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question in Japanese Core 6000 on 2013/03/26
I'd like to get a rough idea about how long it takes people to complete the Japanese Core 6000. I started with JC 2000 on Jan 1st and have now pretty much finished those and am starting JC 3000. (I study 4 hours per week on iKnow.) I'm thinking then maybe 3 months per thousand may be a good estimate, which means it would take me one more year to get them all. But maybe things will slow down when the difficulty of the words increases.... I was hoping to aim for JLPT N2 in December though, which I'm told you need the JC 6000 for. Any thoughts?

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Yup, things will speed up later. By the time i reached core 5k-6k i read so many manga and novels that i already knew 25-30% of its vocabulary.
Core 1000step 1 toos me 6hours to master, core 6000 step 10 took me 2h30.
You can aim for JLPT1 with the core 6k if you have other japanese activities like watching drama, listening to podcasts and reading. I wasn't done with the core 6k when i (successfully) passed the jlpt1.
Don't get your hopes high on the validity of that test tho. I'm far from fluent (in fact, i really suck when it comes to speaking and writting) but i still passed with a high average.
The jlpt only tests your understanding abilities.
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3
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I subscribed on march 18th 2012 and finished the core 6000 the 17th of march 2013 after 260hours of studies.
This include finishing the dictation for all course and getting at least 3star gold medal on brainspeed for every course.
If you learned the kanji first (with heisig for instance) it shouldn't take you more than 250-300hours, if you didn't expect the course to take 2-3time longer to master.
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I study 2 hours a week on iknow and will complete 1k in just under 5 months. So with your study times you should be able to complete 1k words in under 3 months.

Also looking at similar numbers to Cedric: 40 hours and (792-104) 688 vocab items are mastered. So 360 hours for ~6200 items, assuming I keep the current rate. I'd imagine you would speed up later on (trained ear for listening and many kanji readings are repeated). That's with RTK lite, so only N2 kanji were covered.
5
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Yup, things will speed up later. By the time i reached core 5k-6k i read so many manga and novels that i already knew 25-30% of its vocabulary.
Core 1000step 1 toos me 6hours to master, core 6000 step 10 took me 2h30.
You can aim for JLPT1 with the core 6k if you have other japanese activities like watching drama, listening to podcasts and reading. I wasn't done with the core 6k when i (successfully) passed the jlpt1.
Don't get your hopes high on the validity of that test tho. I'm far from fluent (in fact, i really suck when it comes to speaking and writting) but i still passed with a high average.
The jlpt only tests your understanding abilities.
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1
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Thanks for your comments. Your comment about learning the kanji first got me thinking, so I decided to get a copy of Heisig, which I hadn't looked at before. Just spent my Easter engrossed in that book - it is really a great and clever book. It seems like the perfect companion to iKnow.

I get what you are saying about JLPT only testing understanding. Speaking is a tough skill. I'm aiming to go to a language school in Japan at some point for maybe a 1 year course, which will hopefully bring on the speaking and writing better than my current self study with computer and textbooks.

Out of interest, what drama do you recommend? I find they vary a lot in terms of my ability to understand what's going on. Mr Brain was fairly enjoyable for me.
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@Cedric - I have a few questions for you regarding your input.  Is there a way I can contact you to have a quick discussion about it?  I'm running an article on comprehensible input and would like to just run a few things by you!
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Aha that's ok - imasendin at gmail.com
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