Yea baby🥳 Passed!
Listening was a struggle as I expected but luckily got enough points to pass.
N4 next December かもしれない
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You need 50% in each section. And like a couple on top. I don’t think it’s 67%. That sounds kind of high.
It’s lower than that – for N5 the sectional pass marks are 38/120 and 19/60, and you need 90/180 overall. (The way the scores are calculated means that doesn’t correspond to “33% of questions answered correctly”, which is why you find other higher %s floating around in the test-taker lore for what might be a passing mark for practice tests etc.)
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This is starting to jog my memory. But for the n2 I think it’s like you need 21+ in each section but collectively over 50% to pass.
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N1-N3 are all 19/60 per section; the overall pass mark varies, though, being 95/90/100 out of 180 for N3/N2/N1 respectively. (That sounds weird, but it’s what the official website says…)
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A massive congratulations to everyone who has passed! Some impressive looking scores on here! 
I’m very happy to say I passed the N5, I was a little worried after the reading section but my vocabulary/grammar score really carried me through. I used WaniKani for about 2 months before sitting the exam and I’m excited that this is a way I am able to learn and retain kanji after so many years of struggling.
I hope to sit the N4 this summer and spend a lot more time focusing on listening and reading.
I do not regret the whisky I drank after…
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Congratulations!
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Nope, only 19 of 60 (and for the grouped sections in N5 and N4 it’s 38).
For N5 it’s only 80 overall, for N4 it’s 90 overall.
I think the weird points scheme of 95/90/100 might be because they slotted in N3 after the fact? But this is just my idea, I have no proof.
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Massive respect for scoring within 1 point of passing N2 just half a year after passing N3.
N3 to N2 is quite a big leap.
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Thank you very much!
That makes me feel much better about it 
(and the comments by all the other lovely people as well of course!)
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Hope we both manage it soon! At the moment, I’m really swamped with other work. Guess I should work on my time management. I really haven’t been studying much advanced Japanese lately, aside from writing essays (小論文) and getting them corrected. Haven’t had much time for anything else. I’m not even sure I’ll sign up for July’s JLPT because I’m not confident I’ll get full marks.
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Are you going to keep doing the N1 JLPT until you get full marks? That would be a nice certificate to put on the wall.
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Hahaha. Not exactly. I wasn’t satisfied with my first score, and I do want a better one, but fundamentally, the JLPT N1 isn’t really able to test for what I’d call full native/native-like proficiency. Its scope has limits – it doesn’t require, for example, the ability to understand basic specialised vocabulary in academic fields like the sciences and the humanities – and it doesn’t test practical expressive ability at all (checking that you know some nuance and grammar is the best it can do). That doesn’t mean it’s pointless, of course, and having the N1 does open quite a few doors – particularly since most Japanese companies don’t seem to require more than an N1 as proof of high proficiency – but focusing on the test alone feels like something that would produce diminishing returns over time. I’ve done other language tests don’t allow retakes after you pass – in particular, I’m thinking about my C2 exam for French – but I don’t mind because my score was decent (>70-80%) and the test was both hard enough and broad enough for me to feel passing proved that I didn’t have much left to consolidate in terms of proficiency. Those are the tests that are a little more worth working on, I think, especially since the test topics are slightly harder to predict and you effectively just have to learn the test format and improve yourself as a whole in order to get ready.
My current plan is to reach at least a bare-minimum C2 level for Japanese on the CEFR scale, and then I’ll take the N1 again after a bit of test prep. The point is to improve my Japanese as a whole – not just skills related to what the N1 tests – and to get to a point where I know the test will be easy, and I should be able to get full marks without much effort. The reason the goal level is C2 is also that that’s the point where you’re basically comfortable with absolutely anything in your target language, and that has a lot of practical implications too (e.g. you can gather academic knowledge or deep journalistic analysis of an issue without wanting to punch a hole in your computer screen/book). Also, while it’s not strictly necessary, reaching C2 in your target language before moving to a country where it’s spoken makes your life much easier. (I speak from experience.)
