N3 Grammar alongside N4 Vocab? N4 JLPT December 2025

Hi everyone!

I’ve been using Bunpro for a bit over a year now, and it has been quite the game changer for my Japanese studies. Before this, I was basically only doing WaniKani and thinking “I will get to grammar some day”. Granted, I had tried Genki 1, but it didn’t really stick.

I’ve been following the JLPT decks provided by Bunpro, but I only fairly recently started on the vocab decks. I had mistakenly thought that if I learned kanji and vocab via WaniKani, that would be sufficient, until I checked the overall statistics and saw I was missing a lot of words :sweat_smile: Thankfully, a good portion of N5 and N4 vocab were ones I did know, so I could mark them off, so it wasn’t as bas as expected. The N5 vocab deck was quickly conquered :smiley:

That brings me to the present. I am currently working through the N4 vocab deck and have about 350 left here. I am learning 15 vocab words a day (some of these I know in the sense that they are loan words from English and such, so the actual load is arguably a bit lower), so I should be done with the deck early September. I am considering registering for the N4 JLPT when I get back to Norway in December to have a goal to work towards, hence why I want to get the deck sorted soon ish.

However, I also do like learning the grammar points, and I find the example sentences a bit easier to follow due to the proper voices, as opposed to the computer-generated ones for vocab. I had briefly started N3 grammar, but decided to focus on the N4 vocab to get the deck sorted out first. However, given my current pace, I do think I could afford at least one grammar point daily too. My question then is, does this make sense, or is the intended way to use the decks to study N3 vocab and grammar simultaneously, and be done with all N4 beforehand?

Sorry if this post was a bit long-winded! Hopefully some of you can provide insights and your own experiences :slight_smile:

Glen

I noticed vocab of that level is often used in the grammar sentences, though I don’t know if this is still the case with N3 as I haven’t started with those yet.

It’s probably not neccessary to do N3 vocab when you do N3 grammar, I think it would give you just a bit of extra training. I suggest trying the N3 grammar and see if the lack of vocab troubles you.

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