drdunlap Wrote:Also, just a friendly warning, if that beer+plane ticket offer stands for everyone else too then you owe a lot of people beer and plane tickets.

The beer offer stands for anyone. I will happily take anyone with N1 who finds themselves in London out for drinks. I might have to be a bit more discriminating about the plane tickets.. :-)

I'm extremely surprised to see so many assuming I want to learn words in order to speak them, or show off to natives or something. I have no intention of ever speaking to natives or going to Japan, I am only learning Japanese to understand. Learning words that not every native knows is fine to me because they will come up in reading and listening. Usage is irrelevant.

Another thing is because of the first post talking about N1 a lot of people assume I'm at that point and I should just read. I have been reading for a long time and know much more vocabulary than what is covered in N1 already. I am looking for advanced (for natives) vocabulary lists to study from so I can acquire new vocabulary more efficiently.

Thanks for the responses. I have read them all and looked at all of the links.

dizmox Wrote:I just barely passed N1 in 2 years. 103/190

My Chinese friend managed in about 14 months. Learning a new writing system does not put westerners at years of disadvantage. It's just that the majority of Westerners are doing this as a hobby only semi-seriously instead of to get ahead in life/business. There's little economic motivation for westerners in comparison.

I completely agree with this. Passing the N2 and N1 exams is certainly a lot of work, but so is passing the licensing exam to become a lawyer, doctor, accountant, etc. I'm sure that if more people viewed it that way, more people would pass it in a short amount of time. The difference is that the most people don't want to support themselves with their Japanese language ability - they are learning it for personal, not professional reasons. And so they are doing this on top of whatever activities they are doing to support themselves, plus their personal obligations.

a thesaurus ( http://thesaurus.weblio.jp/ ) is pretty cool for browsing though words!

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