Sorry for the bad topic, couldn’t think of a better one to describe my question 
I’m almost done with N5. So far everything is going ok although I had to do a lot of conjunction practice to really hammer it all into my brain.
I’m kind of curious how N4 and the rest were for you compared to N5. Does it get much harder or was N5 the hardest for you because everything was totally new and you kind of build on that knowlegde in N4 and further?
So far, to be honest, N4 I think was the most difficult.
N5 was difficult because you have to go from knowing nothing to knowing something in Japanese, but then with N4 I got so confused repeatedly with stuff like passive/causative/causative-passive forms and the give/receive verbs, etc.
After N4, it seems to have been just “more of the same” so far, i.e. just learning more words/kanji/patterns.
I don’t think it’s harder. At the end of the day, it’s all just memorization, which has the same level of ease. I think N4 is like cold water after a nice dream: you feel like you made great strides completing N5 only to realize how shallow the depth of N5 really is, and how little you really know. Overcoming that bitterness is the hardest part to N4
I echo what has been said although I’d say late N3 is when things become pretty solidly focused on phrases rather than grammatical concepts. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how more “advanced” grammar is easier to apply as the use case/nuance is normally extremely limited but “basic” grammar contains a very large amount of nuance and a variety of usage that takes far longer to understand and master. Of course understanding and passing N5 and N4 grammar on Bunpro becomes easy and simple at a certain point but choosing the exact wording when speaking becomes a challenge as you go on. N5 is pretty basic (retrospectively, hard at the time) but N4 contains a lot more nuance than N5 although it won’t be too apperent until later on. That’s my opinion anyway. N4 is the time when you can start looking at native material (actually understanding it is a different matter but you can at least recognise roughly what is happening in simple stories).
N5+N4 is the most difficult in terms of conceptual learning however N2+N1 seems to be hard just because of how much effort and time it takes. N1 (bottom threshold) is not as high a level as some make it out to be.
Just keep pushing and you’ll get there.
I don’t know if it’s harder but it’s a bit different I think. N5 is things you encounter in every single sentence, N4 contains more specific points that carry more nuances.
I also think that at this level is where you should really start getting serious with consuming native content if you don’t already. It’s going to be rough at first but it will be great to reinforce what you learn in bunpro and textbooks, especially since N5/N4 constructs will be all over the place.
You may also need to reevaluate how you want to split your study between grammar, vocab and possibly kanji. If you know the N5 grammar but struggle with a lot of the N5 vocab/kanji, maybe it’s a good idea to switch focus to that while going slower on the N4 grammar for instance.
I agree with @bunnypro that so far N5/N4 are the most demanding tiers for grammar because that’s where you have the most “core” constructs that require a lot of memorizing. N3 and above feel more like specific applications of these principles and set expressions.
Thanks for the feedback! Yesterday I actually completed my first book in Japanese which felt great (although it was a childrens book )
I did things in a bit of a weird order… completed WaniKani in a year (that’s the basic 2100 Kanji and around 8000 vocab), after that continued studying vocab with Iknow and refreshed the Kanji with the KanjiStudy app.
For grammar I did read content like Tae Kim and watched the Cure Dolly videos so I got the gist of the basics but it wouldn’t really stick well enough to write sentences on my own.
So a month ago I reset BunPro, did a lot of conjunction practice and now I feel I kind of know the most of N5 well enough.
I know this is not the recommended order to learn things, but learning grammar does get a lot easier now that I know most of the Kanji and a lot of the vocab.
Onto N4 it is 
Ouch… I was hoping for that ‘after N5 everything gets supereasy’ answer
Thanks, now I know what I can expect
Interesing insight, thank you.
We actually have a fairly similar learning experience then, I basically spedrun wanikani to level 40 before focusing more heavily on grammar and vocab. I’m about to finish the N3 content right now. I also used Tae Kim and Cure Dolly for basic grammar.
Absolutely do go for N4 and N3 at your stage, it’s well worth it. I’m doing two new items/day which means that it took me a bit over 6 months to go over N4 + N3 with some reading practice on the side and my reading ability has really skyrocketed over that period.
When I finish with N3 in a couple of weeks I’ll slow down with the grammar and spend even more time “immersing”.
Ah that’s good to hear. Did a speedrun too for WK, that was tough but it also became kind of an obsession to finish that as fast as I could I absolutely will do N4 and up, wasn’t even in my mind not to, I was mostly curious about what to expect. Awesome to hear what it did for your reading ability, can’t wait to get there.
Thanks for the post! I’m in a very similar situation, so I wanted to ask about it as well!
I have started N4 this week; the word nuance is giving me nightmares. But so far it’s not being that much different to the end of N5, it’s just being actually “more things” to wrap my head around at once, specially when they all mix in a single phrase .
I feel like I’ll get overwhelmed soon by all this, so I already slowed down. Either way, things are looking bright, let’s do our best 
!
