Hihi! 
New poster here! I’ll be taking the December N1 in Michigan, if all goes to plan. I’ve chosen June 1st as my official study start date, but I’ve still been plugging away at WaniKani and looking into new study resources in the meantime.
Planned books for study:
I’m determined to pass N1 this year!
He is an English teacher after all, so I trust him on language-acquisition techniques, haha.
That’s an amazing feeling I bet. I’m not quite there myself, but I do sometimes do it, like you said, with the really basic grammar points. I think that’s BunPro’s main target is to fill in the sentence just by intuition…but I always need at least the basic hint to get the answer.
Wow that’s a fantastic idea! I think organizing that will also force me to review along the way. By the way, how is loading an excel versus a google doc? I always have to split mine up after 100 pages because it get’s too tedious to load.
Sadly, with Bunpro I never reached that point either. I only have experienced it with the DOJG example sentences in the Anki deck I found. I think the DOJG sentences are very much tailored towards clearly exposing the grammar point at hand. That helps me a lot.
Up to now I haven’t had any performance issues but I’m certain there must be a limit somewhere. Time will tell I guess.
I also have all the N3 vocab and kanji in this sheet and some charts to measure progress and it is still loading fast. I really like having this one place with all my JLPT info, it feels like „look, it is just this one file, that is all I have to learn, I can do this!“.
@NicoleIsEnough I find Bunpro and it’s collection of grammar points very useful but also never can make a habit of using it. I wrote a little Anki mode userscript for it and wrapped it so that I could also use it on my iPhone but I never managed to stick to it. There are just so many things to keep up with and I feel like WK+Anki is already the limit of what I can commit to doing daily…
I’ve signed up for N5 in July (in Singapore, so it’ll be nice and toasty). I’m easing into N5 rather than jumping straight to N4 as it’s been a few years since I last did any formal language study and grad school takes up the majority of my time. Jumping levels and knocking out a thesis at the same time seems like it would be overly taxing on my mental bandwidth. Still, if things go well I hope to clear at least N4 and maybe even N3 before I graduate.
Attempted N2 in 2015, failed by a small margin. It made me realize how much I needed to learn Kanji.
I know that JLPT doesn’t test speaking and writing but it is a certification that you get for life (unlike IELTS).
I’m hoping to make another attempt and pass N2 this time.
According to WkStats: wkstats
N5 is achieved on WaniKani Level 16 and N4 at WaniKani 27 but I was able to easily pass N3 when I was like WaniKani 15.
Maybe me almost passing N2 at about WaniKani 10 and then Passing N3 easily at WaniKani 15 was a fluke? Maybe the test had been made easy to encourage more people to study.
I dunno.
I’m thinking of going for N2 once I reach 80% Kanji at WaniKani 38 (according to WKstats). It seems like a reasonable goal for N2.
There’s JLCT which is also recognized by the Japanese Embassy.
JLCT tests are modeled after JLPT and they occur more often. So, maybe someone can use JLCT as a mock test to prepare for the JLPT.
Kanji is only a really really small part of the JLPT, you only have like 5 kanji specific questions, and it’s possible you will get lucky and only need to know kanji that you already learned. In my JLPT N2 exam last year, you had to know how to read 冷蔵庫, a word that I could probably already read when my grammar was at around N4. Also if you’ve been studying vocab outside of WK (with kanji), you might already know much more kanji than your WK level suggests.
That level number is when you get to like 95% or 100% of N5’s kanji covered. You don’t need to know 100% of the kanji on N5 to pass N5. By the time you’re level 16, you probably know 4 times as many kanji as are on N5.
I have not taken any Level of the JLPT yet, but I am hoping that I will feel confident enough to try the N5 this December. I wanted to make sure I was confident with all of the kanji that may be on there so I went ahead and reset back to Level 1 to restart everything.
