EDIT: Thanks for all the feedback till now, Please share your thoughts on the updated schedule. Changes in Red.

As a way to challenge myself to learn something new and useful, I'm planning to upgrade my Japanese language skills.

The Target: get upto the N2N3 (or near this level) by self-learning
The Time Limit: 1 year (~750 hrs effective study time)
Current Level: Beginner+
-> CANNOT pass N5 as I am now (snowball's chance in hell).
-> CAN identify few kana (5-10 at best) and the English meaning behind a few kanji (5-10 at best)
-> No formal grammar knowledge, very basic vocab (from anime/manga).
-> Basic listening skills from watching subbed anime).
-> No real comprehension/passage reading skills.

Based on this time-limit, I've the following time breakdown for study times:

1. Kana & Grammar : 125 hrs (25 hrs for kana, rest for grammar)
2. Kanji (RTK1 + Flashcards) : 250 hrs (about 9 kanji/hr, 18-36 Kanji/day)
3. Vocab (Core 2k->Core 6k Flashcards): 250 hrs (about 24 words/hr, 48-96 words/day)
-> Pretty sure I'm pushing it here, may be I should stick to the core 2k and then move onto the 6k at the end of this exercise...
4. Listening & Reading : 125 hrs
-> Start with the reading after doing the kana (kids news papers and random websites via "hiragana megane" tool)
-> Listening exercises on japanesepod101.com or similar, YouTube videos etc.

1. Kana & Grammar : 100 hrs (25 hrs for kana, rest for grammar)
2. Kanji (JLPT N3 List + Flashcards) : ~650 in 125 hrs (about 5 kanji/hr, 10-20/day)
-> Not planning to spend time on Kanji writing skills, only correct reading and recall.
3. Vocab (JLPT N3 List + Flashcards): ~4000 in 375 hrs (about 10 words/hr 20-40/day)
-> Vocab is still pretty darn fast paced, gotta deal with it...
4. Listening & Reading : 150 hrs
-> Start with the reading after doing the kana (kids news papers and random websites via "hiragana megane" tool)
-> Listening exercises on japanesepod101.com or similar, YouTube videos etc.

Additional Notes:
1. The time limit is largely self imposed for the challenge and to know how much I can really do in a span of a year. Also hoping that this will serve as a realistic exercise to see if I can stick around to finish this programme. I plan to do a mock/sample N2 at the end of the year to see how much I could manage.
2. Can't really afford classes at this point, considering how this is mainly a "self-improvement" thing, I'd like to stick to freely available material as much as possible.
3. Books: Have copy of RTK1 4th ed on loan from a friend (could get Minna no nihongo, If I ask really nicely).
4. Planning to use the Kanji/Vocab lists from here: http://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/jlpt3/

I'd be really really grateful if you guys could:
1. Comment on the plan and suggest changes to content or time allocations based on your experiences.
2. Suggest resources that would help me out

Thanks for reading.

X-posted to reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/c...f_learner/

It's going to be tough dude. I think this forum consistently underestimates the time frame most people pass N2 and N1 in. What's the average number of years people have studied before the pass N2? Most people I talk to say three or four, with faster people around two years. It's doable in a year, I imagine, but it's really tough.

Thanks for the hint, I know it might be not very realistic, but I want to do it as a challenge to motivate myself to plan and use my time better (and learn something useful along the way). I'm not really sure that I'd be taking the N2 JLPT, but I really want to get as close as possible to that level within a year. I can imagine the Kanji and Vocab areas will be really hard... too much to cover and too little time.

I was also toying with the idea of replacing RTK1 with RTK Lite and starting out with core 2k (then moving onto 6k, if I have time). But, I guess these changes will leave me closer to N3 rather than N2, right?