That’s the most difficult part right, each point is easy to understand but the more I learn - the more I mix them up or simply have forgotten it. It will probably simply need a lot of time and reading before that grammar really becomes second nature.
I’m doing 3 lessons per day now, in 5 days I’ll hit N4 so I can see how bad the ‘nuance’ suffering is going to be for me
I don’t mean to put you off at all - just trying to recall the truth of how it was for me at least.
Everyone is different and you might have a totally different experience
Actually, I also did the speedrun with kanji approach and don’t regret it at all (well, maybe the last 10/20 levels because I think I’ve forgotten almost all of those kanji because I’ve probably never seen them since lol).
But lots of those kanji will definitely help you with N3 and N2, if you can keep them up.
However, for now, if you’re anything like me, you might get super-frustrated at all the words in N5/N4 which are written in hiragana but would be much easier for you to read if they were written in kanji.
From what I remember, it can be pretty frustrating in N5/N4 not knowing where one word ends and the next one starts because it’s difficult to pick out the nouns/verbs/adjectives from among all the grammatical endings.
With a solid kanji background though, if Bunpro is working well for you, I’d say just stick at it and you’ll become a master through practice and repetition - and also watch a few YouTube videos to help with the “problem areas” of N4 like all the causative/passive/causative-passive stuff I mentioned before. Then I think hopefully you’ll be fine!
Even if there is the odd really confusing thing on the test, it’s not the end of the world - most of the test probably won’t be like that and it probably won’t impact on pass/fail, not least because of the system they use to work out the scores for the JLPT.
Oh that is already a major weak point for me - learning words which are hiragana only. I wrote down the ones in N5 in my notebook and had to keep studying them to memorize them.
For some I wrote out the most stupid mnemonics which does help for me.
Same thing after I was done with WaniKani and I started to learn new vocab with Iknow - the hiragana only vocab is so much more harder to memorize!
One nice thing about studying the basic 6000 words with Iknow btw is that quite some vocab does use Kanji from WK level 40-60. Occasionally even Kanji that’s not in WK’s Kanji at all. That at least didn’t make me feel like those 40-60 levels were all done in vain
This is where I am now! I read a sentence, and while I may have the vocab to understand part of it, I have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the sentence! I’m just like, what are all of these endings and why did they make the sentence so long? 
I just started N4, so hopefully it will get easier eventually.
It gets easier with reading practice. Recommend starting with free graded readers from tadoku and eventually moving to satori reader
This is an interesting thread. Many people have laid out a version of this idea, but I want to try my hand at explaining it. I generally gloss over the role that Kanji and vocab play in this discussion as it is a constant background consideration.
N5 is difficult for 2 main reasons. First, it is all new, every aspect of Japanese, especially if you are coming to grammar lessons with no kana or kanji background. Second, you are learning the ‘universal grammar’ it is very amorphous at this stage. You are not just learning what the conjunctions are, but how conjunctions function as a whole in Japanese. Same goes for particles, Japanese’s conjugation system, word/phrase/clause order, etc.
Once you get to N4 you should be comfortable enough with those foundations, but now you have to iterate on each of them in a multiplicity of contexts. How does any given particle interact with the others. What are the main patterns to conjunctions, what are the different ways to express modal concepts, etc.
N3 as most people has pointed out is really the point where you have 80% of core grammar locked in and reading becomes much more accessible, however you are now dipping into the concept of nuance. Not just that you should use a certain grammar in a certain context, but that given your nuance your mood, or social situation, one is more or less appropriate.
N2 is the same but more so, there are so many near synonyms that have shades of meaning and Japanese patterns or thinking that are more or less foreign to non natives that it takes a lot to unlock that idea, but you are still using that foundation from N5 and N4, unless it is a formal or archaic conjugation you do not need to learn new particles, or new conjugations, but how in situations those take on additional meaning.
I am not to N1 fully yet, but in principle it is the same, but the domains of contexts are even further expanded.
For those truly ambitious, N1 is also really just the start. Think in English that there is so much more English than what you learn as a senior in high school. There are higher level tests as well:
Finished N5 but before starting with N4 I put quite a few lessons back to SRS1 level. I keep making too much mistakes and thought it would be better to really get N5 under my thumb before progressing
Nice! It can help to check the additional learning resources on the points you’re having most trouble with, and changing ghosts from “Minimal” to “On”.
Also reading practice, which is something I’m needing more as well, since I have problems with hiragana-only word boundaries too, and identifying grammar points on the wild… But doing it already helped me a lot, it really works!
Also, it’s kinda personal, but I got a little scared about going at N4 at first, being a new level (probably selected semi arbitrarely by some linguists), and the fact of feeling that fear got me a worried that I would stagnate or something. In the end I got so pissed at these feelings that I just started N4, before completing my own plans to polish my N5 grammar, until they somewhat vanished.
I don’t know if you’ll pass through the same or something similar, so It’s hard to give any advice, but I hope my experience can help you out if it happens 
