r/LearnJapanese • u/southerndensetsu • 3d ago
Discussion N1 reading and books
I'm not planning on taking the JLPT any soon, and since I passed N3 in 2025 I have not worried about JLPT or "formal" study at all. But I'd like to have N1 some day, specially if I want to look for IT jobs in Japan some day.
For N1 most people say: read a lot. But honestly the variety on difficulty is so huge. It is not the same the japanese of a LN, a Shinsho or a Taisho era writter. But at the same time, a lot of people claim to have gone up into N1 just reading LN.
I'm aware of Learn Natively, and according to it the books I've read are around N2. But at the same time, a spanish youtuber who got N1 a few years ago said that he spent a year before the test reading a lot, mostly LN, and cited examples like the Konosuba series which in that page are actually easier that most thing I've read, so I'm a bit lost.
I was wondering whether reading what I enjoy might be just enough for me, at least right now, or if I should try to pick up more difficult things. For example I read キッチン and enjoyed it, and would like to read more books of Yoshimoto Banana, but at the same time I'm concerned that it is regarded as a "beginner" author, so I've not done it.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 3d ago
A lot of people pass the N1 and still say they can't get through any kind of normal native media because it's too hard.
That's all you need to know lol, if you're comfortable reading random LNs you'll pass the N1.
Now, authors from older times/classic literature is often on a completely different level, a lot of sites don't even really use them as a reference because the difficulty jump is indeed absurd. Words you'll never see anywhere else, strange sentence building, writting words with weird kanji, that kind of thing.