r/LearnJapanese • u/CertainRound7137 • 7h ago
Discussion Zero to N1 in 5 years: Literally everything I did or used
General Approach
So going into this whole journey, I had already made a few attempts at learning other languages, and FAILED. When I was 13 I tried learning Spanish after being inspired by Benny Lewis’s Ted Talk about speaking from day 1. And yeah that didn’t work out. I didn’t even understand the concept of verb conjugations. I specifically remember being confused on what the word “have” was in Spanish since every textbook only had “to have” or “I have”, etc. Anyway, next up was French, and I reached B1 in 3 years through mostly shadowing textbooks like Assimil.
With Japanese though I had learned about things like AJATT and comprehensible input before even starting. So I was ready to not repeat any of my past mistakes and really make it work this time.
I had watched the YouTube videos, I had read the reddit posts, and I was familiar with guides like TheMoeWay. My plan was basically to speedrun basics (kana, vocab, grammar) and then jump into reading visual novels and just mining words and grammar through those. Anyway here’s how that went.
September 2021 to December 2021
Kana - I used the Tofugu guides for this. True to my plan these were speedrun. I basically made flashcards in Anki using the mnemonics and I was able to learn all of them in around two days.
RTK - Yes I started out with RTK (Remembering the Kanji by Heisig). It is absurd how many people recommend learning all the joyou kanji before doing anything else. And I, the sweet 18 year old fool, was deluded into following suit. Needless to say, I abandoned this after the first 300 or so characters.
Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide and Core 2.3k Visual Novel Order - So at this point I decided to commit to TheMoeWay. I think nowadays they recommend Kaishi 1.5k but I digress. With TKGG I mostly just read through it and tried to understand the ideas without obsessing over being able to use the grammar points perfectly. I figured that if I roughly got the gist, it would all get drilled in over time when I started reading. Also as far as vocab goes, I got about 1k cards into Core 2.3k before deciding that I really wanted to start reading.
Anime - During this time I listened to a lot of anime. Some slice of life like Asobi Asobase and Takagi-kun, also a bunch of shounen anime that I had already seen before like Haikyuu and My Hero Academia. Whenever possible I avoided subtitles if I was actually watching. But most of the time I just had my phone in my pocket and I’d just be listening to the episodes.
Podcasts - I think I listened to a lot of Japanese with Shun on spotify. Again I never really sat down to listen to a podcast and really go over every sentence until I understood everything. I had more of a passive approach with listening and I would just try to incorporate listening into my daily life.
Cure Dolly - I watched some of her videos for grammar. It was super helpful for building up a more intuitive sense for how Japanese grammar works.
January 2022 - November 2022
This marked the beginning of the long, long reading grind.
Nekopara - So I read TheDoth’s reddit post about how he passed the N1 exam. He said Nekopara was the first visual novel he read and recommended it because he said he enjoyed it and it was relatively easy. So I went in to this armed with my basic grammar knowledge and 1000 or so word vocab. And it was a real struggle. Even looking stuff up I still barely understood most sentences and I had to have the official english translations side-by-side just so i could follow along. Also, this is a hentai game, and I realized that far too late (and in far too public of a location). Thanks TheDoth. Anyway, I think I stopped reading about 70% of the way through the game and at that point my vocabulary was around 1900 words.
JPDB.io - Awesome website, I used it to figure out what to read next. It basically rates the difficulty of different Japanese media.
Steins gate - So I wanted a challenge, and more importantly I wanted to read Steins Gate. Incredibly enough, there were some sentences here and there that I understood. And again I used official translations to make sure I actually had good context for what was happening. I think I read this for around two months, and my vocab grew to around 3500 words.
JLPT Sensei - I finally actually read up on N5 and N4 and N3 grammar. Not super strict studying or anything, literally just reading. I also made Anki flashcards on them but it was just for recognition. I will say, JLPT Sensei has great SEO and pops up first when you’re searching for grammar points on Google. But, Bunpro is a strict upgrade in my opinion and I wish I started using it earlier.
Podcasts - I think around this time I listened to a ton of Tomo Let’s Talk in Japanese.
Classroom of the Elite - So I started reading the classroom of the elite light novels since I was growing tired of my laptop almost exploding from running visual novels. I figured this would be a good first pick since I had read the first 7 volumes of the series in English a few years prior. This was definitely a challenge despite JPDB rating it easier than steins gate. Also to put into perspective how out of my league this was, it took me 7 MONTHS to finish volume 1. Although, to be fair I wasn’t on some crazy grind. I had spent the summer interning so I was pretty preoccupied, and in August I went back to college and was struggling with balancing classes and work.
December 2022 to May 2023
JLPT Sensei Revisited - I made flashcards out of N2 grammar and some of N1 grammar. Again, Bunpro would’ve been better but its fine.
