Value of studying for JLPT levels alongside main study

Japanese Language
1

I am considering taking JLPT in the summer of 2025 as a side goal for fun. So here’s the question, do I wait until a few months prior and then deciding what level to attempt it at and then start studying for it, essentially skipping the lower levels, or should I do some studying for lower ones along the way and see where I end up? If I don’t study the others along the way would I have to say make sure I know the JLPT N4 specification even if I am doing JLPT N3

Tl;dr any problems with skipping earlier JLPTs?

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Definitely wait at least until the registration date unless you really need the certificate or enjoy working through textbooks/towards specific exams. Up to at least N2 (possibly N1 too), as long as your usual studying habits are well-balanced, you don’t really need to do any targeted JLPT practice outside of taking one or two practice tests to get used to the format imo.

Now if your usual studying doesn’t really cover one or more of the fields tested in the JLPT (kanji, vocab, grammar, listening and reading comprehension), you’d do well to focus on that before taking the exam, but honestly, unless you use nonstandard and very specific studying resources you should be fine.

So I guess my question would be: what does your “main study” look like?

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Hey, as of yet (due to various commitments), my study routine is not super set in stone, but it should ideally end up being a mixture of

  • Tadoku for reading immersion
  • Nihongo con Teppei for listening.
  • Imabi for grammar.
  • Wanikani and a frequency deck and/or sentence mining Tadoku for SRS/vocab.

Thanks for the advice by the way!

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4

In that case don’t worry. It sounds pretty balanced except for output, and you don’t need to worry about that for the JLPT.

My first (and so far only) JLPT was the N3, I took it at the end of my exchange year in Japan back in high school. At that point I had almost no formal instruction, having had only three months of classes before going to Japan and none once I lived there. (Technically us exchange students did have Japanese classes there, but they were extremely elementary.)

I remember buying one of those JLPT prep books (総まとめ series), working through like eight pages and giving up.

I passed the test.

Yes, the JLPT has its drawbacks and faults – as any test does – but at the end of the day it mostly does its job of testing language ability, so if you have said language ability, you should usually pass.

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