Field notes

How I passed the JLPT N1 without Anki

· 11 min read · Karasu

I never built a flashcard deck. I pivoted from one of the most recommended textbooks when learning Japanese. Study time can look different. In December 2024, I passed the JLPT N1 anyway. Here’s my journey.

I arrive to Japan for the first time, I am going through customs and the おじさん and I are talking, he looks at me and says “How long have you been living in Japan?”.

In that moment, I felt like I made it.

I want to write down my experience learning Japanese up to now because I feel it looks different for everyone and someone can benefit from reading my experience. There’s no Anki deck in this story. There’s no 10,000-card mining workflow, no status chart, no spreadsheet of daily sentence counts. There is a lot of talking to people at 7 in the morning, different books and novels, and just the stepping stones that put it all together.

Like a lot of people, it started with anime, but that’s not when I started learning

I was around 12 when I started watching anime in Japanese. I was going through big changes having moved to a new city, a new place, a new world and I was feeling a bit lost and isolated. I needed something to do and I found anime. At first, I was watching things like Naruto and Bleach in English but then I hit the point where the latest episodes were only available in Japanese. So, down the rabbit hole I went. I remember the first time hearing Japanese it felt weird, comical almost and nonsensical. I was watching shounen anime after all. As I kept watching, it became more and more familiar, the way the voice actors poured their hearts in every scene, the emotion they could get across, I was hooked. In my teen years, I tried to learn hiragana and katakana. I quickly gave up after a day or two. I thought it would be impossible to learn Japanese.

Years later in my 20s, I found myself in a similar situation. New town, didn’t know anybody and COVID was hitting hard. So I found myself wanting to study Japanese seriously. Those years in between weren’t study, but they weren’t nothing either. They gave me three things I think made such a big impact:

This last one is special because you can’t get it from a textbook and you can’t speedrun it. If you’ve been watching subtitled Japanese for years and feel guilty that it “doesn’t count”, make no mistake it definitely counts.

2020: a new town, a lockdown, and a karaoke world in VRChat

I moved to a new town right as COVID hit. I didn’t know a single person, and going outside to fix that wasn’t an option. So I did what a lot of people did that year and went looking for company online.

I ended up in VRChat. One night I was in a karaoke world singing my heart out to a Japanese song, and a Japanese guy started talking to me. He invited me into a world with his group of friends.

That’s where the journey began.

Because of all the anime, I walked in thinking I already knew some Japanese and could manage. I was wrong, kinda. I knew far less than I thought, but I wasn’t at zero either. This newfound community took me in and would engage with me even if I wasn’t fluent or would struggle with certain things. Japanese people can be “you can’t sit with us” vibes in online spaces, so I was incredibly lucky.

Genki 1, and the reason I never needed Anki

I picked up Genki 1 and started working through it properly. My weeb anime years started paying their due dividends. I kept hitting vocabulary I already half-knew, and I mostly just needed hiragana and katakana so I could start actually reading things off the textbook.

This is the point where most people start building word lists. Genki even hands you one at the end of every chapter. I never paid much attention to those, and I never made an Anki deck.

I’m not going to pretend that was a brilliant strategic decision. It worked because of what I had instead. The group had a busy Discord server, and I’d hop into a voice call every single morning and just talk in Japanese. Those calls were the key to it all. Repeated exposure to different topics, words, and conversations.

My speaking got way ahead of my reading, which is backwards

Here’s the part that makes my path unusual. Speaking came fast, the anime years plus daily morning calls did that. Reading was less natural at first. Working through Genki 1, every single word and character felt like a deliberate processing effort. You may be able to relate to this depending on where you are on your journey where it feels like you are doing acrobatics inside your brain to process what you are trying to intake.

The Discord server had constant text conversations happening and I wanted so badly to be in them. I just couldn’t read at that level yet. I remember being genuinely frustrated by it.

What I could do was post photos of my Genki 1 workbook pages and get feedback and engage at a limited level in the chat. That helped more than it sounds like it should have. It made studying a thing my friends could see.

WaniKani: I did all 60 levels

When I finished Genki 1, I set out to fix the reading problem specifically. That’s when I started WaniKani.

I wanted to read the jokes, the event dates, the idle chatter but also be part of it all. So I needed to fix the kanji problem and I needed the fix now.

My routine looked like this: every morning, hop on the voice call, do the usual banter, then stream my WaniKani review session while everyone talked around me. I’d crank through whatever had piled up while half-listening to a conversation. My friends would watch my stream sometimes they’d be intrigued by an English meaning of x,y,z kanji.

That’s the trick, if there is one. SRS reviews are boring. Boring work with good company is completely survivable. I finished all 60 levels.

I can’t tell you the exact day I could suddenly participate in text chat. There wasn’t one. At some point enough pieces were in place and I was just… in there. We also had a LINE group going, a crazy group chat about crazy things, arguments, politics, social issues, internet mess and so on.

Genki 2, and the thing textbooks can’t do

I worked through Genki 2 alongside WaniKani and got through it fairly quickly. Maybe a couple weeks or so, if I’m remembering right. Staring at grammar points on a page is not my strong suit. Plenty of it left me confused and mind-numbed.