I think you can get to N3 in a year if you study for several hours a day every single day. I could potentially pass the N3 after 15 months of study, the first six I maybe could have spent more effectivelly, and I know others on this forum who made about the same amount of progress in the same timespan as I. Furthermore for reference, I've spent on average about 4 hours a day studying including reading. The trick is consistency and a lot of reading.

Looking at your study plan, I don't think you've put enough stock into reading and listening. Kanji is important, but you only need to familiarise yourself with them to start seeing the benefit of reading. Actually, I think past N5 the brunt of your study should be put on mostly reading and interacting with Japanese, but the sooner the better.

P.S. Your topic header is a bit misleading, btw. I thought going in you were at N2 already and going to ask how to better proceed.

I saw you posted this on reddit too, hmmm.

I don't think it's possible to get to N2 in a year. ( Especially if you aren't in japan ) While we all may feel confident planning out how to study, it's sometimes difficult to put that plan to work.

A lot of people come up with studying plans, discuss it here, they start, and suddenly they disappear / stop. You're going to need to spend a lot of time actively and passively learning and honestly, you'll probably just burn out.

I'd lower the goal if I were you. I don't understand the reason to rush through a language, you might miss out on a lot of things. N3 might be more doable.

Jackdaw Wrote:I think you can get to N3 in a year if you study for several hours a day every single day. I could potentially pass the N3 after 15 months of study, the first six I maybe could have spent more effectivelly, and I know others on this forum who made about the same amount of progress in the same timespan as I. Furthermore for reference, I've spent on average about 4 hours a day studying including reading. The trick is consistency and a lot of reading.

Thanks, I guess I've underestimated the effort required for N2 by a lot. It appears I was really off the mark as this is my first real attempt at learning a new language. Would you recommend any specific resources for practicing reading? I was thinking to read the "easy" version of news sites and some random webpages with Hiragana-megane to improve my reading speed.

Jackdaw Wrote:Looking at your study plan, I don't think you've put enough stock into reading and listening. Kanji is important, but you only need to familiarise yourself with them to start seeing the benefit of reading. Actually, I think past N5 the brunt of your study should be put on mostly reading and interacting with Japanese, but the sooner the better.

Ok, I'll start with lang8 and similar sites, so that I can interact with native speakers as soon as I have the basics down. Right now is too early I feel.

Jackdaw Wrote:P.S. Your topic header is a bit misleading, btw. I thought going in you were at N2 already and going to ask how to better proceed.

Sorry for that, I'm not able to edit it with the edit post button, I guess I'm stuck with it.

I think vocabulary is much more important than the weight you've given it in your schedule. No matter how good your kanji-writing is (irrelevant for JLPT, incidentally) or how good your grammar is - if you don't know the words you're not going to understand anything. 2000 words is obviously not enough.

Just start studying. You are just starting out. Don't be concerned with the time it will take and just do it. It is impossible to tell how long it will take because each person is different.

MelonBerry Wrote:I saw you posted this on reddit too, hmmm.

Yup, I want to get some opinions on this before I really start out. That's why I liked to this post from reddit too.

MelonBerry Wrote:I don't think it's possible to get to N2 in a year. ( Especially if you aren't in japan ) While we all may feel confident planning out how to study, it's sometimes difficult to put that plan to work.

A lot of people come up with studying plans, discuss it here, they start, and suddenly they disappear / stop. You're going to need to spend a lot of time actively and passively learning and honestly, you'll probably just burn out.

The more feedback I get, the more clearer it is: I underestimated the effort required a lot. I had a gut feeling that the vocab bit maybe too much, but appears that I was off by a large margin in all areas while aiming for N2 in a year. While I'm really interested to improve my Japanese skill, I don't plan to push it too far and experience burn out.

MelonBerry Wrote:I'd lower the goal if I were you. I don't understand the reason to rush through a language, you might miss out on a lot of things. N3 might be more doable.

I'm not in a terrible hurry or anything, I just wanted to set a nice challenge for myself and learn something useful at the same time. I guess I'll have to revise my plans a bit, may be concentrate on specific areas first and based on that put this new plan into action.

