I’m currently learning a lot of Grammar and vocabulary and haven’t read another book since spring 2025. Are the Grammar Points and / or vocabulary of JLPT N2&1 seldom enough that it wouldn’t be torture to read something?
I want to learn as much grammar and vocabulary as possible in 2026 and start reading again in 2027. Is N3 enough? Unfortunately I don’t have a high tolerance for ambiguity and I don’t want to repeat my First Reading experiences where I translated every single Word and could even recognise If something was a Word or a grammarpoint.
Vocabulary wise even JLPT N1 is not enough by a long shot. Grammar wise the points in N1 are pretty rare and N2 some of them are quite rare. What feels like torture to read is also pretty subjective
The feeling of not knowing what is grammar and where words end got better after N3 for me. The biggest difference however is just how much you read. You develop a feeling for how japanese works over time. You will have to look vocabulary up long after passing N1 though.
I wouldn’t recommend to stop reading completely and rather recommend trying a variety of easier material (can be manga, children’s novels, games, graded readers) until you find something you enjoy doing. At least try to read something every few months to see if you still feel as tortured by reading as before.
A good handful of things on there feel standard or even common depending on the particular author you’re reading. Even in conversations some of them come up somewhat often.
N2 and N1 stuff will come up regularly but in my opinion not often enough that it’s worth “preloading”. You can just learn as you go.
Also many of the more advanced grammar points are going to be more formal or literary versions of things you can say with more elementary grammar. This can cause a lot of confusion if you study then out of context in my experience.
The other thing about the more advanced grammar is that it starts to shift away from “this is a genuinely new concept” and towards “this is a common sentence pattern that you could break down into grammar pieces you already know”. For instance
~に限ったことではない = not limited to just ~
is in the N1 list but it’s grammatically a lot of more basic parts: particle に connecting to the past tense of 限る “to be limited to”, こと nominalizer, ではない “it isn’t”. It’s helpful to know and recognise this as a common pattern, but once you know about it it’s easy to remember because it has more or less the meaning of its components.
By the way:
IMHO an important skill that is part of learning to read Japanese (or any foreign language) is developing a tolerance for ambiguity and a sense for when something really is important enough to your understanding to look up versus what can be safely skipped. At 20 years into learning Japanese and well past N1 I still encounter words in text that I do not know and make judgement calls about whether to look them up or guess from context or just plough on ignoring them.
A textbook centred approach to N2 study generally features study of the grammar in the context of two or three page texts designed for learners. I think that kind of reading (or similar “graded reader” material) is perhaps a good place to start. I think most learners will have done at least some native materials reading before reaching N2 level.
I’m reading with Satori Reader at the moment, but this kind of reading (Graded Readers, etc.) was not what I meant. I should have written that. My First Post was a bit too vague.
I read my first book during the first 6 months of learning Japanese. That was a bit too early. I had to look up every single word and was not able to combine them to a sentence because I knew too few Grammar Points. I wasn’t even N5. My goal is to understand at least around 50%.
Yeah, that would definitely be too early for a lot of people, including me. I think that by around “N3 and halfway to N2” it should be a different and less frustrating experience, although it will definitely still involve some lookups.
