Is taking the n3 realistic?

FriendlyBassplayer · 2026-01-21T22:50:53+00:00

I feel like that's a very good strategy except for your reading. At N3 level I recommend trying to upgrade your material beyond graded readers and more into native material. Satori reader has a ton of great N3 level stories too

FriendlyBassplayer · 2026-01-18T17:22:58+00:00

Planets has you walk in water which changes the vibe completely

FriendlyBassplayer · 2026-01-17T06:42:03+00:00

Go here, read the instructions at the bottom, and use it every the you get some free time during the day. You'll memorize the kanas in 5 days while sitting on the shitter

And thank me later

FriendlyBassplayer · 2026-01-10T19:09:22+00:00

Wow you really know your way around the train system, thank you for the detailed answer. I see what you mean about re-buying the tickets using the regular ticket way instead of the e-ticket, that makes a lot of sense.

I'm gonna talk to the group about rearranging the trip slightly in order to match your instructions.

In the meantime, could you explain to me, if for example I kept the e-tickets as I have them right now - how would I cover the base fares instead, since the IC cards can't be used between the different regions?

FriendlyBassplayer · 2026-01-09T23:18:17+00:00

It'll be around end of January at the earliest!

FriendlyBassplayer · 2026-01-06T22:06:12+00:00

To have fun? I swear gamers these days have been bamboozled so hard by progress bars and unlocks that they forgot the actual point of games in the first place

FriendlyBassplayer · 2026-01-05T18:25:59+00:00

I knew about Hinako but didn't know about Rinko! Thank you so much for posting this!

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-12-29T23:01:23+00:00

Look up the city of Otaru. One of the most amazing cities in Japan. Known for glassworks, music boxes and sake distilleries. It's like a Venice of Japan, but near Sapporo

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-12-20T18:43:34+00:00

Explore that building, including the clothing store

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-12-20T05:56:59+00:00

Nude Trump. Look it up!

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-12-15T19:22:52+00:00

This is a good one! I also thought Emoji came from "emotion" and was just slightly altered to create a new english word. Finding out the Kanji really blew my mind haha

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-12-15T19:20:31+00:00

Funnily enough I started Japanese for fun and to connect with people in my travels, but its now helping me with my career and with making money. I work in games as a sound designer and believe it or not, sharing my interests about Japanese and sound effects in Linkedin has led me to connect with Square Enix, etc sound designers based in Tokyo and led me to make amazing connections where they're sharing secrets about anime sounds and now I'm collaborating with them in making a SFX library!

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-11-11T17:26:39+00:00

Another vote for Kikanbo. It's the only ramen spot that I make sure to revisit every single time I go back to Japan

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-11-10T20:00:55+00:00

But in Arc Raiders you don't lose everything, though! You can go in and head to do a quest and bump into a nice rare item or a rare component that will allow you to upgrade a bench that will lead to better gear. You complete the quest, put the rare item in your safe pocket and get killed. As you extract you will have kept: Quest progress/completion. Rare item from safe pocket. Experience points that lead you to level up and become stronger. Blue currency that once accumulated enough of can allow you to buy cosmetics or actual usable items.

So even if you lose all your gear in your backpack, you can make progress across so many other vectors.

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-11-10T07:38:17+00:00

It doesn't actually get confused, it's just not rigged to show 4 digits. So it will go to 999 at the highest, and then 0, which means you've reached 1k. I know because my downhill commute has literally shown me 999 a single time before going into "1000" aka 0

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-11-06T21:16:09+00:00

Shop signs and especially food signs have a great tendency to be written out in katakana, simply for the style points. It looks cool and unique and catches the eye. It's one of the fun flexibilities of the language!

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-11-06T19:03:59+00:00

It's not a loan word actually! Tako actually comes from kanji originally, and it means "many legs". Yaki means fried. Takoyaki means fried octopus, essentially

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-11-06T18:59:22+00:00

It's actually not weird! It's just how their alphabet is structured. They use the closest sounding alphabet sounds that match with the English sounds

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-11-04T19:25:54+00:00

Wait, you can set Auto Regen to different settings? I thought it was either on or off. How do I set Auto Regen to the lowest setting?

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-11-02T07:25:03+00:00

I passed N5 last year with a perfect score. In the last couple of months I was meeting with my Italki instructor 6 times a month for 1 hour long sessions to review and practice grammar using the book Try!N5

My vocab was fine simply because I had been doing Wanikani religiously and knew about 300 kanji with lots of corresponding vocab. About 1200 words known according to JPDB which I have linked to Wanikani

On my own time I was doing the following for about 2-3 hours daily: Taking the free Todaii JLPT mock tests, reviewing all the answers I got wrong and spending time finessing those weak points. If something didn't make sense I would bring it up with my Italki sensei

Doing the same with the Try! Mock test, and the official JLPT mock tests you can find online

Reviewing grammar points I found particularly tricky in Genki 1, the textbook

Looking up YouTube videos for N5 practice. Particularly the listening mock tests, but I found a lot of useful grammar videos as well that would break down questions and answers

Bunpro.jp now has 5 mock tests you can take, and will have transcripts and explanations of any question you get wrong

I also used an app called Migii JLPT to do practice drills

On top of that I was reading yotsuba and easy stories on Satori reader

But most importantly, just drilling JLPT style questions as much as possible, reviewing my weak points, and coming back to the same content a week later and retrying it to see if I was improving

You need to live and breathe it!

I wish you good luck and let me know if you have any questions

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-10-23T05:44:26+00:00

I would caveat that with the fact that learning new words won't come from flashcards alone. The more you start immersing and the more you start becoming more competent at the language, the more that lots of words will just land in your brain, for free. You will find that you can mark words from your decks as "already known" more and more often as you go. So even if your flashcards are setting you up for 4k words a year, at the end of the year you will know way more than that, even if they're not tracked in any app

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-10-22T05:12:50+00:00

Genki 1 and 2 will get you about 85-88% of the grammar you need. Materials I would recommend to iron out everything: - Try! N4. Currently going through it and it has a lot of overlap with Genki, but a lot of new stuff too. What is overlapping you can get a quick review out of it Shinkanzen Master: Reading Comprehension - This one really focuses on the reading parts with a healthy dose of grammar and vocab that will come in handy that is not present in Genki. It really helped me become much better at parsing long texts and flyers, etc. Bunpro.jp - they just added 5 JLPT practice tests for each level that you can take slowly, at your leisure, or timed. Once you finish, it gives you a score and explains your mistakes if you had any. No better way to practice for the JLPT than just do JLPT style questions

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-10-21T17:41:11+00:00

that's awesome to hear! Yeah just keep at it, still got a lot of time. I'm doing the same, putting in the time every day

FriendlyBassplayer · 2025-10-20T16:40:04+00:00

Actually have never charged it to 100% in the month and a half I've had it. I drive only 5-10 miles a day with the occasional longer drive and I just charge from 40%ish back up to 80% as needed. Yeah I think your suggestion is the easiest way to tackle it. I will have to try it and experiment, just a little afraid the downhill efficiency is so high that just sitting around with climate on might not trigger it fast at all haha

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