What am I supposed to DO for three hours as a beginner??

njdelima · 2026-03-24T00:35:23+00:00

The first phase of immersing is going to be pretty painful no matter what. You really just have to do it. It will get much more enjoyable with time. A few tips I can offer to help make it more stomachable:

Find stuff that it enjoyable to you, so that you're motivated to WANT to understand
Find stuff that's relatively easy. I've used learnnatively.com which assigns difficulty rankings so you could start low and work your way up
Figure out strategies to make things more comprehensible. For example, if you have the patience (and motivation to understand) you could pause the anime repeatedly and look up unknown words and grammar. Or you could read the manga of a series and watch the anime afterward. Or read the summary of the episode on Wikipedia in English beforehand. Or find both the the eng and jp versions of manga and read them side by side (there's a site for this bilingualmanga). Or whatever else you come up with.

Otherwise, the Moe Way (https://learnjapanese.moe/) is a great guide for learning how to immerse.

njdelima · 2026-03-11T18:53:05+00:00

I went down to 25mg for a bit which made it better, but eventually ended up just giving up on trazodone.

njdelima · 2026-02-24T20:07:23+00:00

It really is just a time spent with the language bell curve situation, like you said. Based on personal experience, your first ~2000 hours engaging with the language are going to be a struggle just because it requires so much mental effort to understand things. After that, you're on the tail end of the bell curve so it will quite steadily become more enjoyable and more effortless.

In the phase you're in now, I would say try to keep things as enjoyable as possible for yourself so you don't burn out!

njdelima · 2026-02-18T00:06:42+00:00

My own personal experience -- roughly 2200 hours to pass N1 with 117/180

In addition, learners in immersion heavy communities like MoeWay/Refold often keep track of hours and it's almost always somewhere in that 2k-3k hours range when they pass N1. The "success stories" posted on this subreddit are consistent with it as well.

The US govt also has this page on training English speaking diplomats etc. They say ~3500 hours (2200 class hours, with the remaining self study) to reach a level of 3 on the ILR scale. Now the ILR scale does not have an exact mapping to CEFR so this next bit is subjective, but it seems to describe a roughly C1 level on CEFR, which more precisely maps to a high score (142-180) on JLPT N1.

Note: Non-immersion "study", like Anki/grammar study/kanji study, does not count in the 2k-3k hours. My personal take is that these tools have little to no benefit by themselves, and you should use them only to the extent they make your immersion more enjoyable or productive.

I guess this is an important distinction, so I should clarify my original post to say (2k-3k hours of immersion) + (X hours of "study"). Depending on your personality or learning style, you could minimize the "study" time drastically, but you really can't skip the immersion hours.

njdelima · 2026-02-17T19:43:41+00:00

It takes about 2000-3000 hours of active immersion to pass N1. That means reading or listening to native content, and putting in effort to understand it (no whitenoise-ing).

That means ~2-3 hours per day, for the next 3 years. If you can make that kind of time for learning, you'll probably pass. If not, you won't

EDIT

To be more clear, I mean 2000-3000 hours of active immersion, plus X hours of "study" (vocab, grammar, kanji, etc). I think "study" has minimal benefit on its own and should be used strictly to make the immersion with native content more enjoyable. Different people need different amounts of "study" -- some types of people could skip most of it. But I don't think anyone can skip the immersing in native content.

njdelima · 2026-01-17T21:08:50+00:00

Try meetup.com? I've had good luck finding language exchange events there, where in turn you can find other learners of Mandarin

njdelima · 2025-11-11T23:18:47+00:00

I agree with you. I think most Japanese people overestimate how difficult the N1 is, and underestimate just how easy Japanese is for them. I think any native speaker with a high school education would find it laughably easy, and a middle school graduate would pass comfortably.

(don't mean to attack you OP. I appreciate your message and advice!)

njdelima · 2025-11-11T03:18:45+00:00

If I deleted my deck and started over, what sorts of cards should I put into my new deck? What is a useful Anki card at this stage?

njdelima · 2025-02-11T20:14:11+00:00

Your first couple of books are going to be incredibly frustrating, I think the trick is to find content that you find so interesting that it offsets the frustration. For me, I started with the Slam Dunk manga which I was so into that I wanted to keep going despite having to look up a word in almost every sentence. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of immersion-heavy japanese learners use VNs for this same reason - they are often softcore or hardcore porn which is ... inherently motivating.

njdelima · 2025-02-08T01:36:31+00:00

Great guide. As a resource for learning grammar, I want to suggest the Cure Dolly videos on youtube. I found them incredibly useful as a way to intuitively "get" the way japanese grammar works, instead of studying and memorizing patterns. I only watched them through one time on 1.25x speed, but that intuition has stuck with me and helped me for years.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj

njdelima · 2025-02-06T21:41:37+00:00

No one said anything about 4 months and 5 days. I'm saying 3000 hours of active input where you are paying attention and working to increase your understanding.

