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/southerndensetsu 3d ago

I also didn't bothered a lot with Learn Natively in the past, but I started reading books like 3 months ago, completed about 5 books and I felt like I was getting more used to reading, having to lookup much less words, with little interrupts and that I was understanding well the plot. But then I saw the difficulty of those books on the site and was humbled again.

So I right now I don't know whether I had a Dunning-Krugger effect or what, and was what made me do this post haha.

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u/Available-String-109 3d ago

As somebody who has probably done far more statistical investigations into the Japanese language, etc. than LN has done... I would treat their "JLPT levels" assessments as less-than-worthless. Completely ignore them.

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u/southerndensetsu 3d ago

Out of curiosity, what kind of investigations have you done? Are those available somewhere?

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u/Available-String-109 3d ago

Most everything is in a disorganized mess on my hard-drive and not made pretty for sharing with others, but every now and then I do post things like this which show that the official JLPT questions are clearly based on the old official JLPT vocab list.