The point at which I hope to achieve this would be some time within the next 1.5 years at the very latest, ideally by July 2023, because I’ll have been learning Japanese for 5 years at that point – if I take any longer, I’ll exceed how long it took me to reach C2 in French, and that wouldn’t sit well with me because this time, I know (mostly) what works for me. There’s another reason July 2023 is a good deadline: I’ve just realised that I won’t be allowed to take any foreign languages for my final year in engineering school (there was a change in policy recently), and while I think my former teachers will still answer my questions, that’ll be the end of regular verbal interactions in Japanese. It’s true that I essentially self-studied Japanese for the first four years (I took the opportunity to join a class at the start of my fourth year of Japanese, when I started engineering school, but the teacher could only do so much for me because of the enormous range of levels in the class, and most of the material I was given was far below my level), but with very few Japanese people in my social circle, and none of them particularly good with explanations (with the exception of my teachers and the one friend I’ve just discovered is half-Japanese), I would be missing a lot of guidance. It also doesn’t really help that I’m basically at the same level as my half-Japanese friend, the difference being that he’s way more fluent verbally, and I write essays better (according to our teacher), so there’s only so much we can teach each other without further input/work.
Anyhow, the main barriers to fluency right now are my lack of spoken practice (I really need more conversations where I’m given the opportunity to form long sentences) and my general lack of experience with academic/formal/technical language, which hinders my other three skills (listening to news is hard, reading news and books is hard, and I still don’t sound erudite and natural when I write). I’m amazed that anime + associated information gathering (e.g. Japanese dictionary entries, Japanese articles on Japanese usage) and searching for answers (in Japanese) to questions on the WK forums has carried me this far, but I’m at the point where I probably have to start reading more academic/heavy stuff if I want to get any further: news articles, Japanese junior high/high school textbooks, novels etc. It’s probably going to be a little painful (hopefully I can find some nice articles on recent scientific research, because otherwise news articles just aren’t as fun as anime), but I don’t see any other way. 
As things stand, the only sort of technical language I’m really proficient in is all the terms from traditional Japanese grammar that I pull out when I’m talking to my Japanese teachers or reading dictionaries online. Plus, I got from B2-C1 to C2 in French by reading the news (for fun!) for several hours every day, so at least I know it works. Maybe I’ll subscribe to an online newspaper if I find one whose writing I like. The digital-only subscriptions are sooo much cheaper than they are in France, at any rate.
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Is the certificate any different? I thought jlpt pass certificate was the same for manten
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It’s not physically different to my knowledge.
Also maybe it’s just Japan but the JLPT certificates kind of suck compared to others. Even when you order one off the site (which I did in prep for applying to jobs last year).
Certainly not something worth displaying.
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I believe they started printing the scores on the certificates a few years back. So its no longer just a “I passed” paper, it shows how you did too. I could be totally wrong since its been about 2 years since I passed the N3. But I remember that being some sort of controversy at the time on Reddit, which for all I know could have been someone complaining their scores were visible and didn’t like that. xD
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I think they differ for test-takers in and outside of Japan. The ones you get abroad look like this:
and they are the size of a normal page (I think the Japanese ones are half-size?)
(Also to avoid any confusion, this is NOT my own certificate, just a photo from „out there“)
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Yeah, in Japan they’re not full size.
I imagine each country has some leeway in the same way that they have leeway in other aspects of running things, like when and how they take registrations.
Or maybe it is just inside and outside of Japan.
Kanken certificates are nicer imo than Japanese JLPT ones.
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I think so. I have certificates from Australia, France, and Germany, and they all look like this. (I also think they are issued in Japan no matter the country.)
Absolutely! Especially the golden ones
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Yes, I remember talking with my organizers back in my country and they said the certificates come via post from Japan.
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