Hey, I'm just curious of how hard the N2 and N1 are.
Like when someone can read and easy light novel pretty good he should be N2 or something.
Or if one can watch anime and unterstand it pretty good his listening should be at about N1.

I never took an JLPT test so maybe someone who can read novels and/or can understand anime or other kind of japanese stuff, can maybe compare these to the JLPT test.

When I passed 1kyuu (I took it right before they switched to N1) I was at a level where I could understand conversations, university lectures, and news programs in Japanese (ironically, I still have problems understanding anime and drama particularly when there's a lot of technical vocabulary and loud music/sound effects and crying and yelling), and I could read most contemporary novels although my speed and comprehension weren't great. But I also had to study for it. I didn't have a problem with the reading comprehension passages, but there were lots of grammar points that I wouldn't have gotten without specifically having studied for the test.

A lot of these are things that are pretty frequent in Japanese but only in certain contexts -- when I learned "ならでは" I thought "What the heck is that, I've never seen that before" and then I started planning a vacation to Japan and it's ALL OVER THE PLACE in advertisements for high-end restaurants and hotels.

So I would say that someone who's ready for N1 is likely to be someone who reads well (not to say 100% comprehension, but 95% comprehension of most nontechnical stuff) and who reads a whole lot of different kinds of things in Japanese. And who also knows keigo.

I don't know about N2 but N1 is native Japanese. Except for maybe the listening.. that section kind of sounds like they handed the script to a bunch of robots. The words and phrases they're saying are native enough but ... robots. They are reading from a script, after all. If you can understand anime/drama and have a decently wide vocabulary the listening should be a breeze.

That having been said, it's certainly wider than it is deep. It's native Japanese (can't get much wider than that!) but not on a significantly deep or technical level. Most Japanese high school students shouldn't have too much trouble. The reading sections are often taken directly from the works of Japanese authors. Some are even taken directly from newspapers. There are technical terms and words you've probably never seen before here and there but the assumption is that someone taking N1 could make an educated guess from context because the rest of the passage isn't particularly high level.

http://www.jlpt.jp/samples/n1.html is a good peek into what it's like. It seems a little easier than the real thing, though.

In my experience N2 level was low enough that almost all native material still frustrated the crap out of me. At that point I started reading easy-ish novels but it was very slow and not very fun.

At N1 level I could read easy novels, and it was still not so fast but I could still have a bit of fun. I have a tendency to look up almost every word I don't know though, and that makes things super slow. I could read the news online quite easily however, with the help of rikaichan. But even in newspaper form it wasn't so bad. I found the reading passages on N1 to be many times harder than news stories.

As for anime and drama, it's always been a mix. At around N2 I could already basically grasp a lot of anime that was about everyday school life (even strange ones like Azumanga Daioh). At a year past N1 I still feel largely the same--I can deal with stories about everyday life in standard Japanese or Kansai-ben with high understanding. But other strange ways of talking are confusing for me (even for shows like Lupin, I have a hard time understanding what a lot of the male characters are saying a good amount of the time--which is most of the characters), and topics that aren't close to home are also confusing to me. For example, I tried playing Metal Gear Solid in Japanese after passing N1 and I found a lot of the dialogue way over my head.

I recently passed N2 without trying too hard, having read about 30 light novels worth of Japanese. Pretty sure I would have still failed N1 though, because of the listening section. Gotta work on that and I think I can pass N1 this year.

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N2 can be reached fairly easy. If you can complete Core6k, then you'll have most of the vocab that you need. You'll need to study extra grammar though. At N2 you can tackle light novels, but you'll still be doing a fair amount of dict lookup.

The biggest hurdle in getting N2 in my experience is increasing your speed. If your listening comprehension is good but takes time to process what you hear, then you'll struggle in listening. The same is true in the reading sections which have a lot of text that you need to digest fairly quickly.

N2 is not difficult to reach, but N1 will take some extra book work. From many of the people that I talked to, the biggest hurdle with N1 is the vocab you need to pack in.

Arupan Wrote:- If by "native materials" you mean books, passing JLPT LVL1 doesn't really mean that you'll be able to read one.

Trust me, if you can pass N1, you can read many native sources but if you suppose your vocabulary is about 10,000 words, you'll have to make a lot of dictionary look ups. I have been reading light novels since my vocabulary was about 10,000 and have since added 8000 more words after reading about 19 or so light novels. And if you go through Kanzen Master N2 and N1 you'll hit many of the grammar constructs but you'll still have to look up some. You can supplement grammar with the Dictionaries of BIA Grammar and various online sources.

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Arupan Wrote:

PotbellyPig Wrote:Trust me, if you can pass N1, you can read many native sources but if you suppose your vocabulary is about 10,000 words, you'll have to make a lot of dictionary look ups. I have been reading light novels since my vocabulary was about 10,000 and have since added 8000 more words after reading about 19 or so light novels. And if you go through Kanzen Master N2 and N1 you'll hit many of the grammar constructs but you'll still have to look up some. You can supplement grammar with the Dictionaries of BIA Grammar and various online sources.

One of my juniors got her N1 certificate last year but said that she still has trouble reading books.

Only thing I can think of is that she doesn't like looking up words. As you know, you need to know a ton of vocabulary to minimize dictionary lookups. I guess it also depends on what you read. I've only read the 19 or so light novels so I don't have experience with more complicated texts.

PotbellyPig Wrote:

Arupan Wrote:One of my juniors got her N1 certificate last year but said that she still has trouble reading books.

Only thing I can think of is that she doesn't like looking up words. As you know, you need to know a ton of vocabulary to minimize dictionary lookups.

I certainly think of having to look up tons of words as 'having trouble reading.' Even after passing N1, I gave up on reading at least one book (博士の愛した数式) because I was just plain annoyed at how many words I was looking up compared to how much I was enjoying the story. I've also read passages from famous books like 坊っちゃん, which is supposed to be fairly easy for natives, and I think I'd have so much trouble looking stuff in that book that it'd basically be unreadable (I can show you a sample passage if you're interested). Whereas, I'm finally reading Kitchen, Yoshimoto Banana's book that a lot of people on this forum recommend, and I find the number of look ups to be low and it's pretty easy.

Anyway, you can read almost any text if you have enough time to look up every word and grammar point you don't understand.

I didn't take the JLPT, but I had a graduation test on the N1 level, plus two essays I had to write about a graph and some survey result. I can tell you that the N1 has a lot of rather unimportant grammar points like ものだから、ものの and so on, which you will notice only after having learned them actively somewhere. Not knowing them will probably blur your understanding of things now and then, but never to the point where the sentences will become incomprehensible.

With an N1 level of Japanese, you should be comfortable with at least newspapers. Novels are always a different thing, and that's the case in every language.

andikaze Wrote:I can tell you that the N1 has a lot of rather unimportant grammar points like ものだから、ものの [...]

I don’t care about N1 as such but I can’t imagine how you could guess what ものの means in this sentence (you get bonus points for knowing what is のみ):

通路を挟んだ反対側の席には、中年のサラリーマンが座っていたので、彼が注意してくれないだろうかと期待し、「お願いだから、こいつらにひとこと注意してくれーっ」と念を送ってみたものの、彼は週刊誌ずっと読んでいるのみ。

I learned ものの at school actually. I wouldn't just guess it. As for のみ, that one's kind of self-explanatory. But that's not the point. What I tried to say was, when you can pass the N1, you should be able to understand most of what you find in newspapers and normal daily life.
Vocabulary is life-long learning of course.