I’m currently doing a ‘Mad Dash’ to JLPT N2. I’m currently in the middle of studying for the JLPT N3 test in July with hopes to take the N2 test in December. I am about to enter my final year of college and want to pass the N2 before I graduate so I can work in Japan. I am currently living in Japan while working as an intern at a software company for about 6 months. I finished the N4 grammar deck last week and am taking about 4 N3 grammar points a day with the intention of finishing it about a month before the exam. I recently ported my 30 levels of WaniKani over and am filling in the missing vocab/kanji for the levels leading up to and including JLPT N3. I have been doing a lot of reading recenlty with things like Manga, Graded Readers, Nihongo so-matome and online articles. I would like to add my grammar was definentily past N4 level before I finished it on Bunpro but I wanted to have all of the reviews added before I went to N3 so I could be sure to have a good grasp of everything just in case. I was wondering if anyone has had a similar timeline for wanting to pass the N2 test and how that went for them.
I am also planning to take the N2 in the winter, but already passed N3 last year. Hard to tell from my position, but if you do, you might fail because of vocabulary most likely i would guess. The leap from N3 to N2 is quite big so brace yourself.
Either way have fun on your journey and good luck.
It’s not impossible, but very, very time-consuming and hard to do. I would guess if you’re doing some form of dedicated study for 4+ hours a day it’s manageable.
As a rule of thumb if you get ~90%+ on the previous JLPT test the next level should be manageable. Still, the jump from N3 to N2 is very big. Definitely need to have the vocab and supporting kanji down which is approx 4-6k words for N2.
Edit: Otherwise I think you’re doing the right things. Wanikani is good for vocab, Bunpro is good for grammar. I think the reading mode for vocab in Bunpro is very effective for practising reading comprehension which is the hardest part of the exam. If you do well on the reading you’ll do well on the rest. You’re in Japan so your listening should be pretty decent too if you’re getting enough daily exposure.
I had somewhat the same goal last year, got 120~ on N3 in july, 81 on N2 in december. I only started Bunpro in september, after the N3 exam results however, and was only halfway through N3 grammar points when siting the N2. N3+N2 on bunpro is clearly doable in ~3-5 months depending on your starting level. I checked and I started N3 on October 12 and finished N2 on March 25. I lost around 2-3 weeks to the worst case of flu I ever got, so I could have gone even faster but that’s life…
I highly recommend you do around one complete practice test in real-ish conditions once a month to gauge what’s working or lacking. You also might want to drill some of the exercises since you want a easier time getting a visa; some of the exercises can be trained (the stars one especially, a few custom drills made by Claude helped a lot in my case).
My one recommendation is really try to understand the weak spots you have. I had a score of 78, 83, 78 and like 73 before I passed the N2. My weak spot was vocab. For the first attempt I was basically going off of vibes and doing it to stretch myself.
But I’m also particularly bad at metagaming the exam.