JLPT N3 Grammar Checklist

N3 is the level everyone warns you about — and they are right. The gap from N4 to N3 is the widest on the JLPT ladder, because the grammar stops being about structure and starts being about nuance and evidentiality: not just what happened, but how sure you are, where you heard it, whose fault it was, and how you stand toward the person you're speaking to. This is also the level where you start reading real, unsimplified Japanese. Pace yourself deliberately; the textbook-to-native-media path and the keigo-for-work path run well as parallel tracks alongside this checklist. It assumes the N4 checklist is complete.

1. Passive, causative, and causative-passive

Three new voices that reshape who does what to whom. The causative-passive (〜させられる) stacks both and is the single most feared conjugation at N3 — but it's just causative plus passive, in that order.

2. Keigo entry

N3 is where honorifics stop being optional. You need the two elevating axes — 尊敬語 (raising the other) and 謙譲語 (lowering yourself) — and the regular patterns that generate them. This is a large system; the keigo-for-work path walks the whole thing, so use this as the N3 slice.

3. Explanatory and evidential endings

The heart of N3. Every one of these attaches to a full clause and colors how you know the content. Learn them as a family — the comparison page below is the key one.

One point of honesty about level: 〜べき ("what one should do") is placed at N2 in this guide, but the JLPT sometimes samples it in N3 reading, so it's worth a look now.

4. こと・もの・わけ idioms

Three formal nouns that, glued to a clause, become fixed idioms of decision, generality, and logic. English has nothing like them, so they must be learned as whole patterns.

5. Expanded conditionals and compound connectives

N3 revisits the conditionals for finer control and adds a set of two-word connectives for cause, standpoint, and agency. Note the coverage honestly: this guide has dedicated pages for によって, として, and ため(に); it does not yet have standalone pages for 〜おかげで ("thanks to") or 〜せいで ("because of, blaming") — treat those as fixed vocabulary for now, built on the same cause logic as ため(に).

Self-testing with real text

N3 reading is unsimplified, so the annotated N3 texts are the truest gauge. Read these and check that you can hear the evidentiality in each line:

• 駅のアナウンス — a station announcement in keigo
• ことわざ — proverbs with classical notes
• 天気予報 — a weather forecast

When the forecast's 〜そうだ and the announcement's keigo feel obvious rather than decoded, you're carrying N3.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• N3 is the difficulty spike — grammar becomes nuance, stance, and evidentiality, not just structure. Pace deliberately.
• Learn the evidential endings (そうだ／ようだ／らしい／はず) as one set, sorted by how you know the information.
• The passive-causative voices and keigo entry both hinge on tracking who acts on whom — the recurring N3 theme.
• Run keigo-for-work and textbook-to-native-media as parallel tracks, and verify on the annotated N3 texts.