Hey all, I barely passed the December 2022 N3 and last month, I went to Japan for the first time and spent two weeks there.
Overall, I was both disappointed and pleased with how far the N3 got me (note I’m talking purely about my skill level – at no point did I ever show anyone in Japan my N3 certificate lol).
On the one hand, some might say that N3 is enough for anime and conversations with normal people. As someone with a 31/60 on the listening section, this is categorically not true. I never got the chance to, nor do I likely have the ability to, hold a long everyday conversation with anyone in Japan. It’s not like I was surprised at my lack of skill by the time I was on the ground in Japan and talking to people, but I did expect to have been able to do so by the time I got an N3 back when I first started studying. So I am a bit sad that that expectation was off.
On the other hand, wow does real immersion make a huge, gigantic difference. When I first landed I had to ask people to repeat themselves slowly two or three times for me to get what they said, and people would often switch to English before I put together what Japanese words (that I already knew) actually corresponded to the sounds I was hearing when they were speaking Japanese earlier. But by the end of the first week, my conversation skill was enough for dining in restaurants, shopping in malls, speaking to hotel staff, and small talk with tour guides 100% in Japanese. It was incredible how comfortable I felt talking about non-trivial upgrade options or specific observation site locations, and it was also incredible how much nicer people treated me when I was speaking Japanese with them vs when my wife would talk first in English. It was absolutely 100% worth it for me to get to this level of skill, and it really made me feel like my work has finally paid off.
To conclude, if you’re like me and you grinded almost nothing but Anki all the way to around N3 level, you probably have the same mix of okay vocab/grammar but extremely shitty listening comprehension. If so, I highly recommend greatly increasing the amount of listening practice you do on a daily basis. I’m still not sure what’s the best way to study that, but I definitely could have used more of it before my trip. But at the same time, don’t despair if you’re going on a trip without that. You’ll be fine – trust your subconscious brain and enjoy the huge comprehension gains!
I had a similar experience. I first went to Japan when I had just passed N3 back in 2015. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite enough to be a competent adult, but it also wasn’t so poor I didn’t understand anything around me.
Some things I realized on my first trip there: Katakana is far more essential than you’d think, and conversely, Hiragana is far more useless as well. There are lots of 丁寧語 and 敬語 structures that will get thrown around even in the most common situations.
But then I returned to Japan in 2019, and I was already an N2 by that point (for a couple years already), and it was a completely different experience. My Japanese had improved a lot by then, and I was solidly making good every day conversation with all sorts of people. The leap was really noticeable too, with my main limitation being that my kanji knowledge was still somewhat lacking for a functional adult. Some people even complimented me asking how long I had lived in Japan and whatnot.
So the main takeaway, is that it’s normal to struggle a lot at an N3 level, but at the same time, you’re really not that far away from being able to use Japanese comfortably. Just a little more and you’ll get there for sure!
Thanks for the helpful advice! Already looking forward to my next trip, hopefully will have my N2 by then