Just received my voucher and information for the exam!
Fun stats if anyone is interested.
In the location I’m going:
N1 29 takers
N2 45 takers
N3 63 takers
N4 116 takers
N5 125 takers
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I’m doing N4 in London. I signed up within hours of passing n5 (as it sells out very quickly) and am worried I overestimated how much I needed to do to pass, but obviously a year seemed like a long time at the time. Resigned myself to being bad at listening and grammar so hope kanji and reading can scrape it. I obviously have Bunpro for the grammar but I am struggling to translate that into passing the practice questions which all seem to be choose from these 4 very similar particles? I also struggle with concentrating on the listening test.
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How did you get those stats out of interest? Just wonder what they look like for London.
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They attach a registration number, which is sequential to everyone and tell which classroom you have to go.
Maybe other locations keep their numbers secret and just tell you on the day of the test.
All the places I’ve gone in Spain do it like this.
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Nothing like that for London. We have to meet in Hyde park where a man in a trenchcoat and fedora will pass us a newspaper inside of which is information on the test location. 
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ミスター豆…
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Best comment ever. This is exactly what I imagined before I scrolled down too.
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I’m taking the N4 in Atlanta, GA, US this year. Last year I passed the N5.
Several days ago I went through an entire practice exam for the N4, including a timer for each section, the audio CD from AATJ, etc. ISBN978-4-89358-820-3 if anyone is interested. It was pretty helpful to tell me what to focus on in the last few weeks! I passed it, but not by a large enough margin to be comfortable.
Surprisingly, my listening was by far my strongest, which was certainly my weakest area last year. I’ve focused most of my study time on listening recently though, so that makes sense. The long passage comprehension was also easier for me this year, because I had context to understand certain words that I may not know. The vocabulary was tougher because I haven’t used any “traditional” study methods (no classroom, no textbooks, no tutors), so I have holes with a lot of words that I “should” know.
To anyone considering N5 vs. N4, the most apparent difference to me is the speed at which you have to be able to read. The N4 requires a much faster reading pace (anyone N3+ is probably laughing at me calling it fast). I definitely recommend timing yourself with some practice questions beforehand. When I took the N5 last year, probably 2/3 of the people were unable to finish the written sections of the exam before time was called.
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I signed up for the N3 this Dec in Tokyo, not fully understanding how truly bad I am and I may just entirely not show up. I just reset my N3/N4 reviews becuase my personal understanding and review rate was abysmal and I’m heavily struggling on basic reading.
The cert isn’t that important to me as of this moment but it sucks to throw money in the garbage. Might go and fail just for the practice.
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I just want to add I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail the N2 because of the reading section. I also just need to vent because this is happening too often and it’s frustrating me.
I was going through one of the practice books the other night for the reading section. I explained the passage to my girlfriend (native speaker) and she confirmed I was able to read it. I then explained the answers and she confirmed I was able to read those as well. Then I’d pick an answer and it would be incorrect. I’d look at the book’s reasoning and it would say something along the lines of “something somethingとは書かれていない”
I can’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but imagine an enormous passage consisting of two paragraphs where the author waxes poetic about basketball. You then get to the question of “what sport does the author like?” and the four multiple choice answers are:
- Big red vacuum cleaner
- The author loves basketball.
- The author loves all sports.
- Hermit crabs
Obviously it’s basketball. It has to be basketball. The guy just wrote an almost page-long love letter to basketball. However for some reason or another the answer would be “he loves all sports” because in the middle of the first paragraph a single sentence said “I like sports” and throughout the rest of the passage he never directly wrote down “I like basketball.”
It makes me want to scream.
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I still remember the reading of my last N3. It was a big long text talking always about the author’s bird mascot, then the questions would be nothing about the main topic, and I was like “Huh? Was that even mentioned in the text?”
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It’s definitely worth it to go take the exam if you’ve already signed up! In some ways, it’s actually MORE valuable if you fail because you get the most information about what to work on.
Understanding where your gaps are is the real value of the test (unless you need one of the higher level certs for a particular job or immigration, which it sounds like is not your situation). Plus, the exam itself is kinda quirky, so getting the experience now, regardless of pass/fail, will give you an edge when you take the exam again in the future.
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I’m really glad you said this! For some reason my voucher came 2 weeks later than they said it would, and I had almost forgotten about printing it and the test site info entirely.
