N5 to N1 in one year

I gave the Japanese N1 exam on December 1st 2024, got the result today, passed with a score of 108/180.

My journey

I first started learning Japanese about 3 years ago, with Duolingo. I did one lesson a day for like 2 years, barely learnt anything apart from kana. Calling me N5 level would be really, really, really generous. But as it is a 2 year headstart, I titled this post “N5 to N1 in one year” to be conservative.

I seriously started learning Japanese on October 18th 2023, using jpdb.io. You can see all my statistics by going to https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee and inserting my stats json. Download json from here.

Ive spent a cumulative 433 hours on jpdb, learning a total of 18627 non redundant words. In the starting few months, I was doing around 100 new words on average per day. Ive spent 66 hours reading books (同じ夢を見ていた, 本好きの下剋上　第一部　第一巻, 一瞬の永遠を、きみへ, 本好きの下剋上　第一部　第二巻) for a total of 650k characters. Played about 50 hours of divinity 2 original sin in Japanese. Watched an indeterminate amount of anime.

Advice

Learn kana first, you can do this in just a few weeks. Go on jpdb.io, find a simple slice of life anime (do NOT pick anything with a difficult topic), and memorize as many of its most frequent words as you can. (I started with horimiya). Once you have a decent starting point, you can start watching the anime, hearing the words in context will help you remember them alot. I would highly recommend donating to jpdb patreon, as that gives you access to its mpv plugin, which is a really convinient way of mining words. A free alternative would be setting up memento with anki. Its 90% there, but if you can afford it, I would still recommend the jpdb version.

I personally did not bother learning any grammar through any grammar book, I simply immersed and my brain put together all the verb conjugations, particles etc for me (although I did learn a bit from Duolingo, so this may be biased. But still I would not say I learned very much from Duolingo).

After you have watched and mined ~100-200 episodes of anime, you will have build a good vocabulary base, and can start reading books. I would recommend going to the prebuilt decks in JPDB, and seeing what books have the highest coverage for you, and starting with finding one you like from there. I would personally recommend 一瞬の永遠を、きみへ. It was simple in vocabulary and grammar, but was a good read regardless.

Books will force you to actually learn grammar, as you wont have as many context clues as anime, but since you will have a vocabulary base, putting it together subconsciously will still be possible.

After you’ve read a few books, and watched a few hundred episodes of anime, pretty much any kind of immersion along with a popup dictionary will be a piece of cake for you, and you can start watching any genre of content you want. Once you are at this point, immersion and getting better is barely any effort, if you are a weeb, you can just watch what you would watch normally, but with Japanese subtitles. Just try to keep up with your reviews.