I recieved confirmation via email for my signup today!
It seems like I’ll have to wake up early on that day… 8:15-12:30
Don’t worry if you can’t read that, it’s german.
Except “Japanese Language Proficiency Test” looks suspiciously like English 
I think they should just be honest and call it the “Polyglot Proficiency Test” 
That part “Japanese Language Proficiency Test” is written in English. 
In German they’d probably write probably “Fähigkeitstest der japanischen Sprache” or something like that.
That can also be read as (近々) = きんきん, so it’s not too bad.
皆さん、次の日本語能力試験を合格していいですね！
(I hope you all pass the next JLPT!)
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I just sat N4 and not feeling particularly confident cos the listening was SO hard. Weighing up whether to resit AGAIN if I fail (first time I didn’t prepare fully due to poor time management, this time I thought I was prepared but the listening was so much harder than any of the mock tests I did). It seems like a lot of spend on something I can’t actually use for anything but at least I’ve got that if I plan to sit N3 in July but fail first time. Last time there was only about 2-3 hours between July results and seats for JLPT in London opening up and they sold out within 2 hours so not like there’s time to think it over. Would be great if I just passed and didn’t have to worry about it until N3 next year!
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Start checking towards late July (or very early August) for the registration date on the SOAS website
Registration is normally, at least for the last few times on Monday mornings (ie 17th or 24th August this year)
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For anyone wondering about US dates (I also thought I missed it when I read this lol) -
Testing sites and info will be posted later this month, and registration will open in mid-August in a scattered pattern (N1 first day, N2 second, et. al)
Pretty sure everyone’s test will be on December 3rd, but just in case you needed to know!
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I haven’t taken the test before. I think I could reasonably pass N3 right now so I’m going to aim for N2 in Dec.
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It can be read as はやばや when followed by と. Though I’m not sure it’s terribly common compared to そうそうに
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thats quite the jump. Depending on how well you did on the n5 you have to beat your lucky charm Piñata bloody. But if you fail, you can always redo it later so why not go for it i guess. good luck.
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No reason not to go for the second level up, like N5 → N3, because if you fail and then retake the test 6 months later, you are taking the retest when you would have taken the test originally, had you taken the in-between test instead, in this case N4.
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I´m pretty sure Listening on July´s N4 will probably cause me to fail, even though everything else went surprisingly well considering I didn´t have enough time to prepare. I was going back and forth wether I feel lucky enough to not sit again but decided I´m gonna sign up again in december. If I passed I will waste a bit of money but I will be happy and if I didn´t pass I will be happy that I don´t have to wait a year to retry.
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Hey! I just found out about jpbd the other day and it looks amazinggg. But where are you finding their jlptvocab lists? Im able to find loads of other stuff from media, but I cant find a jlpt vocab deck anywhere. just the top 3k frequency option (for nonpatron). what am i missing 
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Hi! I had problems finding the JLPT decks, too. I just googled “jpdb jlpt decks” and found them. The deck is listed as “Japanese Language Proficiency Test” (yes, the entire thing), and the deck is separated into five smaller decks, so you can study individual levels instead of the whole thing.
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You can find them on Google (as @Neon_Kitsune) mentioned. Here’s a direct link though.
FWIW, it seems they were removed from the deck search by the developer of JPDB since they felt like the decks weren’t great quality (reddit). I honestly can’t speak to whether they’re worth doing / wouldn’t be surprised if there were better lists to do (compared to other possible vocab lists, any consistent studying is worth doing even if suboptimal).
I did the N2 deck along with a Top 2k-3k words deck simultaneously to cover more words, and once I finish N2 (in 8 days now), I do plan to move onto media decks and stuff which hopefully will shore up any words that I’m blatantly missing. At the 5k words JPDB claims that I know, I should be able to relatively smoothly go through N2 level immersion material over the next few months to make up for any issues with the deck itself.
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lmafo I was just on reddit right before this reading up on why the deck is hidden. I was able to find it from google though thanks @Neon_Kitsune ! It was nice to see an approximate completion rates on them. But I think for my uses I wont learn from them, but see how what im learning from media just phoenix wright and harry potter for now ups those levels over time.
@tanukiii im actually planning to start the top 3k and gimme a quick boost for more common words, how did you feel about that deck overall? worth it?
Sounds like youll be having a much better time and more fun just reading stuff, congrats!
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Pretty solid overall I’d say. I had a great time overall with my experience in both decks overall, and every time I’ve immersed (which has unfortunately not been consistent) I can immediately recognize the progress I’ve made through vocab.
Just being critical of the decks to provide nuance to some of their potential flaws.
With that in mind: it’s worth mentioning that the database is constantly growing meaning that the top Nk vocab lists are also constantly changing. So my 2k-3k word list is fixed at what it was when I created it many months ago, and would be different from your one.
I could definitely tell the kind of content that built the bulk of the database just by the kind of vocab in that list, and it’s not primarily Wikipedia and news articles that’s for sure (which is why I did prefer the JLPT deck).
There were a decent number of words that were more military/fantastical in theme then I would have expected (in the 2-3k most common words range) which feels like it reflects the kinds of light novels and other content it pulls from.
Not to say those words aren’t useful, and the vast majority of words in the deck felt universally applicable. The deck was good, just keep in mind that there are potentially some flaws, and supplement through other avenues.
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Regarding JPDB, the corpus itself contains a massive amount of LNs, VNs, and web novels so the freq data tends to lean heavily that way after the top 2k. The developer does try to mitagate this a bit but overall the freq data still represents the corpus it is from. If you have a patreon sub then you can create freq decks for specific types of media (e.g., just news, just aozora bunko texts, just non-fiction, etc).
As also mentioned the JLPT decks are not amazing quality - they were made from lists found on wikipedia however they contain multiple misparses. My suggestion would be to not study them directly but keep them as decks just to see your coverage stats.
The main strength of JPDB is the coverage stats and that it removes the work of mining. It is generally suggested that once you know the top 1 or 2 or 3k words then you should focus on learning based on the media decks instead of pure freq lists.
I also strongly recommend the “jpd-breader” (jpdb reader) extension. You can find support and discussion of it on the discord but here is a link to the github page: GitHub - max-kamps/jpd-breader. You can parse webpages, novels through ttu, hooked text, etc and mine into JPDB directly using it. Very useful for quickly marking words known as well. It can also auto-gen furigana based on a word’s known status, colour them based on status, allows you to do SRS reviews whilst reading and other things as well. You can also get it working on mobile with the kiwi browser. It is amazing.
One final suggestion - if you can stomach the lower retention then setting your review length to longer intervals reduces your review load over time. I only recommend testing this out if you are not a beginner and don’t mind the possibility of tackling a massive stack of reviews later if you decide to revert to a shorter interval again.
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I’ll keep all that in mind, def makes sense. Thanks for sharing your experience 
Yeah im planning just to keep them around for coverage stats, mostly because I dont do well with lists I dont have any attachment to like from a book or vn Im tackling.
okay that extention looks b o m b. cant wait to see what it can do thankkkk
I can see the longer intervals working for the 3k deck because ideally I would get some exposure through content, but those settings are global right? Im new to jpdb so I started the harry potter deck by freq to try it out and I kept getting them wrong all day. But I can remember most of them the day after so 
Im not sure what my workflow will be like with jpdb yet, but thank you so much for all the info 