Without further ado, here are some more JLPT N2 materials I've been using.
新完全マスター聴解
This book - one in a series focusing on different skills, for various JLPT levels - focuses on listening skills. It comes with two CDs full of listening exercises. The accompanying textbook includes sample JLPT-style questions, explanations of different listening problems with practice exercises, and transcriptions of all the audio.
The listening here is not purely listening to full JLPT-style audio conversations, although there's plenty of that. There are shorter exercises focusing on typical listening problem areas, such as spoken contractions (-te iru = -teru, -te shimau = -chau) and pronunciation, identifying whether a speaker is, say, asking permission to do something or asking the listener to do something, agreeing or disagreeing, etc.
All explanations in the textbook are purely in Japanese (with furigana etc). They shouldn't be too difficult to follow, unless you really are just moving on from N3 and didn't pass N3 very strongly. In any case, good reading/vocab practice. Overall, it's a good book, I feel.
日本語パワードリル（N2文法)
As the title suggests, this book consists of lots of grammar practice questions. There are a few pages practising specific types of grammar (sentence endings, particles like 'ni', 'o', etc') but mostly the book consists of 30 10-minute sections, each with a variety of question: 10 general grammar questions, 4 'put the words in order' questions and 3 'read this passage and choose the right language to fill in the blanks' questions (all question types that appear on the actual JLPT).
There are no grammar explanations in this book, so this would work well in conjunction with another resource, eg, the Internet or a grammar textbook, so that you can look up the ones you didn't know or understand.
This book is useful for grammar drills, but it would be more useful when you have a good bit of vocab/kanji behind you. The reason is none of the words in this book have furigana, and there may be sentences you can't understand if you can't read all the words in the sentence. As someone with rather weak vocab, I find I often don't know which answer is correct because I haven't understood one or two crucial vocabulary words in the sentence, rather than the grammar. I suppose this is good practice for the real test. In any case, even if your vocab is weak, there are loads of grammar questions in this book, so you should be able to find lots of questions that you can read!
Shadowing 日本語を話そう 中~上級編
This is not a JLPT-specific resource, but it's designed for intermediate-level students wanting to improve listening, reading, speaking, etc through the technique of shadowing. Basically, this involves listening to short but full-speed Japanese conversations (and you can read along in the book). You listen a couple of times, then try, eg, repeating after the speaker, or reading them at the same time. It has different types of listening (casual conversations between friends, polite conversations in public settings, etc) and has a mixture of 'intermediate' and 'advanced' level listenings. I like that all the conversations have Japanese transcriptions and English translations.
Personally, I find shadowing a bit boring but I suppose that's the point of having each track so short - each page/track is just one or two minutes long, with several conversations on each page - so you can do short bursts of it. It's a good resource, but I haven't used it much, because I did find it somewhat repetitive.
日本語能力検定試験Ｎ２［読解・言語知識］対策問題＆要点整理
Catchy title, huh? This is another book in a series designed for JLPT practice. As with a lot of practice test material, it's better to start using it after you've been levelling up for a while. I mean, because the reading texts approximate what you'd find on the actual JLPT N2, you probably won't be able to understand much of them if you're fresh out of N3. As with the test, it's broken into different types of reading - shorter texts, longer texts, comparing two texts and finding information in 'real world' texts, and a practice test at the end. There are lengthy explanations of the correct answers, etc. (Frankly, I don't find the explanations of the answers any easier to understand than the actual readings. If you didn't understand the reading properly, you'll probably be all the more confused after struggling through the explanations.)
実力アップ!日本語能力試験N2読む(文章の文法・読解)
This is another N2 reading practice book; again, it has a lot of texts with sections similar to those on the real test. As with the previous reading resource, this book is good once you're starting to near N2 level and can benefit from reading texts that are similar to N2 level. A nice feature of this book is a 'quick reading' section with furigana over kanji, but most of the book doesn't have this support (and so is more like the real test). As I said in my review of N3 materials, I had the N3 version of this book and liked it.
I like this reading resource better than the 対策問題 reading book I just described (although the other one has the benefit of a practice test in the back). I think this one makes a little more of an effort to teach you something, rather than just presenting lots of practice; along with the texts there are useful expressions and vocabulary lists - with English translations, even. Another plus is that it includes grammar reading tasks, like on the test, where you read a short passage and must fill in the blanks with the appropriate grammatical expression.
中級を学ぼう―日本語の文型と表現82 中級中期
All these JLPT-specific skill books I've written about are useful for working toward JLPT, and many of them are really good, but they are pretty boring if they are your only resource. Also, some, like the reading practice texts, are not so useful for the gradual process of getting yourself from N3 level to N2 level - they're better when you're close to N2 level already and want to practise more. Therefore, it's quite nice to have an actual general-use textbook like this one, which covers a variety of skills.
I finished my previous textbook (テーマ別中級から学ぶ日本語, which, for simplicity's sake, I'll just refer to from here as 'Japanese by Topic') and I've gone onto this one. I had started to get bored with 'Japanese by Topic' (despite praising it highly in my previous JLPT post) by the end; because of that, this new one seems great by comparison. Like 'Japanese by Topic', this is a general study book - not specifically targeted at JLPT students but containing a mixture of vocabulary, grammar, reading and listening.
Comparing the two:
- this book comes with CD included, so it's better value for money
- this book has furigana with kanji - so you can work through it more easily without a teacher helping you - but the furigana are written in red, and there is a red sheet provided with the book. This means that if you want to try to read pages without furigana help, and test your kanji reading skills, you can easily slip the red sheet over a page and immediately hide all the furigana
- this book has new vocabulary threaded through the readings and grammar sentences, but doesn't present you with huge, daunting lists as in the other book
- my impression is that this book starts from a higher level than 'Japanese by Topic', but finishes at a slightly lower level than that book does ('Japanese by Topic' takes a huge leap in difficulty through the book)
- this book has more focus on grammar - more practice questions, example sentences, etc
- this book includes a variety of reading passages, some longer, some mere paragraphs long, which can make a nice change of pace
(Update: I've just written a post on my other blog specifically about the different N2 grammar textbooks I've used - most of them not reviewed on this page.)
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