My preparations for the JLPT N1 exam

Earlier this month I travelled to take the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) N1. This is a test sponsored by the Japanese government to certify non-native speakers. It’s sometimes required by schools and employers in Japan, but many people (like me) just take it to structure their practice and have a way to describe their skill level in a nutshell.

The JLPT doesn’t provide a complete picture of Japanese fluency: it’s a multiple-choice test with no speaking or writing portion. But the N1 level is at least a pretty decent test of reading & listening comprehension of a variety of abstract material. Since I translate from Japanese instead of into it, the style of test is pretty well-aligned with my goals.

I took the second-highest level of the test as long as 15 years ago now, when it didn’t even have “N” in the name. Back then, I figured I had it in the bag, having lived in Japan and read a few novels. I didn’t bother with much dedicated study for it, and ended up passing it by the skin of my teeth (I got exactly the passing score and not one point higher).

For a decade after that, I focused on my job and allowed my Japanese to deteriorate unused. Four years ago, I decided to get back into Japanese. It took maybe a year to derust back to N2 level, and another 2 years until I started to think I might finally be ready for N1.

Remembering my near-miss, I biased towards overpreparing this time. N1 can’t really be crammed for in the same way as the lower levels because the range of possible vocabulary and structures that could come up is so large. Fundamentally, you do have to just read and listen to a wide variety of challenging material for years: explicit pre-test prep will only get you marginal improvement. Still, I thought I might be close to the line again, for example because my Anki deck only has 8000 cards whereas N1 is supposed to require a Japanese vocabulary of 12000-15000 words. If so, that marginal improvement might be enough to put me over the top.

I won’t get my results back until spring, but I’m feeling pretty good about how it went. In the meantime, for other test-takers, I thought I’d write a bit about what I did to prepare.

The 6-12 months before the test

In this time period, there was no point in cramming, but I thought I should deliberately vary up my reading and study style a bit, to avoid falling into a rut.

Essay-like reading material

My default Japanese fare is fiction, whereas the JLPT N1 has essay-style texts about society, science and business. Contrary to what some people assume, it should absolutely be possible to get a good score on the JLPT purely from consuming fiction, as long as it’s challenging and varied enough material (science fiction for science-related words, workplace dramas for business-speak, etc). Still, you can obviously get there faster if you include material that’s a closer match.

I incorporated these sites into my online reading:

• Subscribing to bloggers I’m interested in on note.com

• Reading book reviews on allreviews.jp.  The writing on this site is usually more difficult than N1 readings, so I use it to stretch the limits of my abilities.  And the reviews sometimes lead to discovering a whole essay book I’m motivated to check out!

• Following X/bluesky accounts who post in an essaylike style.  I particularly recommend https://x.com/freakscafe

Vocabulary flashcards

Despite the poor reputation of wordlist-based study, I figured there would be no harm in using one to cover for any remaining mismatch between my commonly seen vocabulary and the words the test expected me to know.

So on days when my Anki load was light and I felt like doing extra memorization, I used the N1 vocab list at https://tangorin.com/vocabulary/65001 and scanned it rapidly to check for words that jumped out at me as totally unfamiliar, and middle-clicked them to create new Anki cards using Yomitan. I ended up adding roughly 300 out of the ~3000 words there.

These were mostly perfectly good words that I did start noticing in my reading afterwards. But zero of them showed up on the test or even any of the practice tests I did, and I somehow felt much more tired after doing this style of memorization than after mining the same number of words from real-world texts. So while this extra study didn’t somehow make my Japanese worse or anything, I would have to agree wordlists kind of deserve their bad rep.

Grammar flashcards

I used two sources of pre-baked flashcards to add N2/N1 grammar points to my study.

The first one is the Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar. I like this book a lot, to the point that I made a plan to take screenshots of each page of the Kindle edition and make flashcards from them. But then I found somebody else already created a better version of that, saving me a lot of tedium!

I learned about 150 new grammar points from that. This study felt useful right away: it shed light on some peculiar structures that had been bothering me for a while like とばかりに, and otherwise kept turning up in whatever I was reading.

However, it turned out the reason the grammar from DoAJG is so useful is that despite the impressive-sounding “Advanced” in the title, it’s mostly N2 grammar. So I found another deck specifically for N1 grammar, the Nihongo Kyoushi deck. I learned another 100 or so grammar points from this. Most of the actually N1 grammar hasn’t shown up for me outside the flashcards, neither in real-world text nor the N1 practice tests. But I still don’t regret spending the time because, unlike with vocab lists, it’s highly unlikely I’d have ever been able to learn this grammar through immersion/mining.

What I learned from doing practice tests

The most useful thing to do in the month or two before N1 is to take lots of practice tests under realistic time constraints. I ended up doing five of them in total. Here’s what I learned from them:

Follow a process of elimination

The “correct” answer for reading-comprehension questions is sometimes a limp, partial summary that doesn’t exactly jump out at me as “best representing the author’s thinking”. So on my first few practice tests, I wasted time waffling and sometimes got questions wrong even when I fully read and understood the text.

So starting in my third practice test, instead of trying to search for which of the 4 multiple-choice answers is the best, I reversed the procedure, and mentally eliminated the 3 options that had something wrong with them. By “wrong” I mean that either part of them actively contradicts the text, or they assert something not mentioned in the text. A particularly common type of wrongness I learned to look out for is when the answer is too sweeping (for example, containing a word like 全て).

Focus on the current question, not the last one

This is especially important in the listening section: if I zoned out because I was still worrying whether I got the last question right, I would miss a part of the current one and then start worrying about this one too. At worst, this can turn into a vicious cycle.

This is something that got easier to do the more practice tests I did. Especially after noticing that even when I felt a little overwhelmed by a listening subsection, my score still usually wound up good enough in the end. So there was no reason to panic even when it felt like things had gone off the rails.

Time management

I knew this would be a problem since I had run out of time on the JLPT 2 with about five questions left. So even in my first N1 practice test, I tried to go through it very briskly. And I was pleased to discover I was able to finish the main section just in time! Only to later realize that the time limit is actually 1 hour 50 minutes, not 2 hours…

By my fourth practice test, I had squeezed out that extra 10 minutes and finally just about had the timing right.

Practicing against time constraints also clarified the sequence I should do the reading section in:

• Generally, I read the first question before reading a sample text. After I had read far enough that it seemed like the text was moving on to a different topic, I answered it, read the next question, then went back to where I left off in the reading. This approach works because earlier questions always refer to earlier parts of the text.
• I did the very last question, “information retrieval”, before any of the other reading questions. I noticed I got that one consistently right on the practice tests given enough time, so I wanted to make sure I did give it the time.

I’ve heard advice online for more dramatic sequencing changes, like doing all of reading first. Personally, I didn’t see any reason to do that: I just made sure to finish knowledge within 35 minutes. Another piece of advice I’ve heard is to skip over useless-looking chunks of text in the readings and search for words relevant to the question. This may be reasonable advice when short on time, but to me it seemed less reliable than simply reading everything in order: several of the questions even seemed designed to test whether you really read the whole thing.