You can never know, I felt like I failed N3 and it turns out that I passed by 3-4 points because I aced listening.
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The exam ended up being substantially harder than I expected. No individual question was all that difficult, but the time constraint, particularly for the grammar section, was surprisingly tight. There was a lot of text to read through. Judging by the reactions from the other people in the room, I think I fared better than most, but I was still quite rushed.
I expected listening to be my weak point, so that’s where 90% of my study time went for the last 6 weeks or so. When I got into the exam, it clearly paid off. Although I’m sure I missed several of them, I was able to follow along and understand most of the questions. Our audio cut out between the 6th and 7th question, which gave a nice little mental break while they called tech support in (took about 15-20 mins) to get everything working again.
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So my advice (to be taken with a grain of salt) is to pace yourself to have learned all of the new grammar, vocabulary, and kanji that you need at LEAST 2 months before the exam. Spend that last 8+ weeks doing tons of repetition to speed up both your reading and listening comprehension.
Practice suggestions for listening:
Practice suggestions for reading:
- Tadoku
- Lingo Mastery
- Japanese social media (Youtube and Twitter comments) – and yeah, I understand there are lots of possible pitfalls here, but it does help reading speed
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Overall I’m pretty happy with the experience of taking the exam, and I recommend it. I think certification exams in general are great for exposing and filling in holes in your knowledge.
I don’t think I scored particularly high on the exam, but I do think I passed. And more importantly, I know where to direct my next few months of study time.
(and no, there were no yellow or red cards during my exam 
)
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I have taken N1 for the first time, and since I know what my real level is I was really skeptical about my ability to pass. But actually, it seems that I have quite a good chance of passing it. Listening was really easy (apart from concentrating on all the tiny details in the dialogues all the time) and grammar and vocab sections weren’t disastrous.
Reading I felt was okay too but maybe I have missed tons of nuances, dunno.
Overall, seems like I might pass and hopefully not just by a few points.
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That’s amazing to hear. N1 is a huge feat. Do share the result when you get it!
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Just so you know to find it less confusing in the future, that type of format seems to be quite common in that section of the JLPT tests. They will have two different pieces of writing that are related and partially share information. For example, one is general information about a hotel and then the other is a flyer for a special deal the hotel is currently running and question 1 might be something like ‘based on article A, what should this person do’ and then the second question might require you to take both A and B into account. I’ve seen that type of question structure in multiple leaked past exams and practice tests.
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I took N2 for the first time after getting almost a full score for the N3 in July. Work was very busy the past 6 months so, aside from doing my flash card reviews before and after work every day, adding new words and trying to fit in immersion, I barely got through any textbooks and only did one practice test. Only added about 1 quarter of the N2 grammar points on Bunpro too so wasn’t feeling very prepared.
The vocab section only had about 3 or so questions I didn’t feel confident about. Since I thought I will get a high score for vocab, I skipped the grammar questions except the final 5 where you fill in the gaps in an article to focus on reading since I didn’t want to fail any individual section.
I wasted too much time on two of the shorter reading questions and ran out of time, so I had to fill in random answers before the time cut off for the final two pamphlet questions and a bunch of the short grammar ones. I think on raw score, there is a pretty good chance I could pass, but after scaling, who knows. If I did it again, I would probably do the reading questions in reverse order and I would have skimmed the short grammar questions for easy ones to quickly answer them first.
Biggest regret is overthinking the article about the forest. I thought the correct answer was too obvious and it was a trick question, but it was the obvious answer all along. Wasted too much time on that one. The later longer articles were actually much easier for me to parse.
Anyway, good luck everyone.
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How’d you up your listening ability? That’s my weakest point.
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I listen to Japanese every day to some extent. Also it’s important to keep the variety up, don’t just stick to Animes or certain Podcast or whatever, keep changing.
Also I did some immersion for a few months, though that’s probably mostly gone already sadly.
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Is your listening passive or active? I’ve tried doing some listening in the past but always felt like I just couldn’t understand without having to stop and play 5s snippets at a time to actually hear what’s being said.
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I do both, I have sometimes stuff on the background, sometimes I focus on it.
It depends on mood / availability.
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Bunpro has been really useful for listening practice since they implemented the new interface options in examples.
Grammar > All > (pick anything) > Examples > Hide All
Then just hit play on each recording. When you finish with all of the recordings for that grammar point, just hit the left or right arrow at the top to go to another.
(note that there aren’t recordings for everything yet, but most grammar points seem to have them)
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For that you can also use the recordings Asher provided the google drive for, and load them on any player.
Still missing some of then, as old recordings are not there, but still a good alternative.
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