Wow, I had no idea those books are available for free, thanks. 
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same, had to travel 3 hrs for one way in my country. Here in japan i just had 30 minutes by train.
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I’ll be trying JLPT N2 again.
I’m doing a lot of reading since it was my weakest part, and then compare how far I’ve gotten. Still expecting that I might not pass it, but at least have improvement.
So far I’ve booked the accommodation only. Transport will come a bit later, booking it so much in advance is usually not the best price.
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what exactly are you struggling with reading? kanji or grammar? For me i struggle much harder with listening since its very fast and alot of words sound sometimes similiar. But i m just n4 though.
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Kanji.
For me listening is what usually makes me pass the test or almost pass it.
This was my December 2022:
And I passed N3 because the listening, everything else had failing scores.
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they say you need roughly about 1000 kanji for n2, which isnt that huge considering that this is already very good advanced level. I personally use wanikani. But yeah some special readings or rendaku’s or this ノマ repeat kanji can get disgusting ugly. For example 近々 becomes ちかぢか、but 早々 becomes just そうそう.
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This number is bigger now. Just took N2 exam, I believe there were one or two questions testing kanji outside of existing N2 kanji lists. The same for N1:
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i always wondered if those kanjis have been individually picked, or rather roughly defined by the range of used sentence where those kanji are naturally used at said level.
It’s always been mentioned that the kanji/vocabulary/grammar lists are not set in stone.
The common theory is they play with the levels based on how many people pass/fail.
If July has been a hard one, December (or July’s next year) will have more odds of being a bit easier.
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I know info isn’t out yet, but when is it during December? Is it early or late, or does it depend on the location?
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Normally the exams are on the first Sunday of December or July.
On the JLPT website already it says that the next exam will be on the 3rd December.
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I’ll be trying to take my first JLPT (N2) this December.
Been studying for it all year now, so I’m fairly confident I’ll be ready by December.
I finish the N2 vocab list on JPDB.io in like 3 weeks (and will start working on decks from like various books to continue learning vocab) and I’ve finished the N2 grammar here on Bunpro, so content wise I should be good. Just need to make sure I can synthesize everything by December.
They only do Decembers in the US so really want to make sure I pass and don’t have to wait another year.
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As @zerohbeat said, it’s always the first Sunday of July and December. Whether it happens Summer, Winter or both, depends on the location.
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Here’s me, reading 早々 as はやばや
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Do you recommend doing the N2 vocab list on https://jpdb.io/ ?
Currently working through the Bunpro N2 vocab list, so I guess doing both would be excessive and actually probably mess up the SRS system where there are instances of the same word being covered in both 
They opened registration for it here today so I signed up for N4 after work, hopefully I didn’t fill the documents out incorrectly! It’ll be my first time taking any level 
Test date will be 3rd December around here it seems…
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I like JPDB a lot. It makes finding a deck with high quality cards very easy. The SRS system has been pretty effective for me while also requiring less daily reviews than what I was getting with the same amount of new material in Anki.
For vocab, I really like having SRS that doesn’t actually test you, but just asks you if you remembered it (like Anki.)
That being said, I’ve been using JPDB for a few months longer than Bunpro (just hit 100 days here, ~170 days on JPDB), so I never tried the vocab here and can’t say whether it’s better or worse. Like you said, it’s probably not a good idea to do vocab in multiple places, and all that really matters is making incremental and steady progress so it doesn’t really matter which one is most optimal. As such, I wouldn’t recommend switching to or adding JPDB to your routine.
I don’t know how accurate JPDB’s JLPT vocab lists are, but every word I’ve learned has seemed relevant, and at ~4500ish useful words (+ the other 1-2k words I’ve learned outside of the JLPT deck), it at least gives me enough of a foundation where combined with immersion / other decks I don’t think I’ll have to be too worried about vocab for the test.
JPDB’s real strengths are in the content decks however, where you can quickly choose a deck to learn words directly relevant to something you are consuming (although I think it’s difficult to stick to these decks without having the foundation from a larger list like top N thousand words or the JLPT deck).
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Aiming to go for N3!
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sent the sign up documents yesterday - going for n2 this time. excited 
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you had me checking London in a panic in case I missed it again… they’ve still not announced the date registrations open
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