As someone who started learning Japanese on 2020. studied for a year and half, and returned on late 2023, (so a bit more than 3 years of study) and still is learning the first part of N4… To pass the N3 on 1 year is an impressive task (even if it’s your full time “job”).
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Oh, of course, I had realized that many months before and has long abandoned that wish. Now I just try to attempt N1 in July 2026, if I passed there, it will be two whole years for me. If not, it will be another attempt in Dec 2026 anyway.
Edit: Oh, I thought you were saying N1 
. Passing N3 is more like a must for me, because I am kind of obsessed with achievements ><.
My 感想 from N1…
Are you stupid? (to JES)
I felt like listening, reading, and even grammar were pretty on par, but vocab was literally insane, especially 問題１.
I guess you could quantify the difficulty of 問題1 by checking the average frequency of all the words they ask you about for various tests of the years and check if its higher (easier) or lower (more difficult) than usual.
Especially 問題1 is extremely hit or miss. The pool of vocabulary they can pull words from is just extremely large and they just ask you six questions. I doubt a sample size that small can quantify your language knowledge.
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I took N2 this year after 3 years of studying and I think the test in itself was quite fair. But I had serious problems with the reading section. I’m used to reading on my phone and laptop, so the big font of the booklet really threw me off. I took some previous year’s tests and usually finished those with 30 - 40 min to spare, but during the real test I barely managed to get through everything on time. It was like reading a book in font size 40 
The listening was okay-ish, I didn’t get some of the questions, but overall doable. Right now I’m really torn between if I passed or not.
We also had to seal our phones in an envelope, put in in our bags and show the unbroken seal after the listening section. All in all it was a very pleasant experience, not much coughing or sneezing, people were paying attention to the instructions from the proctors and the audio was in a very good quality because the room had a sound system through which the audio was played (instead of a CD player on the front desk).
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I really wonder why they don’t ask more questions in that section 
SO… i’m going to be that annoying impatient person…
47 days til results come out online (earliest and most optimistic guess).
or 51 if you think theyll come out on the very last working day of January.
I am guessing they will come out January 26 or 27 though.
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I did exactly that last time on the N3. Got passing marks in every section but failed the test on overall score. Hoping I passed this time, though!
I took the N2. I’m hopeful, but not assuming anything until I get the result. The wait seems so long!
I’m also grateful for the Bunpro practice tests, they were super useful, but I felt their written parts were quite a bit simpler than the real test. Especially the essays in the real test were much longer, more complex, also using a bit harder vocab, but more than anything because the actual arguments and questions were less straightforward and more nuanced.
For example, I easily passed 3 Bunpro tests with ~30 minutes left of the written portion in each case:
By comparison, on the actual test I had to scramble to finish and had to just skim through the comparison problem (I left that for last).
One annoying thing that caught me off guard was the crammed space. Instead of desks, we just had those chairs with an attached writing surface that’s about the size of one page. So even the opened test booklet would not fit on it, and I had to juggle with flipping pages and where to put the answer sheet. I totally didn’t expect that and it may have cost me those couple minutes that I was missing.
About the rules: they did the sealed envelope thing, although the check at the end was not very serious because they just glanced at them from a distance as people held them up. And the proctor was looking at his manual and read things up from it, mumbling, like it was the first time he’d ever seen one.
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Yesterday I came across the word 封筒.
I am really curiose about what kind of envelopes everyone is talking here
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Results are usually always announced 7 weeks and 1 day after the exam on Monday at 10:00 AM JST.
So it should be the 26th of January this year.
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Do they send out an email or do you just go online to check?
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They do not send out e-mails. They will post a message about it on their website about a week in advance.
The process to check the results and dates when the results are posted are slightly different if you took the test in Japan and some other countries in Asia.
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Really? I actually had consistently good results in the bunpro N2 tests (aroun 90% each time) and during the test I was SO cooked T-T I was really lost and did not know anything
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I was more like 75 percent on the tests so I guess I just felt similarly lost/prepared to feel a bit lost maybe?
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46 days til january 26…
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I took N5 and thought the same thing about the text! I opened the booklet and immediately had a “What’s this??” moment where I felt like I couldn’t really read. My adjustment time really took away from what I had in practice tests for double checking my answers 
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I had the same run-in with time for the real test compared to practices. I hadn’t even thought about the extra time of filling in the bubbles (and triple checking that I was filling in the correct bubble for the correct question for the correct section 
). I’m definitely going to sit down and do physical, more “realistic” practice tests in the weeks leading up to N4 next year!
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Sorry for triple posting- I need to re-teach myself how to reply to multiple people in a single post~
Anyway, to add to some of the experiences: we didn’t have anyone booted from our N5 group BUT the girl in front of me was given the section 2 booklet during section 1 🫢 She of course didn’t notice until section 2 and called the proctor over to say “Hey, I already had this booklet”. Basically, she had filled all the test bubbles for section 1 with section 2 answers! So they just said “Well this is section 2 so start filling in the bubbles on the section 2 page” and left to get a replacement section 1 bubble page for her. She was scrambling to fill in the bubbles with her original answers, and they came back with the section 1 booklet and told her they’d give her a few extra minutes.
The pure distraction I had just in proximity of her experience, I can’t imagine how she gathered her focus to actually do section 1. And then basically got no break before the listening section to boot 😮💨
In other news, it was someone’s birthday and they brought Kit Kats to share during break which was supper sweet. きっと勝つ！
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I took the N4 test, it was alright. I felt like I understood a majority of the questions. But I did not get through all of the learning on Bunpro though (probably 75% done on grammar and vocab). So I’m not too confident on how I did…
Fingers crossed that I passed hehe.
I did find that Bunpro was a massive help. Ain’t no way would I have been able to do this without Bunpro.
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