6 levels.
Zero to native.

The book saw this over and over. One student wanted N2 in three months. She never opened the plan. She left saying she'd learn Japanese someday. Someday means never.

Most people set a goal and stop there. Do both. The author wanted a job in Japan. He was also scared of ending up in a job he'd hate. You need something to run to and something to run from.

Your ears need months to learn where one word ends and the next starts. They only learn that at full speed. Slowing the audio down teaches them the wrong thing.

Phone and laptop in Japanese. News on while you get ready. A podcast on the way to work. A show at night. You won't understand any of it. That's fine. You're not here to understand yet.

Don't drill ね on its own. Learn ねこ (cat), ぬま (bog), めがね (glasses). You remember the word, and the letter comes with it.

Give kana two weeks. That's it. Start learning real words at the end of week one. Any kana guide works. The guide doesn't matter. The words around the letter do.

There are about 600 grammar points between you and N1. There are over 10,000 words. Grammar is the smaller pile. Do the smaller pile first.

Your first 500 cards are all example sentences from a grammar book. Tae Kim. Genki 1 and 2. Tobira. JLPT Sensei. Or the 100 sentences in the back of the book.

Front: ペンとリンゴがあります。 Back: 〜がある = "〜 is there", ペン = pen, リンゴ = apple.

Three new words is the limit. The book tried cards with ten new words on them. They stopped working.

Front: 此れは猫です。 Back: 此れ（これ） = this, 猫（ねこ） = cat. You meet the kanji inside a word you actually ran into.

Japanese isn't math. The rules break all the time. Right now you don't know enough to tell what's normal and what's weird. So don't think about it. Just do it.

This is what the book told a learner who spent three of her five study hours in Anki. Turn on Anki's timer so a session can't run long.

Also stop writing sentences in a notebook to type in later. If adding a card feels like work right then, skip that sentence.

That's the whole job for seven days. No cards. Just open it.

The learner this was built for was doing fifteen cards a day by the end, and nobody asked him to. It's like folding one sock. Once you start, you usually keep going.

Know the sentence and the words? Easy. Know one but not the other? Hard. Know neither? Skip it. If you still don't know it at the end, delete it.

You're not allowed to sit on a card for two minutes. What matters is that you saw it. Not that you got it right.

Say it right after you hear it. Single words first. After a week or two, chunks of three or more words. By the end of the month, whole sentences.

You'll sound like a baby. That's the right sound to make right now.

Four questions decide if it counts. Is it in Japanese? Written by a Japanese person? Written for Japanese people? Do you actually want to read it? Yes to all four and it's fair game.

One learner was told to read a few pages. Soon he was reading two real books a month. He hit N2 in four months instead of nine. The author's first book took three months. The next book, same level, took three days.

Easy News is real Japanese. It's written for Japanese kids. It gets you to N3 and no further.

The learner who got this rule found it hard for about a week. Then it became one of the easiest parts of her day. Keep the easy stuff if you like it. Just don't let it be your ceiling.

Look words up in a Japanese dictionary made for Japanese people. Then you learn words from those meanings, and more words from the meanings of those words.

The author picked up over half his vocabulary this way. Keep the three word limit or it gets out of hand fast.

Textbook grammar is done. What's left is the odd stuff that textbooks, shows and news don't cover.

Free Japanese YouTube teachers cover it. Find one you like. Then find another. Not teachers explaining Japanese in English.

Be short and clear about what you want out of the trade. HelloTalk. Tandem. iTalki. It's a numbers game, so plan for that.

If nobody shows up, have the conversation anyway. On your own. All that listening already built the ear that catches your own mistakes.

If the words around it tell you what it means, don't make a card. If it shows up a third time and you still don't get it, then it earned one.

This one change dropped a learner's Anki time to 30 or 60 minutes a day. She still got to 4,000 cards.

Your brain can only hold so much at once. Cut the cards that aren't teaching you anything so there's room for the ones that are. This isn't tidying up. It's making space.

No conversation comes with subtitles. No phone call. No test. Practicing with them builds a skill you can't use anywhere.

Add 30 to 60 minutes of news a day on top. Every day.

