Hey Touski no worries. I see someone posted the dedicated thread I made, that was more focused on a mindset shift that personally helped me and thought might be helpful for others.
For a more concise summary about the actual process. My personal progress went from completing Genki 1 and Genki 2, as well as Quartet 3 and 4 textbooks. During that entire time I used Anki as my main source of vocab acquisition, I touch on this in the thread but I think if you are really gunning for it, a high daily new card limit atleast in a short sprint can really help with your input. I did several months of 60+ new card limit on Anki.
Around Genki 2 I started incorporating different sources of input, starting with NHK easy, I would read several articles a day, before progressing to standard NHK articles. As well as easier Japanese podcasts like “Speak Japanese Naturally”. I find getting this base knowledge with grammar and vocab first (which seems like you may already have with N5 covered) really helps the process of enjoying and getting benefits of input. For kanji I used an app called Renshuu and set it to only learn the meanings of kanjis not focusing on stroke orders or readings (I believe you can pick up on readings as a consequence of learning vocab.
I did do quartet 3 and 4 but I feel at that point I couldve easily switched to bunpro and gotten a similar results (and would’ve been a lot more convienent). It was at this point I switched to doing bunpro, I put all Genki 1 and 2, as well as the quartert content at differing mastering levels so I could incorporate them at that stage. At this point I had also worked through all the free tadoku books from tadoku org. At this stage all of my vocab mining was from using yomichan and adding to my Anki deck via finding words in YouTube videos, articles or books.
I believe at around the n3 stage of grammar points and vocab coverage you should push heavy into getting a lot of input via pure Japanese content. And I would even opt to grind out learning grammar points to get to this stage before slowing down to prioritise content (increase learn limit), but that might be controversial.
For resources:
The website learnnatively is great for finding novels at different difficulties, very helpful once finished the tadoku books.
As mentioned, Renshuu for kanji, Anki for vocab, bunpro for grammar. Yomichan the chrome extension is also a godsend for vocab mining, especially as it adds the audio reading automatically.
There is many podcasts / YouTubers I listen to, off the top of my head: Bite Size Japanese podcast, akaneteki Japanese classroom,speak japanese naturally, Kensan okaeri, honobono, yuyu, Japanese with shun.
But not clearly enough apparently aha. At least it was a one-time occurence only, and I wouldn’t call your current listening score low either. Plenty of us would be happy to pass N3 with such a score I’m sure
)
But if I don’t feel ready for whatever reason, I’m going to go for December 2027 instead.
you can do it! Very nice to see you made such progress! Keep up the awesome work.