Can I pass N2 in 3 months?

14 comments

1. Your question is a little bit too detailed. Try to be more vague.

2. Doable but impossible. Might pass or reached the minimum. U can try the mock exam as much as u can and u realized oh my god, there’s too much to cover.

3. It totally depends on your skills. Although realistically, from a N4 and you having to go through kanji again… it does not look likely. Even if you have very very intense classes. If it’s all done by self study it will be even tougher.

   Best of luck

4. Possibly, but i dont recommend it lol

5. You cant.

6. Pretty unlikely especially if you have to go through kanji. The people getting that kind of progress usually already “know” it because they speak Chinese etc. Or they know grammar structures because Korean etc.

   Also doesn’t help that the amount of hours doesn’t equal amount of info actually properly learned and absorbed. Language learning doesn’t quite work like that.

7. Looking at a table like [this one](https://cotoacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/563809d0d0c0955d06784fbe788840fc729c1987.png), which is not very scientific but it’s the “best” thing we have on hand, it takes about 2200 hours of study/language exposure to pass N2.

   Assuming your language ability didn’t deteriorate since a year ago, from N4, we can mark you at the 787 hour point (= hours to pass N4).

   So you’d need 2200 – 787 = 1413 hours

   Let’s take 6 hours a day for 3 months: 6 * 30 * 3 = 540 hours

   With 8 hours a day it’d be 720 hours.

   That’s less than half the hours you’d need (statistically speaking) to pass.

   So unless your level right now is significantly higher than the level you were at when you passed N4, I think getting to and passing the N2 level in 3 months is not going to be likely.

8. Do you also speak Chinese or Korean? If not, I’d set 1 year as a more attainable goal assuming you’re still at a beginner level.

   6-8 hours/day isn’t good for retention, especially if your goal is proficiency vs passing the test.

9. I wrote up a moderately detailed post being somewhat encouraging, with the thesis being that this would be an interesting challenge mostly limited by your ability to sustain the mental fortitude of actually studying hard 6-8 hours per day.

   But then I did some calculations. With the public estimates of ~1k kanji for N2, ~6k vocab for N2, and ~1.5k vocab for N4, you’re talking about learning ~72 new vocab + kanji per day. That’s really hard to imagine. I find 10 new words per day reasonable (total about 45 minutes of studying), and 20 uncomfortable. I think scaling to more than 70 would be unbearable. And then you also need to study grammar, and practice reading and listening.

   The only way I see this being possible is if you have extreme natural language acquisition ability (not just gaman), and you do some off-the-wall strategy like total immersion. For example, see [this excellent post](https://web.archive.org/web/20220128074822/https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/sedr0m/how_i_got_180180_on_n1_in_85_months/) about getting from zero to N1 in 8.5 months with effort ranging from 4-10 hours of immersion per day.

10. There is quite a jump between N3 and N2, it may be possible but it won’t be easy.

11. Short answer: no

    Long answer: nooooo

12. I was one told, I couldn’t fit a whole empanada in my mouth.

    It’s not possible they said.

    I tried anyway, and made it happen.

13. No lol

    If you were already N3, I’d say it was possible with hard work but not from N4. Especially if you aren’t strong with N4 kanji…it only gets harder from there

14. Hard to say, but probably difficult. N4 like pre-school level, while N2 is higher elementary school.