N3 Kanji list ( Confused and Pondering) HELP!

Greetings !!

I am preparing for N3 and i am keen to keep my effort at the required level and dont wana accidentally study the N2 or N1 Kanji. Having said that, even though there is no resource for JLPT kanji list, only best guesses, so i am rolling with N3 kanji list provided by COTO Japanese school.

Additionally through some resource i have grabbed all the past papers of N3 with the date mentioned, even though its a wide spread fact that jlpt doesnt publish past papers. Anyways i thought since it mentions N3, the vocab and Kanji would be relevant but i am coming across Kanji that i have never seen in all the required N3 kanji i have studied. Consider the following please

ć…„ăŻé»™ăŁăŠăšăŁăšæŒ«ç”»ă‚’èȘ­ă‚“でいる. (is a sentence from N3 past paper)

黙 This kanji by no means a N3. The Joyo kanji list marks this as secondary school kanji and its an apparent fact i suppose that N3 kanji is all the primary school kanji nor secondary school.

Would appreciate your thoughts on this. Is the past paper that i am studying is screwed and non authentic or Jlpt throws curve balls? Thanks

You’ve basically answered your own question, there is no public list of kanji, vocab, or anything else for each level of the JLPT post-2010, and examiners can use their discretion to include content above the “level” of each exam (and often do). I’d even guess that almost all past n3 papers include at least 1 or 2 pieces of content which aren’t “n3” listed by typical resources.

That being said, whether a couple of kanji are or are not included shouldn’t make that big a difference anyway. If you’re confident on all the “n3 content” (which at the end of the day is just someone’s guess of what the content might be) then you shouldn’t be likely to have your fate of passing or failing decided by whether or not you know a few kanji which may or may not be included depending on the choice of the examiner. I might be wrong, but I think that the harder questions are typically less heavily weighted.

I don’t really see why it’s an apparent fact that all n3 kanji is from elementary school, nothing to suggest that. Also a quick look at the n3 practice questions provided on the official jlpt website shows several junior high school kanji being used. The ones they use are all common and worth knowing anyway

Thank you for your time and thoughts on this , i just hope there are few of such cases that higher level kanji is given in an exam , i just came across this sentence and got startled

you’re overfitting.

if your goal is to pass N3, what you should aim for is to get better at comprehending Japanese. ideally N3 is a stop on the way to more and more skill in Japanese.

if you have that perspective, then it is clear that no effort is wasted. learning a kanji or a word teaches you something that you might need later in your use of Japanese.

also, if you have that perspective, N3 will feel easy, because you’re getting further and further.

黙 may or may not be N3, but 黙る as a word showed up for me first in some of the lower-graded graded readers I read. It’s a great word, and I think definitely makes sense to put on a test attempting to qualify you for having the “ability to understand Japanese used in everyday situations to a certain degree”

yes considering learning Japanese, its totally not a waste of effort, but since i am preparing for an exam i was hoping to reduce my syllabus to the minimum and revise only those bits.