My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread

(2015-12-20, 1:50 pm)RawrPk Wrote: Here is an article I could that might help those who have only self studied in Japanese. I for one like this gauge better

An Alternative to JLPT Study Hours http://jlptbootcamp.com/2011/04/an-alter...udy-hours/

I think the difficulty with that kind of gauge is that the JLPT isn't really testing that kind of "real world" ability -- it's weighted heavily towards reading comprehension and speed, and though it does have a listening section it has no tests of production at all (either written or spoken). So it's quite easy to end up able to pass the JLPT without hitting all of those real-world benchmarks. A lot of those things are partly whether you've practiced the thing in question (reading menus, for instance, can be tricky depending on the menu and whether you've got the detailed food related vocab or not...and if you don't happen to live in Japan you probably haven't spent that much time reading menus.)

I guess it depends whether the underlying question is "supposing I'm this capable in Japanese, what level of JLPT would I be able to pass without having to prepare for it particularly?", or "if I've passed JLPT level X then what does that imply about my general competence in the language?". I think I'd agree with the benchmarks for the first question, but not for the second.