The closest place to me for the test is about 7 hours away in Washington D.C. at Georgetown University. I have been using Wanikani, BunPro, Japanese Pod 101, Japanese Ammo with Misa, and the Japanese from Zero Book. Lastly personally for feeling comfortable speaking I am also using Pimsleur on Audible. I also read the Japanese Graded Readers, and am following along with the book clubs here. The biggest thing for me will be confidence. Most of the time I feel like I don’t know anything, but then I listen to a television show or something and understand a lot, or I will just be speaking to my husband and then realize that I can say that same thing in Japanese.
Anyways, I am looking forward to it, its been fun reading everyone’s stories here!
I don’t know if you were referring to this deck but damn, this is a really nice deck:
https://dojgdeck.neocities.org/
They even have a template prepared that you can use to get random example sentences. Nice little detail.
If only I didn’t have 3 different grammar decks already… but I guess a forth won’t hurt 
(I’m more of a “let’s hope I figure it out by enough exposure over time” person than a “actively do exercises” person… ).
Has anyone taken the JLPT in Toronto? How was it? How was the test administered? Lots of people? Just a few?
I’m thinking of doing N5 or N4 in December (no July tests here). It’d be my first JLPT cause I missed the registration date last year.
I think it’s more than just a small part since the only section that doesn’t use kanji would be the listening section.
I have a similar story as to his in that I was around lv 10 and took the N2 and almost passed in 2017 but that was mostly my listening score being good while the vocab section and partially the reading section was pretty bad because there were so many kanji I didn’t even recognize.
I definitely agree that there are much more “lower level” kanji on the test and you can get by, most were N3 level but I didn’t know a decent amount of those either haha.
Now that I’ve learned a lot more kanji I’m hoping that as long as I maintain or improve my reading speed it should be a breeze this December.
(Sorry, butting in. Just wanted to say that I loooove this deck! I split it up into ‘basic’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘advanced’ (thanks to the handy tags) and honestly it’s the best Anki deck(s) that I have ever used! I can highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t used it yet!)
I finally figured out a study routine for the coming month!
Watch all nihongonomori grammar videos on n2 There are 3 playlists: 1 is very general, the other two describe differences between items in more detail. The two detailed ones will be watched as needed based on the practice exams I do.
Do one n2 practice exam everyday, then mark mistakes and do those again during the week before the actual test.
Read in japanese at least 1 hour a day
Watch something in japanese (with japanese subtitles) at least 1 hour a day
I made an anki deck of the sou matome n2 grammar book sentences and will learn a new ‘day’ (about 4 grammar points) every day, focus on pronunciation and grammar.
That sounds like a good plan! 
Where are you finding all those many practice exams? Or do you just mean exercises as they can be found e.g. in the Sou Matome series?
I was thinking about doing some more sample tests too but I don’t have many available.
And also: 5 weeks left for studying everyone! Here we gooooo!
It’s this one! It has 20 exams that are, to be fair, only grammar, vocab and reading practice, but so far I’ve already encountered a lot of vocab I didn’t know yet. Additionally it really focuses on distinguishing similar grammar points, so it makes it easier for me to see which points are similar.
Being avoiding doing an Listening test like the plague since that’s the only thing I can’t “study” for which makes me uneasy.
Finally took one and…it was easy? Like really easy? My score was 25/30. Even the last questions, with the infamous “long” conversation about multiple things, I got all correct. Though I did get a tip to make a grid and write notes which made it a lot easier to answer.
This makes me feel so much better. I attribute my entire success to ひいきびいき, Terrace House, and various Let’s Plays. ;A;
Yahaaaa
The only problem with this for me is that the conversations are sometimes so boring that I can’t keep my focus on listening.
I tried terrace house before but found it a bit boring too… Which one are you watching? Does it get more eventful?
I listen to it on my bike commute so I’m not totally focused on it but it’s good background noise.
I found it boring at the start too but I think it’s just because everyone isn’t used to each other yet. It starts getting kind of dramatic once people start getting sick of each other, lol. I’m watching Boys & Girls In The City.
I also listen to it on my bike commute! So it’s totally okay not to pay full attention then?
That sounds perfect, I’m always here for drama. Then I should just keep going probably lol