Great series honestly. The next volume will likely be the last one too. Was actually just talking with another learner who was reading it the other day on a server I’m in.
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yes! N4 isn’t good for much anyways. N3 suggest you actually know Japanese to some extent. Though N2 is when it becomes good enough for employment as far as I know. N1 is a requirement for several jobs and to take university courses in Japan in Japanese, I think.
I suggest you do the practice tests, timed as if it was a real test when you should have been doing the N3, to both get a feel for the test itself, and to see where you are right now and what needs further improvements. 
Good luck with your studies! ^>^
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Awesome thanks
It’s even on Natively:
And 50% discount right now on Bookwalker
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Yeah, I’m also little surprised to hear some people consider those words rare. I’ve heard both in pretty informal sources, not just in LNs or adult literature, so it’s pretty much all over the place.
I first came across たちまち in Kiki’s Delivery Service, a children’s book, as part of the Beginner Book Club here on Wanikani. It was the first novel I ever read. The whole tone of the book has a more colloquial folksy tone, so it’s not really formal or very literary.
I still have the Anki card I made for it:
中にはこわがってよける人や、人のうしろにかくれる人がいて、たちまちキキを遠巻きにして人垣ができてしまいました。
As for ざるを得ない, I hear in a variety of TV shows, in conversations between the characters. I think it was in Dele when I first came across it, back when I was mainly watching slice-of-life shows or crime-solving shows. Also even in “asadoras”, the daily 15-minute morning dramas, you’ll sometimes hear it.
But yeah, if people aren’t watching mainstream J-dramas, or not reading many books, I can see people not encountering it all, but those phrases are certainly not niche phrases. So like you said, it’s a definitely a content issue.
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My guess is that the other thing that feeds into this is that people generally are very bad at estimating how often particular words or phrases turn up in what they read and hear, both for their native and non native languages. When you think “is this a common word?” what you usually end up doing is answering the question “do I have some strong/recent memories of having seen this?” and then using that as a substitute for the harder actual question. Plus if you’ve recently been alerted to a particular word (eg you just learnt it), you’ll feel like it turns up all the time, but it’s just that you’re noticing it when previously you wouldn’t have paid conscious attention to it.
And I think for learners reading native texts it’s easy to skip over some words you don’t know if you feel like you understand the sentence enough in context to not want to do the lookup, and then forget that’s what you did. Take that sentence from Kiki for example: if you happened to read that and knew the other words in it you don’t need to know たちまち to understand what’s going on and keep reading. And then you can easily forget that you saw it and skipped over it. I could easily believe Andy had seen that word half a dozen times previously and simply forgotten that he had because he’d skipped over it without actively looking it up or thinking about it. (To be clear, I think for extensive reading not looking everything up is absolutely the right choice; but it does mean your intuition about “does this word or construction I’m learning turn up often” is not going to be reliable.)
There does also seem to be a certain “market” for the opinion that the JLPT is super hard / full of useless obscure stuff; I’m not sure why.
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That’s very true. You raise some good points.
I also keep forgetting the term for what you described (about seeing a recently-learn word everywhere) and had to look it up again. It’s the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or Frequency Illusion.
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