One grown-up news story, plus pages from a real book, manga or light novel. Every day.

For a sense of scale: the author read about 10 books and 300 news stories before N1.

Someone who met you at N3 still talks to you like you're N3. You talk back like you're N3. It sticks. The author spoke way better with brand new partners, then dropped right back down with the old ones.

One exception. If the friend matters more than the Japanese, keep the friend. Just know that's the trade you're making.

Copy where they pause. How they move their hands. Where they slur words together. Use the filler sounds and the short forms people actually say.

Here's the test. When other foreigners think you're overdoing it, you're usually about right. And don't study pitch accent. You're already soaking it up from thousands of hours of listening, and it flips between Tokyo and Osaka anyway.

Stop the active stuff for a few days or a week. No Anki, no grammar, no writing. Keep watching and listening. Your brain sorts things out during the gap.

People come back stronger than they left. Sleep in full cycles, not five hours. The author started walking an hour a day with Japanese in his ears after reading the brain research.

The author did a small test each week and a bigger one at the end of the month. When something kept going wrong, he changed how he studied.

The score isn't the point. A wrong answer is a hole, and now you know exactly where it is.

There are two roads. Pick one. If you're so-so at everything, go straight at your weakest part.

If three parts are strong and one is weak, do the opposite of what teachers say. Drop the weak one. Push the other three as high as they'll go. Spreading your effort evenly just makes you average at everything.

Everyone's words come from their own life. No test can measure what's actually in your head. It leaves out more than it checks.

How much you read, and how deep you can go in a conversation. Those two things show you what you're really missing.

Someone makes a joke you don't get. Go find out what it was about. The singer. The old news story. The book. The show.

The author even studied the general knowledge part of government job exams to learn what counts as common sense in Japan. This is the gap between understanding Japanese and being funny in it.

The author stopped at 4,500 cards. A learner he coached hit the same point and just switched to real books and shows as her review system.

Anki was never the goal.

The author passed N1 without studying for it. The test was never the point. He walked in feeling like passing or failing didn't much matter either way.

That's why he could read the passages without rushing, and actually listen to the listening part instead of hunting for answers.

To read something without help, you need to know about 98% of the words on the page. That's 8,000 to 9,000 word families for reading, and 6,000 to 7,000 for listening. After that, new words come from how much you read. Not from studying.

This is the book's Month 5 reading plan, just bigger and forever. Old classics on 青空文庫, plus real books about things you care about. AJATT says the same thing. Read like a Japanese person, not like a student.

Native speakers don't build every sentence from rules. They pull from a huge pile of ready-made phrases they've heard a thousand times. That's why you can be 100% correct and still sound off.

So change what you collect. Not new words. Words you already know, stuck together in ways you wouldn't have guessed. It's the book's sentence method aimed at the chunk. AJATT gets there too, with its Japanese-only cards.

When you write, you find out exactly where what you meant and what you can say don't line up. Reading and listening let you slide past your weak spots. Writing doesn't.

Add the book's style copying too. Read a lot of the kind of writing you need to do. Copy how it's built, on purpose. Your own voice shows up out of the copying.

Stuff that slows you down now is what sticks later. Easy practice feels great and fades fast.

This is the book's weirdest idea, used again. Input that's interesting but too hard for you is the whole point. It's also what AJATT means by staying at the edge.

A learner in Japan was scared that getting good at casual speech would make her rude at work. Keeping the two apart on purpose fixed it.

Polite at work. Casual with friends. Written style when you write. Do it that way on purpose until switching happens without thinking. Add 関西弁 later.

People who get really good don't just put in hours. They pick one narrow thing they're bad at, work on it, and get told right away how they did. Everyone else levels off once they're decent.

So don't practice “Japanese”. Practice phone calls. Or telling a joke with the right timing. It's the book's weak point rule from Month 6, used after the test is over.

Things you learned well and kept using stop fading after a few years. They stay for decades. Things you learned halfway just disappear.

That's the whole idea behind the name AJATT. All Japanese, All The Time. The book says it quieter: make it normal, not a chore. Japanese isn't something you practice now. It's just on.