My morning ritual of talking to my friends on discord was what made it all click. A grammar point I’d been squinting at in the book would just come up in conversation, and that’s when it would click. Sometimes I’d interrupt: “Hold on, I literally learned this yesterday from the book can you explain this to me?”

My friends would try. And here’s the thing sometimes native speakers often can’t explain the things they know best. It’s hard to break down something you’ve never had to think about. You know? But it would make sense in context.

I didn’t finish Tobira and my Japanese got better anyway

After Genki 2, I did what everyone says to do and picked up Tobira.

The jump was mind-numbing. I was having genuinely fun, funny, occasionally heated conversations in Japanese every morning. Arguing about politics, social issues, US vs. Japan culture stuff, in between rounds of Apex and League and Overwatch. And then I’d sit down and reading Tobira’s long passages felt like a chore. After a couple of weeks, I gave up on it.

I still wanted to improve badly. I just felt the timing was wrong for that specific book. So I was left with the question of what to do instead.

I decided I needed a change of pace, not more textbook learning.

Games and novels in Japanese

I started playing Pokémon Sword in Japanese. The first game I ever played in the language. It was rough at the start. I vividly remember running into 紫 for “purple” and just going “…uh.” I was still mid-WaniKani at that point.

I finished it. Then I read my first novel: 僕らの七日間戦争.

It’s aimed at children, and it was actually a really fun read. It transported me straight back to being a kid. That book is where I figured out something about myself as a learner: native material with real context was dramatically easier for me to absorb than a textbook, and infinitely more rewarding.

Next was かがみの孤城. By then I was near the end of WaniKani. It’s a long book and I loved it. My plan was to read the novel first and then watch the film adaptation to compare it against the version I’d built in my head. The movie adaptation left me feeling a bit… hungry. The novel pours so much care and detail into each character, and the movie runtime just doesn’t have room for that.

From there I kept going. A partial list of what I read:

Plus more games, plus the same friends on Discord nearly every morning, still.

Coming back to textbooks

After all that reading, something shifted: I actually wanted textbooks again.

I went into the Shin Kanzen Master series and worked from N5 up through roughly N2. And it was a completely different experience from Tobira. By that point I’d met most of the grammar and vocabulary already. The book wasn’t teaching me things from scratch. It was labeling, organizing, and filling gaps in stuff I’d already absorbed.

The JLPT detour (and the $100 that stopped me)

Around this time I started thinking about actually taking the JLPT. I thought as a first time try I could go for the N3.

Then I found out each test cost about $100. I did not want to pay $100 for multiple levels if I started with N3. So I dropped the JLPT idea entirely for a while and went back to just living in the language.

My first trip to Japan

Eventually I went to Japan for the first time back in 2023 and met up with my Discord friends in person. We planned the whole thing out on Discord before the actual trip. Two full weeks of jam-packed Japan.

I did the standard 東京・京都・大阪 run and plenty of first-timer tourist things. But it was special to me in that my friends took me to their own favorite local spots, the kind of places you don’t find because you don’t know they exist. So I had such a good mix of the wonder of local places while still getting the tourist attraction experience.

At this point, I had no issue holding conversations and could manage daily life in Japan if I needed to. Okay with one exception, I remember I was in Kyoto and I needed to send my excessive luggage to Osaka (don’t pack too much is not worth it). I went to Lawson or Family Mart and I needed to fill in the slip with the hotel address. I can’t write kanji at least not yet. I spoke to the convenience store employee and he hands me the slip. The store was pretty busy. It dies down and next thing I know he is right by me asking me if I wanted him to write the address to which I reply お願いします!

Passing the JLPT N1 in December 2024

When I finally decided to take the JLPT I registered for N1.

I was in a book club at the time, reading Japanese novels with other people and several of them wanted to take the JLPT too. So our sessions turned into a hybrid: discuss the novel, then talk through JLPT prep. Having a group made the studying social again, same as my discord calls.

What I used to prepare

Test day surprised me

Across every practice test I took, vocabulary was my strongest section close to perfect while reading always had a lower score.

On the actual exam, that flipped completely. The vocabulary section spooked me; it felt like I was seeing words I had never encountered in my life. Reading, the section I’d been worried about, I aced.

There was also a girl seated next to me who spent the entire test erasing and changing her answers, over and over. Nerve-wracking in a way no practice test prepares you for.

I passed.

My unsolicited advice:

What I’m working on now

I still read novels. I still talk to the same friends. I still consume Japanese media constantly.

The gap I’m aware of is handwriting kanji. Reading them is one thing; producing them from memory with a pen is a completely different skill. I’ve had the itch to fix that for a while now. I’ll start once I find an approach that fits how I actually learn.

Why I built Kotoba Loop

Here’s the thing five years taught me: “studying” all the time is not feasible. Nobody sustains that. But the passive moments matter. The exposure that happens when you’re not sitting staring at a textbook or cranking out a review.

That’s the gap Kotoba Loop fills for me. It’s a Japanese vocabulary widget that lives on my phone’s home screen, so every time I unlock my phone I get a word. Usually one I know. Sometimes one that stops me like ペンチ, the katakana loanword for pliers. It’s not often pliers come up in conversation.

I wrote up what the vocabulary looks like at every JLPT level, N5 through N1, including what N1 actually asks of you if you are heading where I was. The full N5 list is free to read there.

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