Book review: Preparatory Course for the Japanese Language Profiency Test

Note: Throughout this post I will use "JLPT" to refer to the "Japanese Language Proficiency Test".

These are 2 books I want to recommend: 実力アップ!日本語能力試験2級 文法編 and 実力アップ!日本語能力試験1級 文法編 (note: I could not find an English link for the second book). I would like to recommend the entire series of these books, but especially the ones focusing on grammar for the JLPT2 and JLPT1.

In fact, I am not exaggerating when I say that it was these two books on grammar that got me through the JLPT2 just 3 months after coming to Japan, and through the JLPT1 a year later.

Look, studying grammar is pretty boring (at least to me it is), isn't it? You learn some grammar, use it a few times in an exercise, and the next day you have forgotten all about it. At least for me, this is the truth. Moreover, many grammatical structures in Japanese look alike. An easy example is 「～てから」 and 「～たから」. Every student of the Japanese has confused these 2 a lot of times during his or her study, I am sure of it.

Wouldn't it be great if a book told you "do not confuse this with...", or "this looks similar to ..., but it differs here and here" ?

The 2 books I want to recommend here made things a bit easier. For a number of grammatical structures (focusing on what you need to know to pass each level of the JLPT), they give some example sentences, and shortly explain the meaning of the structure. They also give some structures with a similar meaning, even warn you for cases where you could confuse it with other structures which look the same but have a different meaning, and explain cases which often use the structures in question.

Here and there in the books there are short tests to check if you remembered what you learned.

I also love the size of these books: small enough to take one with you wherever you go. Small enough to read even in very crowded trains. I read these books on the train everyday in the months before the JLPTs, maybe just 20 minutes a day. That taught me more about Japanese grammar than the Japanese language classes I was taking at the time. Now I am still using them as a reference every now and then, or to refresh my memory.

I love this series of text books. In total I have bought 7 of them, covering grammar, reading, and Kanji drills. (There are also books for listening exercises, but these I didn't buy so I can' evaluate them.)

Strongly recommended.

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