Nihongo

I passed JLPT N3 years ago and have been quietly losing it ever since. Before starting again I asked what should have been a simple question: where is the official list of what N2 covers? There isn’t one. The Japan Foundation published a syllabus for the old test, withdrew it when the test was redesigned in 2010, and has declined to replace it, on the grounds that the point of learning Japanese is to communicate rather than to memorise lists. Every “N2 grammar list” in circulation was reverse-engineered from past papers by somebody. This one is no different, and it says so on the home page.

Read first, then test

Most study tools are quizzes with a textbook attached. This runs the other way. Grammar comes in 66 short lessons, each built around something learners actually confuse — うちに against 間に, the four ways of saying “if”, the whole わけ family — with an explanation of the group, a side-by-side table, and every point in full with examples. Only then does it test you on that lesson. Everything you test goes into spaced review; what you got wrong comes back in ten minutes.

Finding the holes

For a lapsed learner the hard part is knowing what has gone. A sweep runs every point at a level once, over as many sittings as it takes, then reports the misses by lesson. Lessons that come through clean are marked as known, so it does not make you reread what you still hold.

Kanji as words

The exam never asks you to write a kanji. It shows you a word and asks how it is read. So each kanji comes with its common words, ranked by how often they turn up in newspapers, and the test offers the wrong readings the exam likes to offer: the other reading, a voiced sound where there shouldn’t be one, a missing small っ. The first version ranked the words badly and taught 食 by way of “solar eclipse”. It has been spoken to.

Listening, by a narrow margin

The listening questions are voiced by the Mac’s built-in Japanese speech. The Mac lists nine Japanese voices. Eight of them produce about a hundredth of a second of silence and report success. The ninth plays every part, pitched up and down to make a cast.

The target is N2 in July 2027. In Australia only Canberra and the Gold Coast offer it mid-year; Sydney makes you wait until December.