Thanks guys!
But ye, he’s got 40 more days, and he is doing quite a lot of work every day, so I think he’ll get to the point of 80-90% before the actual exam
Your mileage may vary, but I found the Bunpro tests to be easier than the real thing.
The grammar and kanji sections are fairly similar, but Bunpro’s listening is much easier.
And, iirc, the first N5 test on Bunpro was easier than the other 4.
Get your friend to sit another Bunpro test for a comparison.
Or try the onagibun website to sit one under more realistic conditions. The only downside is that the scores for all 3 sections are averaged, so you don’t get an accurate breakdown, but you’ll have a good idea if you’ve passed 
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The metric I’ve heard is that if on a real mock test you get 60-70% of questions right in a reasonably balanced way, you’ll pass the JLPT. Which seems to be what Bunpro is doing, but I’d get your friend to try a more official JLPT mock test to benchmark his performance on it.
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In fact I suspect that the 50% pass mark is quite deceptive and contributes to the relatively low pass rate, as users can try a small number of questions and feel “50% is doable” whereas in practice you need 60-70% to pass.
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Since the July JLPT is coming up, is there a plan maybe to expand the mock exam library? Just a little bit… like or two more per level? 
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We definitely want to expand our practice test library soon, but are not currently in the process of doing it with the other projects that we are working on. Unsurprisingly the tests are actually really time consuming to make 
.
Keep an eye out though! There is a non-zero chance that we will decide to do some more before the end of the year.
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One of the difficult things about studying for JLPT is getting good feedback on the tests that we use for practice.
It’s not just about knowing which answer is correct, but also why the other answers are wrong.
I appreciate that Bunpro uses this in its practice tests 
and if I could make a suggestion, it would be to expand on this! I know it’s a lot more work, but maybe make the extra feedback exclusive to subscribers…?
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And as a real live example, I am myself in the middle of a JLPT n4 practice (N4 Grammar Exercises - Part 7 (with Answers)), and i’m having to use the Windows Snipping Tool to copy the low-image-quality questions, paste them into google images and ask AI for a breakdown of the grammar.
It’s effective, but it’s a hassle
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If possible, could you give an example of somewhere that you feel any of the explanations are not adequate? We spent quite a bit of time on the work involved in giving responses to incorrect answers, so it would be valuable for next time to know where something isn’t hitting the mark 
.
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Sorry I don’t have anything specific to hand, but next time I take a test I’d love to give feedback.
How/Where is the best place to reach you?
P.s. and Bunpro is the only place so far where I’ve found any feedback after I’ve taken a test, so it’s not a criticism, I just want more!
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Feel free to contact me directly on the forums or to send feedback through any of the feedback reporting forms on most pages of the site.
Wow, I just checked this webpage, is it legit? So many practice tests! 1000 n3 grammar questions!!!
It reminds me of my high school years, when I solved entire math practice books, becuase I was so bored and intellectually starved, like 300 pages of math practice questions
Challenge accepted.
I suppose it is the grammar questions from different jlpt exams gathered in one doc, right?
Thank you, I appreciate the quick feedback.
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I think it’s still completely broken, or my profile is somehow bugged. I have done several of the lower level tests, and all the N1 tests, and one was rather recently, but I still don’t have any jlpt tag and there isn’t an option to toggle it in profile settings either.
Not really an issue since that’s not the point of the tests, but these kind of bugs always get stuck in my mind. It might help to run a cron job every other week or so to go through past tests and award anyone who had connection issues at some point. Then it doesn’t really matter if it’s reliable or not.
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You’re right. It wasn’t just a connection problem. There’s a bug too.
I think I found the cause and it should be fixed in our next update.
Anyway, we updated your profile manually so it’s displaying the proper level already.
Thanks for pointing this out.
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I also have the issue 
No need to update it manually, but I’ll be sure to check it again soon if it is to be fixed in the next update 
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Hi Asher, I’m following up on our conversation about feedback for the Bunpro JLPT answer explanations. I’ve just taken the 5th JLPT N5 test, and there was an answer/explanation that wasn’t clear to me.
First section (Vocab), question 17.
I struggled with translating the sentence in the test. Some of of the vocab and phrases in this sentence aren’t covered until N4, and I hadn’t come across them. Nodo = throat, and the phrase “nodo ga kawa ku = to be thirsty” are N4 vocab and phrases.
My thought process during the pressure of the test situation: kawaitakara, this might be some grammar point to do with “Kawaii” and “ta” and “kara”? I also misread nomimono as “no” and “mimono”. I thought “mimono” might be “something to see”. In the end I went for “yomitai” because my best guess for the answer was thinking that I “want to read” something that I see.
Obviously I was wrong for several reasons, but here is where I feel Bunpro could improve this section:
Even looking at the mark scheme, it wasn’t clear from my existing knowledge why “nomitai” was the correct answer. The explanations for why each possible answer was right or wrong don’t clarify anything if you don’t know what the sentence says, and there is no way on Bunpro of finding this out.
I ended up copying the sentence and putting it into google translate and asking the AI to parse the grammar.
A translation of the sentence itself in the answer section would be helpful, and possibly a link to the grammar point “Nodo ga kawa ku”, especially because (a) it’s a set phrase and (b) it isn’t covered in Bunpro’s N5 content.
I’ve only gone through the answers to the questions I got wrong, so it’s not a critique of the entire test, just about 5 of the answers.
It’s tough trying to cover every base, and if you are setting the questions and know the right answers, it can be hard to see or predict where everyone will go wrong. Only 1 answer is correct, but people can be incorrect in a million different ways. Sometimes it’s only when you can see someone else’s thought process that the gaps become clearer. So I hope this is helpful!
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You made a couple of interesting points here.
At the moment, the way the JLPT questions are set-up is to give the test taker advice when they have selected something wrong, and to tell them why that particular answer is wrong in context with the question. In many cases, as you highlighted, it is hard to account for every word in a sentence that a user may not know, and if that was the particular word that tripped them up.
After having a brief discussion with the team about this, we are quite possibly going to add English translations to most if not all of the test content, in order to remove at least one of those variables.
This should work for quite well for single-sentence questions, but I have a feeling it will still be quite difficult for entire reading passages where even having the text might not make the answer immediately obvious. In those cases, we will just need to continue doing our best to predict where the user actually went wrong, and highlight those points in the official hints.
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Thanks for the in depth reply.
I agree Bunpro can’t (and shouldn’t have to) account for every infinite variety of potential mistakes users will make, but there just needs to be a little something extra to help users to find out for themselves where they went wrong.
English translations would be good. Or a romaji translation with word spaces. Just something so a user (using my own experience) can slap their forehead when they realise it was “nomimono” and not “no mimono”, or give them a word (“nodo”) they can then search for on Bunpro’s search function.
The search itself will help users to learn, and if it can all be accomplished through Bunpro then that’s even better.
One thing I want to say in defense of bunpro here, and I know this isn’t the main thrust of your post, is that it’s good they incorporate ‘non-N5’ material.
Despite there being a sort of agreed-upon canon of grammar points and vocab for each JLPT level, they do not release a list of items that will be included on each test or really offer much in the way of guidelines for what to study. The stuff included changes every year, and all we have are guesses. So you have to be prepared for things beyond the scope of what you expect.
Honestly, these tests have long been criticized for being too easy. N1 in particular is regarded as a very easy test for what it supposedly measures. I would not be overly shocked if one year they responded to those criticisms and raised the difficulty across the board without telling anyone first
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