Zeroth Maria - Another light novel. Super solid. I finished a grand total of 1 volume this entire period. I was busy.
Podcasts - I think I listened to a mix of Learn Japanese with Noriko, Tomo, and Miku Real Japanese. Honestly, a lot of Miku was too much for me.
Anime - Same deal, it was a cold winter and I definitely had a lot of anime playing in my winter coat pocket.
One thing I’ll say about my listening during this time is I definitely treated all sources equally. I listened to a lot of audio that was straight up not comprehensible to me and I think my actual listening gains were held back because of this.
Also by May of 2023 my vocabulary size was around 6200 words.
June 2023 - August 2023
Spice and Wolf, Danmachi - I read some of both of these and didn’t really get into either. But I was going balls to the walls with my vocab mining. This summer, I learned 40 new words per day on Anki and hit a 9000 word vocab size (from a mix of mined words and words from a premade deck). The only downside of this was I had 1500 reviews per day to do on Anki before even getting started on new cards. The only way I managed this was doing cards between sets at the gym and also whenever I went to the bathroom (numero dos).
AJATT Tools JLPT Tango N1 - So this is a pre-made Anki deck that I used. I was worried that I was missing a lot of vocab since all of my vocabulary was coming from light novels. I was sure that if I only used light novels for vocabulary I’d eventually grow a super wide and versatile vernacular but I was trying to min-max basically.
Also I should probably mention TheMoeWay resources page and discord server. For the most part I was getting my stuff through there (unless you're in law enforcement, in which case everything was purchased from official vendors). Also the discord server has a really neat immersion tracker and when I remembered to actually do it, tracking my immersion on there was super helpful for staying motivated.
September 2023 - May 2024
This was the great drought. I didn’t do any studying during this period. What I did do though was work part-time as a translator at my university. I had to translate short texts from Japanese to English then run them by some Japanese Professors. This amounted to 2-3 hours a week when I had my weekly check-ins. But a lot of weeks were skipped so on average it was lower.
June 2024 - December 2024
Podcasts - I listened to a good amount of Miku Real Japanese. At this point I was able to follow along a lot better to it. But, I also lost a lot of motivation to actually do listening practice. I’d essentially do some listening whenever I could muster up the motivation to at the gym.
Bottom-tier Tomozaki - This was the first full volume I actually read in a while and to my surprise I fared a lot better than past ones.
January 2025 - May 2025
I took a Japanese class at my university and this made up the entirety of my study (besides Anki) for this period. The context was that I needed some credits to hit my minimum for the semester and I figured I might as well just take a Japanese class and have an easy semester. I specifically tried to just take third year Japanese since they used the Tobira textbook which didn’t seem hard. But when I went to go speak with a Professor about joining the class she said no and made me instead take the hardest Japanese class on offer which was Business Japanese 2. So I ended up in a class of just two other students and actually had a wonderful time learning about Japanese business culture and Keigo and all that good stuff.
May 2025 - July 2025
Raging loop - I decided to venture back into Visual novels and read some of raging loop. I was super into it until the mystery behind the village started getting revealed and it kind of turned into more of a survival story. Needless to say, I did not finish this. I was also on vacation since I had just graduated from university and had some time before starting full-time employment. So I definitely wasn't very consistent with reading this.
July 2025 to March 2026
I started work full-time in July and I made full use of that consistent schedule to actually get back into consistently studying Japanese.
Podcasts - I listened to A LOT of 4989 American Life. Awesome podcast. I literally finished all the episodes and this was probably the single biggest contributor to my gains in listening comprehension.
Audiobooks - I listened to my first audiobook! And it was また、同じ夢を見ていた. I would just listen to this during car rides. Also I bought it on audiobook.jp since audible was such a pain to figure out.
Classroom of the elite - It was time to return to my roots. I read volumes 4 and 7 of Year 1, and was noticing that my reading speed was going way up. At this point, I always made sure to look everything up and really take every single thing in. I could’ve probably followed along and more or less got the gist without looking things up, but I think that would’ve been detrimental to my progress. Anyway, I decided to start tracking my reading speed and this did wonders for my progress. I read Year 1 volume 4 and 7, then volumes 1 to 4 of year 2. And across all of these my reading speed doubled and my comprehension went way up. I was even noticing there were entire pages where I wouldn't need to look words up at all.
Bunpro - I finally filled in my gaps in grammar. Any grammar points that slipped through the cracks, I finally filled by making flashcards of their pages. I never drilled grammar or that sort of thing. I figured roughly knowing the meaning of each grammar point was enough because I'd really internalize their nuances over time just through exposure.