PotbellyPig Wrote:Just start studying. You are just starting out. Don't be concerned with the time it will take and just do it. It is impossible to tell how long it will take because each person is different.

Thanks for the advice, I wanted to measure progress and better understand my learning speed, therefore I thought of setting a specific goal and working towards it. I generally like to be a little calculating about these kinds of things, maybe that's the wrong approach...

Aikynaro Wrote:I think vocabulary is much more important than the weight you've given it in your schedule. No matter how good your kanji-writing is (irrelevant for JLPT, incidentally) or how good your grammar is - if you don't know the words you're not going to understand anything. 2000 words is obviously not enough.

Yes, time allotment appears to be a problem in many areas, as I've underestimated the effort required. I guess I must adjust the time and make a new plan. I guess based on the feedback it is clear to me now that rather than "compromise" on certain aspects of N2, I could aim for N3 and plan according to that.

Combined listening and reading time of 125 hours is nowhere near enough.

It suggests that you intend to do ~2% of your reading/listening practice *in the actual exam*

tameshi Wrote:Would you recommend any specific resources for practicing reading? I was thinking to read the "easy" version of news sites and some random webpages with Hiragana-megane to improve my reading speed.

For the most part I'd just say read what you feel like reading and if it's too much above your level, read it for what little bit you can muster, then go find something easier to focus on and come back to it later. Basically, it's good to have something on your level you can read in bulk for practice and something a bit above your level you can work on in small chunks to challenge yourself with.

But to answer your question specifically, I often link beginners the following:

- The Great Chocochoco Library - An assortment of free graded readers with glossaries. This one really helped me out when I started out.

- Tom Ray's collection of Japanese children's stories with line-by-line breakdowns, translations and glossaries. Also quite helpful.

- NHK Easy - News with simple grammar. It's rather vocab heavy I feel, so I personally didn't like it for start out reading practice, prefered manga. But it's a good resource to have, particularly for broadening your vocabulary.

- Easier shounen and shoujo manga. Yotsubato is often recommended, although I think the accents might trip you up until you've got a better feel of Japanese. What I can personally recommend is perhaps Horimiya and similiar slice of life romcoms. They generally share vocab, so if you've read one, the next is a lot easier. You often have furigana to help you too. (Note that there are OCR tools like KanjiTomo you can use to help you read things without furigana, should you need it.)

Generally, what you read is what you get good at reading, so if you keep working on the things you like to read, whether's it's sci-fi, comedies, fantasy RPG games or what not, it'll only get easier over time. I like to read from a lot of different genres and types of materials to cover a lot of different grounds.

anotherjohn Wrote:Combined listening and reading time of 125 hours is nowhere near enough.

It suggests that you intend to do ~2% of your reading/listening practice *in the actual exam*

Thanks, I guess you're right there. However, I don't plan to sit the exam right after I'm done. I just want to test myself and see what I can do. After interacting with everyone here, I realize that I've been underestimating this too much, may be I still am... But I plan to stick to the whole in-a-year thing and see how much progress I really make, based off of that, I'll plan future stuff, including when to sit for the exam

Jackdaw Wrote:For the most part I'd just say read what you feel like reading and if it's too much above your level, read it for what little bit you can muster, then go find something easier to focus on and come back to it later. Basically, it's good to have something on your level you can read in bulk for practice and something a bit above your level you can work on in small chunks to challenge yourself with.

Thanks for the specific links to the reading material. I'll try it out once I'm able to recognize and read the kana.
The Kanji OCR tool sounds promising, but I'm not sure if I can ditch furigana completely and still continue to read at a decent speed. Maybe I'll have to work out a phased approach here and wean myself off of furigana as a start learning the Kanji. :/

Jackdaw Wrote:Generally, what you read is what you get good at reading, so if you keep working on the things you like to read, whether's it's sci-fi, comedies, fantasy RPG games or what not, it'll only get easier over time. I like to read from a lot of different genres and types of materials to cover a lot of different grounds.