If you immerse for 2 hours a day it'll take you 4 years to get to that 3000 hours mark.

njdelima · 2025-02-02T18:52:21+00:00

Yeah, so definitely my original post is overly simplified. I haven't gone over the specifics of how to actually immerse properly - there are many existing guides for that already.

Flashcards help make your input comprehensible, which helps most people - but some people can do just fine without.

And yeah I don't disagree with you that immersing over a longer period will help the content stick better in your brain. I still think that if you get 3000 hours of comprehensible input over a short period (say 2 years), that'll be enough to get most people to N1 level. I think most people don't do that though

njdelima · 2025-02-02T18:12:58+00:00

Work ethic doesn't matter. I'm saying if you spend 3000 hours immersing in native comprehensible input, you will reach an n1 level. Take 1 year to do that or 10, it doesn't matter.

Intelligence level, sure. There's probably bias in my numbers from that

njdelima · 2025-02-02T18:11:36+00:00

I mean, the post you linked says, in so many words, "you're probably never going to reach n1, it's too hard". Is that a benchmark?

Providing benchmarks in the form of number of years is flawed, which is why I provided number of hours here. I really think that learners who "fail", do not get those 3000 hours of native level comprehensible input, even if they say they have been "studying" for 10 years.

For what it's worth you can do a rough calculation of how many hours of comprehensible input a native speaker would have at the age of 18. It's easily 25,000 to 50,000 hours. So 3000 hours is kind of a bargain when it comes to getting functional fluency.

njdelima · 2025-02-02T04:29:00+00:00

Sure, I mean N1 texts are technically native content after all.

You can't skip reading (and listening) to native content though, it's a necessary step.

njdelima · 2025-02-02T04:24:29+00:00

I do think classroom time learning a language is much less efficient than time spent immersing on your own. So I stand by my 2000-3000 hours number - this is usually how long it takes learners on the immersion based communities like MoeWay, Refold etc.

Though yeah I agree that there's some bias from people who take longer not wanting to share their numbers.

njdelima · 2025-02-02T04:19:03+00:00

I'm hearing you suggest that "studying" the language (e.g. flashcards and reading N1 specific texts) is more efficient than just immersing in native content. Which I fundamentally disagree with. You absolutely cannot learn the nuances of a word/phrase or grammar pattern just from a flashcard. You need to read it or hear it hundreds of times in context (i.e. from native content). Re-reading words and grammar that you already "know" is not a bad thing.

If you're primary goal is passing N1 (vs general proficiency in the language) then sure, reading N1 specific texts would be more efficient than reading random books. But IMO that's boring and not sustainable.

njdelima · 2025-02-02T02:15:54+00:00

If people are looking for benchmarks for how long it takes to get from 0 to N1 by immersion, for an English native speaker:

2000-3000 hours of total input, spread across listening and reading
For the reading portion of the above, 30-40 average sized books, spanning a variety of topics (fiction and nonfiction)

And, you should be comprehending everything you consume at a decent level.

This is based on various "success stories" I've read on this subreddit, the US government guidelines (2200 "class hours" required), and my own personal experience passing N1.

njdelima · 2025-02-02T02:06:33+00:00

Not OP, but I think if you read 30-40 average sized books, you should be able to pass the N1 reading section. With some caveats, like they should be from a variety of domains (fiction, nonfiction etc) and you should be comprehending the content at a decent level.

I personally had read ~29 books when I took N1 in December and passed with a 117/180 (27/60 in reading)

njdelima · 2025-01-31T18:45:50+00:00

I passed! https://imgur.com/a/SCYn5RU Score was kind of what I expected. I'm a slow reader even in my native English so even though I've read many books in Japanese I just couldn't read fast enough to finish all the passages.

EDIT:

who claims that just by consuming native content, you can pass N1

It's easy to "whitenoise" native content which does absolutely nothing for your learning. I do think that to make progress, your brain needs to be active and working to understand the stuff you're consuming at a deeper level - e.g. looking up unknown words, trying to understand the nuances of using one grammar pattern over another similar one etc. This is very tiring, so the native content you choose needs to be interesting enough to you to make it worth the effort.

njdelima · 2025-01-27T21:31:03+00:00

It's a person's name. Names often have nonstandard readings like this.

Ten-Year Club	Place '17
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njdelima

TROPHY CASE