This plan assumes no Japanese at all — no kana, no vocabulary — and ten to twelve hours a week for twelve weeks.
That is an achievable target, and it is genuinely demanding. If you already read kana comfortably, you do not need this plan; use the eight-week plan instead.
Month one: foundations
Nothing here feels like exam preparation. All of it is the thing everything else depends on.
Weeks 1–2: kana. Hiragana, then katakana, to the point of instant recognition — not “I can work it out”. This is two weeks of unglamorous work and it caps your score in three of the four sections if you skip it. See learning hiragana and learning katakana.
Weeks 3–4: first vocabulary and basic sentence shape.
- Twenty words a day with spaced repetition, from day one and every day after.
- Numbers, times, dates, counters. These decide more questions than any other category.
- The basic sentence: は, を, に, で, and ます-form verbs.
- Twenty minutes of listening daily, starting now. It will be mostly incomprehensible. Do it anyway — it is the slowest thing to improve and it needs the longest runway.
Checkpoint at the end of month one: can you read any kana word instantly, and do you know the numbers and days cold? If not, extend by a fortnight. Do not proceed on top of shaky kana.
Month two: the bulk
This is where the score gets built.
- Grammar in use, not in lists. Verb forms — past, negative, て-form. 〜てください, 〜てもいいですか, 〜ないでください. Particles in context. までに versus まで, which decides an unreasonable number of questions.
- Vocabulary continues, every day, weighted hard towards daily life and work: shops, transport, the workplace, the hospital, housing.
- Short reading texts. Notices, signs, simple messages — the real material the reading section is built from.
- Listening moves up. If you understand all of it, it is too easy. Aim for roughly 70%.
- First full practice test at the end of week 6. Expect a low score. Its purpose is direction, not judgement.
Checkpoint at the end of month two: you should be able to read a short shop notice and extract a date correctly, and follow a slow spoken sentence about a time or a place.
Month three: converting knowledge into points
Stop learning new material around week 10. From here the work is different.
- Full-length timed tests on a computer, twice a week in the last fortnight. Sixty minutes, one clock, no pausing, no dictionary.
- Review every wrong answer by cause, not by topic: unknown word, misread grammar, ran out of time, or careless. Four different problems, four different fixes — and most people treat all four as vocabulary.
- Practise the clock. The sections are not separately timed and the reading section is at the end, which is where the damage happens. See time management.
- Keep listening daily. Twenty minutes, still.
- Week 12: taper. Light revision of your own error log, one final timed test early in the week, then stop. Sleep beats cramming for a sixty-minute exam.
The honest caveats
Three months at twelve hours a week from zero is the fast version. Three to six months is the realistic range, and which end you land at depends on hours, consistency and whether you had any exposure to the language before. How long it takes sets out what actually drives it.
Month two is where plans die, not month three. The novelty is gone and the test is still far away. Build for it: a fixed time of day, a minimum you will hit on bad days — twenty minutes of listening and yesterday’s vocabulary, nothing more — and someone who notices if you stop.
The booking rule
Do not book a date at the start. Book when the evidence arrives:
Two full-length, timed tests in the same week, both at 200 or above, on a computer.
The free practice test reports by section, which is what tells you where the remaining points are.