Btw, good luck on the N2! I’d love to see you pass it. I remember you saying in another post awhile back that you felt like you lucked through the N3, but I think you’ll do better than you expect.
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Taking the N3, but I have no experience taking any JLPT. I’ve been walking through 新完全マスター along with bunpro as well. I think listening is my weakest right now, but I have been taking practice exams on youtube. I average around 70-80%, for listening exercises, but I’m not sure what the actual test is going to be like. Vocab is fine. Kanji is easy. Grammar is… Well, there are some areas where I could definitely do better. I still have trouble with ~ていく and ~てくる in the various ways that they can be used, but I feel that there won’t be a ton of questions on the exam that caters to this small caveat.
Wishing everyone else the best of luck. We don’t have long left!
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You’ve added to the thread title the ominous «23 days left». Well, thank you for the stress 
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Yeah was about to say the same thing! Might as well just roll out a big doomsday clock whilst you’re at it!
@Eradin would be interested to know how you got from listening zero to hero, if there’s anything insightful other than ‘do lots of listening practice’ 
I’m doing JLPT N5 listening practices, genki dialogue and some Nihongo con teppi pod casts, any suggestions welcome. (tbh I’m struggling along with those so I’ll be fine until N5 is done, but I’d like to try N4 next year and I’m not sure if I need 6 months or a year to level up my listening sufficiently)
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If you’re listening to Nihongo con Teppei, you’re already doing better than I did before my N5, haha. Although many, many people recommend it as beginner-friendly, I found that I needed something even easier to get a foothold.
- I actually use Bunpro as listening practice even more than grammar learning. If you select a particular grammar point (like through Content > Grammar at the top of the main screen), you can listen to all of the example sentences. There is a “Hide Japanese button” so you can listen a few times and try to pick out words before showing the Japanese sentence to check yourself. I also recommend trying to translate the sentence before you look at the English, since going directly from sounds to meaning lets you listen much faster than trying to identify a word, recall its meaning, and fit it back into the sentence.
(^ I actually started doing this on the advice of a Vietnamese friend. She told me when she was learning English, it was very helpful to go over a bunch of sentences in a row with similar patterns. Conveniently, this is just how they’re presented in Bunpro since they’re grouped by grammar point!)
- Youtube channels. Some of my go-tos are below
- https://www.youtube.com/c/ComprehensibleJapanese ← This is the smallest step I could find to get started. She goes slowly, repeats sentences with slight variations, and uses a LOT of visuals. Videos are labeled as complete beginner, beginner, and intermediate.
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsQCbl3a9FtYvA55BxdzYiQ ← The ones where she’s walking around outside are the most helpful imo, again because there’s a visual element to go with it. I also found her voice easer to parse for longer periods of time, compared to other similar channels.
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMNVKIaw8hV8ln3dDE5z-hA/videos
- https://www.youtube.com/c/Onomappu
- I also watch some videos of a particular Japanese artist I like. They’re intended for a native Japanese audience, so they’re spoken at natural speed and not at all beginner-friendly. I barely understand anything at all. But I think it’s helpful to get some exposure to that, even if all I can do sometimes is just try to parse the phonemes.
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I try to focus on particles as I listen. When I started listening practice, I wasn’t able to really hear more than a word or two here or there, so I tried focusing on different things. I tried verbs first on some advice I’d heard awhile back, but I found I was recognizing them late and missed almost all of the sentence. So, I tried focusing on nouns instead because those give good context for the words around them, but I struggled a lot with understanding their relationships in more complex phrases. Eventually I found that particles are a better way for me to parse Japanese sentences, because when I focus on them, what my brain retains is actually the words directly preceding them, so I can get a nice little chunk of information from the sentence at once. If I miss something, it’s a self-contained something, and I can pick right back up with the next particle without the entire sentence falling to pieces in my head.
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I repeat the same listening on different days. This gets my brain used to the cadence it’s supposed to understand, without having to spend so much time trying to recall individual words since I already heard it recently. It’s certainly possible to overdo it, but I’ve found that a couple of repetitions helps a lot.
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Try to listen to a variety of voices. I realized kinda early that I was getting too used to one or two voices, and I struggled even with words I knew when someone else was saying the same thing.
I hope this is helpful!
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wow, really helpful thanks! Hadn’t thought of that 1st point.
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