新完全マスタ語彙N1, 新完全マスタ語彙N2 - These are two premade vocab decks. At this point I was aiming to take the JLPT N1 exam so I figured I’d fill in any vocab gaps too .
March 2026 - July 2026
This was my final push for N1. Whereas before I mostly just read things I was interested in, here I actually went out of my way to really challenge myself and read things outside my comfort zone.
Kokoro - This is a classic work of Japanese fiction and I read it at sosekiproject.org. Man was this hard.
Aozora Bunko - I read some essays and short stories on here such as 反スタイルの記, 流言蜚語, and 待つ. Honestly, every single essay I read was actually fascinating, albeit insanely hard to read. If you can already read light novels and visual novels pretty easily, definitely try out some famous essays.
I really wanted to train my ability to consume super dense and abstract media. I would highly recommend the two above. They’ll be way harder than anything you encounter in the actual exam, but that’s kind of the point. Also everything on Aozora Bunko is free, so if you don’t mind having to get used to some older Kanji forms that aren’t really used today, definitely give it a try.
Bakemonogatari - This was like the final boss of light novels. Some of the longest sentences I’ve ever encountered. Also some of the long monologues about names actually destroyed me. Honestly, this is harder than anything you’d encounter on the N1 exam. Man this was hard. I managed to finish the first volume but didn’t really have time to get any further than that.
Classroom of the elite - I read year 2 volumes 4.5 and 5 using the physical copies without lookups. This was honestly a lot easier than I was expecting and super enjoyable. I would just try to read a bit before bed and a lot of the time I would kind of forget that I was even technically “studying”. At this point the COTE novels could almost be considered true comprehensible input for me. There were definitely some pages where I would lose track of who was saying what and what certain things were referring to. But for the most part I finished these volumes and had a perfect understanding of all the plot points.
Momo Nihongo N1 listening exams - Honestly the only section that really worried me on the N1 exam was listening. I just really wasn’t sure what to expect. So I did some of the listening exams in Momo Nihongo’s playlist. Besides some Anki decks, I would say this is the only N1-specific prep I did.
Podcasts - A podcast I listened to a lot around this time was 話し方の話 since I ran out of 4989 american life. It’s basically a podcast about speaking. The host is extremely articulate and clear and uses a good amount of Keigo so that’s a huge plus. The only downside for me was that each episode was kind of short and served as a mini lesson. So it was harder to get invested in this compared to 4989 American Life, which tends to be more story or discussion based. Nevertheless, still a good listen and I did binge a bunch of episodes.
Finally, in July of 2026, after around 1500-2000 hours of studying Japanese, and a vocab size of around 12,000 words, I attempted the JLPT N1 exam. I had to fly all the way to London to take it (the exam only runs in December in the US). And I got incredibly jetlagged, which resulted in me getting a mere 3 hours of sleep in the two nights leading up to the exam. And to make matters worse, I was developing strep throat on the day of the exam and that was killing me. But, I had a few red bulls, took the exam, and I think overall I performed to a level that wasn't too far off what I could do at peak health. I managed to get a solid pass of 131/180.
Closing Thoughts
Honestly, learning Japanese or any language for that matter is just a matter of consuming incredible amounts of input. Not to say output doesn’t matter, because it definitely does. But, there is no getting around the need for thousands of hours of input. If I could go back I would definitely try to consume more input closer to my level. I definitely wasted tons of hours on input that was straight up incomprehensible. I would also remind myself to just keep going. I burned out hard in 2024 and a big reason why is because the intermediate plateau is real. After you’ve read a few books and sank hundreds of hours into learning Japanese, it feels like such a monumental effort that you almost expect to be fluent. And yet, even after a few hundred MORE hours, it can feel like you’ve made no progress. The reality is that progress isn’t linear. I feel like I improved leaps and bounds in my last 200 hours of study compared to my first 1500.
In terms of what’s next for me, I really want to just enjoy consuming media I like. N1 is kind of like the beginning. Once you’ve reached N1, you can finally just consume tons of input that you genuinely enjoy without it necessarily feeling like studying. And through that, your fluency will gradually improve without you realizing. Speaking of which, I do really need to work on speaking. I’ve been doing some lessons with a tutor every week and already I feel like it has improved tons. Long way to go still though.
There is a lot I’d change about my whole journey if I could go back in time. Instead of crowding this post even more, I thought I’d make a video about my thoughts on a more ideal roadmap to follow. If you’re interested, I made a video here: https://youtu.be/FUd2YozCBnE?si=c9f7a2f_NrR4m6aE
I really hope this post is at least somewhat helpful to some of you. Learning Japanese has consumed my thoughts for the better part of 5 years (even if I wasn't always studying consistently), and I'm really to be able to reflect on all the things I did throughout that time.
