Realistically what should I expect for passing the jlpt?

Planning to take the n3 in December (America so no July)

Currently on level 16. I was at level 23 before and then restarted from scratch because I’m stupid (restart date 400 days ago).

WK stats says level 30 is 90% of N3 kanji and level 25 is 81%. I’ve been on a big hiatus from doing new items and just have doing reviews intermittently. Now that I’m caught up on my reviews, I only get 20-30 reviews per day

I think a good pace I can keep up with is 15 new items per day. My question is, realistically, what level could I expect by december? I think level 30 is way too far out of reach. But I’m thinking maybe level 25 might be doable since I was level 23 before (so a little over 1 level per month).

Even now with level 16, even though I was like 23 before, a lot of the kanji and radicals I don’t really remember at all. So I don’t know if that’s really gonna be a big help going forward.

For reference, today is my 76th day on level 16. I let my reviews pile up to several hundred and just recently caught up on them.

Is maybe 20 days per level doable for most people? I know I should go at “my pace”, but I want to know what the average joe can do and what I should expect in terms of passing the JLPT. I have until mid august for sign ups, and I wanna know now if it’s something that’s possible to achieve at the rate I plan to go, or if I should scrap the idea.

Outside of WK, I’ve completed n5-n3 on bunpro (though I haven’t done any reviews in a couple of weeks), and am halfway through quartet 1 with a tutor.

I just got my official results from the N4 from last december and my raw score was 141/180 and 96.5th percentile.

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I was at level 20 when I took the N3 and I aced the kanji section with zero sweat. I would recommend giving your time more to reading/vocab and listening if any of those could use some strengthening. I thought I was fine in listening and that specific score ended up being low enough to cost me the exam.

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Not sure how similar N3 is to N2&N1, but I thought the kanji section was too short to actually make it a big thing to focus on (only 13 kanji specific questions if I remember correctly).

So my recommendation would be the same as taiyousea’s, which is to focus on vocab, grammar, reading and listening.
Last year I really mainly focused on reading and it showed. Through reading, I also improved on kanji, vocab and grammar. Just to say, was you get to the point where you think you could start reading (if you haven’t already), maybe using wanikani time to read instead would be an option

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agree. i was probably at or below level 16 this past December and passed N3. beyond continuing with WaniKani, i’d suggest practicing reading and listening comprehension in some way that feels fun. they sell books of practice exams as well, to give you a sense of what the exam will be like.

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I passed N3 in July 2023 when I was at probably Level 13. I did spend quite a few collegiate courses up through Tobira, with additional study on the side (with 8 months of time in rural Japan). Highly recommend the Shinkanzen Master series and giving yourself a little bit of extra study time for some N3 Kanji you won’t encounter with your pace. I think if you are through Quartet I (which I’ve also used) you should be able to pass if you do well on mock exams. N3 pass is like 95/180? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going slowly through WaniKani at a pace of 10ish lessons day to get you where you want to be. Even knowing 70% of the kanji, you could pass!