I'd prefer to gain some general comprehension so the idea of reading different genre of articles seems appealing, I guess the news sites should provide some exposure to various topics.

If you don't actually care about the exam, maybe you should pick a different measuring stick. 'I want to be able to read this book/understand this show after one year of study' is just as meaningful and much cheaper to test.

I think your change to using a JLPT word list over Core is a step backwards. Core has audio, example sentences, and nice card formatting ready for you. Ankiing sentences to learn vocabulary also lets you memorise grammar for free, so you can cut down on step 1.

Haven't read the replies, never do anyway.

Boy or girl,
get down to it. You'd already have learnt the kana at least.

Some materials:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840

Hiroshima wasn't built in day, but it was destroyed in less than a minute.

Good luck.

Aikynaro Wrote:If you don't actually care about the exam, maybe you should pick a different measuring stick. 'I want to be able to read this book/understand this show after one year of study' is just as meaningful and much cheaper to test.

I don't really care for the exam at this point, but I may take it up in mid-far future (say 3-5 years from now) depending upon professional opportunities available and things of that nature. I see this exercise as a stepping stone to it. While I'm not too concerned with sticking to test patterns and drilling sample questions, I wouldn't want to deviate too much from that path either.

That said, using a different way to measure progress is also a nice plan. May be I should pick some basic book and see how long I take to be able to read that fully... I'm not sure I could use this as the only measuring stick as I'd like to see my progress against the expectations of the standardised tests too. Could you recommend any basic books that I might be able to read a few months down the line?

Aikynaro Wrote:I think your change to using a JLPT word list over Core is a step backwards. Core has audio, example sentences, and nice card formatting ready for you. Ankiing sentences to learn vocabulary also lets you memorise grammar for free, so you can cut down on step 1.

Sounds interesting. I haven't really compared/tried the deck myself, just going off of numbers to plan time. I guess I'll revert back to the core6k and turn off words or maybe find a JLPT-oriented deck with the audio and sentence examples. Any suggestions? I was planning to use the tanos.co.uk site lists, but they don't have sentence examples & usages. They do have anki decks too, not sure how good they are.

buonaparte Wrote:Good luck.

Thanks for pointing me to the stuff and your words of encouragement. I'll try to keep the whole Hiroshima thing in mind. I don't wanna go *boom* on this plan, I'd rather build it day-by-day.

Quote:Could you recommend any basic books that I might be able to read a few months down the line?

I have a thread for that (which I should probably post more in). You would need to import them, but I can guarantee ふたごの魔法つかい are the easiest worthwhile native fiction novels around. If you're looking for stuff you can download your options are quite limited, but have a look in the Book Club thread and you might find something do-able.
Manga is easy to find recommendations for. I think ぴたテン is a good milestone though.

Quote:I guess I'll revert back to the core6k and turn off words or maybe find a JLPT-oriented deck with the audio and sentence examples. Any suggestions? I was planning to use the tanos.co.uk site lists, but they don't have sentence examples & usages. They do have anki decks too, not sure how good they are.

Wouldn't know. I made my own deck using subs2srs and anime. I doubt a JLPT deck would be much different from Core though. They're all words that you'll encounter soon enough whichever way you go.


Also, once this thread has run its course, you should leave this forum for the next few months and touch no other Japanese-learning related websites. Once you've worked out your strategy, just follow it without looking for endless optimisation. We're all just wasting time here really.

Aikynaro Wrote:I have a thread for that

Cool, I'll bookmark it for laters.

Aikynaro Wrote:Wouldn't know. I made my own deck using subs2srs and anime. I doubt a JLPT deck would be much different from Core though. They're all words that you'll encounter soon enough whichever way you go.

