Reddit reviews 2000 Essential Vocabulary for the JLPT N3 (Trilingue Japonais - Anglais - Chinois) (N3 (3))

Depending on how many hours a day you study, this can be possible, or extremely difficult. 3 hours a day almost puts you at the same amount a Japanese language school would have you do, though obviously without the Japanese immersion. 1 hour a day, I honestly don't think that would be enough time. It takes about 6-8 months at a language school to go through n3, but many people can do it quicker.

Let's assume you study 5 days a week, as I'm not sure you will be studying everyday for the next 6 months (maybe you will, but I don't know your work ethic). You got about 130 days to get this done. There's more or less about 100-120+ grammar points for n3, so you really only need to do 1 grammar lesson a day, 5 days a week to be on track. You need to learn about 2,000 new words, and 300 new Kanji. That puts you at about 15 new words a day, and 2.5 Kanji. Kanji part should be easy, though 15 words is a little high.

If you did 3 days of 2 grammar points, 2 days of 5 Kanji, and 15 words a day you would have the basic necessities down. You could get these done in an hour to an hour and a half. I would honestly try and spend another hour on listening and reading practices when you have that extra hour or 2. At least 2 listening and 2 reading a week should be good. I'm sure you could do a reading and listening practice easily within an hour.


I used the try! N3 book for grammar, as well as 中級を学ぼう and 中級から学ぶ日本語 books, but honestly just a regular jlpt grammar book should work. I like the try! books, and kanzen master. The other 2 I listed are very hard to use outside of a classroom. Not very good explanations of the grammar.

The 日本語総まてめ books are good for the practice reading and listening books, as well as Kanji as long as you do your own practice writing and stroke order lookup.
As far as vocabulary, I really like the はじめて日本語能力試験 series. Has a good amount of words, organized well, and has the red card to quiz yourself. And it has an example sentence for every word. I couldn't find the series on amazon, so I had to go to amazon japan to get the link. But I really like these books so if you can figure out how to use a Japanese website definately check them out.

Edit: added links.

Edit 2:

Also, Just to expand on some things. I don't know how long it took you to get to N4, so I don't know what kind of pace you are at right now. Generally, being fully immersed in Japan, it takes about 2-3 months to cover N5 stuff, and 2-3 months to cover n4 stuff. The jump to n3 is bigger, and takes about the same amount of time as it did for both n5 and n4. So generally 6 months. N2 also takes even longer. I spent probably 10+ months straight on n2 before I moved on to n1, and I still don't feel confident in my vocab, and this was living in Japan, going to language school, and having a job where I spoke complex Japanese as my job, as well as only having Japanese friends who can't speak English (I have terrible memory though). So don't get too stressed if it takes you longer than expected. I'm also an idiot, so it probably takes me longer to learn things than it should...

All the resources I gave you are specifically focused on the JLPT. Honestly the test could be better. I doesn't test on speaking or writing, and so it's not really a good measurement of skill. These books aren't going to make you able to speak better. If your aim is the JLPT then this is a good way to go, but it depends on what your goals are. When it comes to slang and colloquial speech, these books don't provide a lot of useful information. It's really helpful to find Japanese people to talk to, weather it be through a meetup group in your city, or online through things like hellotalk. These things won't really help you with the JLPT though.

Anyways, good luck on your test!

This book series is pretty popular and has i+1 sentences for virtually every word covered. There are Anki decks out there up to N3 if you can prove ownership. I think they're great (the books, I'm using my own decks and haven't seen the shared ones). That would be my first choice. Core 6000 would be my second choice because it's free.