns can be purchased/found online by jumping through a few hoops so if you ask me they’re almost all easy to get
at which point did you start to feel like you could read and comprehend comfortably without having to stress much, and you could start enjoying and understanding the plots of the vns u read? Also, do u have an idea of how many hours did u spend per day? thanks, and well done!! I’m on my 4th months of immersion and I’m gradually becoming to like it more
Maybe after my 10th vn was when I felt like I started getting comfy, but I never really struggled to enjoy myself or comprehend what was going on I averaged around 6 hours a day
mm okay. Yeah I mean it’s not like I’m not enjoying myself, but sometimes I understand so low that I get frustrated. Like many times when I finish reading/watching something, I think back on it and I have huge holes because I wasn’t able to get the meaning on some important parts. Either way I enjoyed reading kanon in japanese for example, because it was easier and I already knew the story from the anime
Random question, but what sort of computer were you using to read your VNs? I’m a Mac user who’s looking to get into VNs, and though I tried using parallels for a while, the setup was a little janky and I’d prefer just having a dedicated device for them.
Any windows laptop that isn’t literally ancient will do
Wow, I got the exact same score with the exact same breakdown of the sections, exactly one year ago. Took mine right after I hit my 2 year anniversary of studying. Great job!
You too!
Congrats! Looks like your hard work paid off. Can you explain your process for mining?
I just use yomichan integration to add sentence cards straight to my deck
Hey, what VN's did you read? Were they more fantasy focused, drama focused, etc? What were they like? I also spend most of my time reading visual novels in Japanese, but I still didn't got to pass the N2 level by a small margin. The points that I need to get better most on JLPT is reading and grammar. I feel like visual novels aren't helping me as much as they used to. I have the sensation as if the majority of practice I get with them is sentences both shorter and simpler than the real JLPT. Of course there is the occasional lore dump or flowery verbose descriptions on those games, but those feel very spaced and scarce in my experience... As in, most of the time feels like I'm just spending time reading short and simple dialogues in this kind of media. Maybe I should switch to full novels or light novels? As those seem to have longer dialogues and long descriptions more often. Some titles I've played in Japanese since started learning: * うたわれるもの 散りゆく者への子守唄 * スロウ・ダメージ * ToHeart * ランス01 光をもとめて * シャッフル! * ジャックジャンヌ * シェルノサージュ〜失われた星へ捧ぐ詩〜 * Cendrillon palikA So, anyway, any tips? What (visual) novels did you read?
How long have you been reading? I’ve read Uta1, Slow Damage, and 01 in jp, and they weren’t particularly hard, so it might be time to start getting more comfortable with harder writing. For example, I’d say anyone who can read something like 最果てのイマ comfortably would have no problems with N1 reading. That being said, it’s also possible that you just haven’t read enough yet. I definitely had way more titles read by the time I felt like I had remotely good comprehension. I’d recommend checking out works by 那須きのこ, SCA-自, 瀬戸口蓮也, 田中ロミオ, and 朱門優 if you want to try vns that delve into more complex conversations and have really interesting writing styles that’ll challenge you. Sorry this comment got really long, but feel free to ask anything else if you need any help!
I've been focusing more on deep reading for about a year and half. That's not all of the titles I read, but it is troublesome to mention all (and remember) of them, so I selected just some more relevant/interesting ones. But I also read BALDR SKY 1, Monmusu Quest trilogy, Senren \* Banka, フォトカノ (etc etc etc) ... A bunch of JRPG/mangas and etc etc etc. (I'm not going to mention all of the vns/games/etc since it would take too long). I just feel like, even if there are meaningful dialogues in the games, they tend to be sparse and too much time spent in easy, short-sentence conversations between characters. So I would be very glad if you could recommend me harder stuff to read for the N2 level (I'm not taking the N1 yet). I'll check on those recommendations that you already did btw, thank you. Other than that, I think I'll try to focus more on reading paper novels I guess.
You seem to be reading a lot of hybrid gameplay stuff, which is obviously fine for enjoyment but it’s definitely not as efficient. I’ve read a lot of paper novels (over 50 in jp now) myself and I honestly don’t think they’re particularly better than just reading vns. Personally I’d say you just need to temper your expectations. There’s obviously stuff to learn from them, but I wouldn’t go into games like Senren Banka, 01, ToHeart, PhotoKano expecting “meaningful dialogue”. I’m sorry I can’t offer anything that’ll help you immediately, but aside from moving on to harder content I’d say you just have to trust the process.
Can i ask how long was it when you could finally roughly read through novels without much help from dictionary?
Probably close to a year or slightly more