Ok. I didn't mean they'd be different w.r.t the words, but the extra content like sample sentences and stuff. I guess I'll have to try them out a little and if needed, create my own a few days down the line.

Aikynaro Wrote:Also, once this thread has run its course, you should leave this forum for the next few months and touch no other Japanese-learning related websites. Once you've worked out your strategy, just follow it without looking for endless optimisation. We're all just wasting time here really.

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep that in mind. But I'm not sure I can totally study in isolation, I guess I'll be around asking specific advice rather than writing out study plans. Thanks again for all the help.

tameshi Wrote:

Aikynaro Wrote:Also, once this thread has run its course, you should leave this forum for the next few months and touch no other Japanese-learning related websites. Once you've worked out your strategy, just follow it without looking for endless optimisation. We're all just wasting time here really.

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep that in mind. But I'm not sure I can totally study in isolation, I guess I'll be around asking specific advice rather than writing out study plans. Thanks again for all the help.

Don't feel that you're studying in isolation. Groups like this exist to support you. However, there is a kernel of truth in what Aikynaro said.

On a slightly different note, I'd say it's ambitious, at the least, to lay out a 750-hour plan for something you've little experience with. Better to try out 20 hours or so, see how it fits your lifestyle and temperament, then try another 40 hours.

I think there's a tendency to think of learning as a math problem. You simply do that many hours, and boom, you'll have that skill. But I don't think it works like that. It might take you 200 hours to reach N3, or it might take you 2000. Your background, age, motivation, recall ability, and astrological sign will all play a part.

So while it's good to have a road map, I wouldn't focus on the hours too much until you get a bit further along. There's no telling how long it's going to take.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:On a slightly different note, I'd say it's ambitious, at the least, to lay out a 750-hour plan for something you've little experience with. Better to try out 20 hours or so, see how it fits your lifestyle and temperament, then try another 40 hours.

Thanks, my main motivation behind this (and the reason for planning 750 hrs upfront), is that I have some extra time over the next 10-12 months. I'd like to use this to try something new, and learning a foreign language seemed like a good idea as I haven't had the experience of doing this before. Also, the choice of language itself, Japanese, is tied to the industry I work in (and my personal interest in manga/anime etc), I'm pretty confident it will open new paths in the future and help me grow professionally as well.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:I think there's a tendency to think of learning as a math problem. You simply do that many hours, and boom, you'll have that skill. But I don't think it works like that. It might take you 200 hours to reach N3, or it might take you 2000. Your background, age, motivation, recall ability, and astrological sign will all play a part.

So while it's good to have a road map, I wouldn't focus on the hours too much until you get a bit further along. There's no telling how long it's going to take.

As you say earlier, I might have gone too math-mad on the whole planning thing, but I want to gain a good insight of both the progress I make and my l33t estimation skillez (which BTW, have been really off in this case) from this exercise. I realize the point you're trying to make, but I'm doing this after due thought. Sure, there is stuff I can learn that would be useful *right now*, but I feel it is better that I use this strech of time I have to try out something new and intensive that can be useful for my future.

I think it's a noble project. But then of course I would, since I've been doing the same thing for 10+ years. It's just that of the people I've seen start out learning Japanese, 99% quit before they achieve the ability to communicate proficiently.

Everybody's balls-out in the beginning, and then a few months or years in, they realize it's a much bigger project than they'd imagined. Please understand, I'm not trying to discourage you in any way. Rather, I think that people starting out would be well served by understanding the enormity of the task, and being prepared for it.

Learning a foreign language is a great use of your spare time, and something that will enrich your life. But if it's Japanese you've chosen, well, gird your loins.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Please understand, I'm not trying to discourage you in any way. Rather, I think that people starting out would be well served by understanding the enormity of the task, and being prepared for it.

No problemo, I really appreciate your insight and perspective on this.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Learning a foreign language is a great use of your spare time, and something that will enrich your life. But if it's Japanese you've chosen, well, gird your loins.

lol