I loved the exercises in this book. The parts that were difficult to understand were due to my own misunderstanding, and I appreciated how easy and quick it was to get through (even if I failed the practice test in the back by two points). I'm still left feeling more confident about my chances with the JLPT next Sunday.
Definitely a must have for those studying for the JLPT. I found this book and the listening ones to be my favorite of the Kanzen series.
And to note: if you're just studying Japanese and have no plans to take the JLPT, you do not need this book. This book isn't about teaching you how to read, it's teaching you how to read for a test.
Like the other N2 books, this one also contains zero English. Since this is reading practice, there is less furigana on the kanji, however the answer explanations all contain furigana.
I love how much this book explains the techniques you can use when going through the reading questions on the test. It talks about what clues to look for, why certain answers are right/wrong, etc. Really breaks things down. All the answers are in the back of the book, and also contain a break down of why answers are right/wrong. I found it to be extremely helpful, and wish the N3 grammar book had more of that.
I highly recommend timing yourself for each question, to get properly prepared for when you take the test. (I found this blog post for timing suggestions.) It's night and day to take your time versus only having a couple minutes to get the answer. It's very much worth it and forces you to get better at picking out important pieces of information faster.
I'm certainly not perfect after finishing this book, but I feel much more comfortable about the reading after this. (Not confident about passing still, but that's no fault of this book, haha.)
My one complaint would just be of the book's quality, which doesn't seem limited to just mine. (I noticed my tutor's book had the same thing happen.) The answer key in the back is more loosely placed in. My partner suggested for easy removal when studying, which would be fine if so, but not all the answer pages were properly bound together for that to happen, and it was more like tearing itself out, despite me doing my best to keep it tucked inside.
Do you want challenging lectures to verify your reading skills for the N2? Do you want to learn useful tricks that will hone your arsenal for reading long lectures? Do you want examples about pamphlets and other interesting (and challenging) topics commonly seen in blogposts or magazines?
If you answer positively to one of those questions, then this book is for you. The most challenging and complete book for studying Reading for N2. Challenging questions, fascinating topics and real life examples , I have actually seem some of the pamphlets in my daily life living in Japan, make it for an intensive and hard preparation for the test.
Don't be discouraged if you find this too challenging, as it is the best measure to infer your probabilities in the actual test. Although, I recommend reading easier books first like the Sou Matome Series before going through this. There is also a lot of vocabulary that it is far more advanced than N2 , but that you can actually infer the meaning just from the context, so it is manageable.
Overall, excellent, definitely the best book out of all the Shinkanzen Master series. 5/5
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
The style and length of passages as well as the level of difficulty of the questions were similar to the actual exam, with the only difference being that this book uses passages which have more difficult vocab than the exam. In those cases though, the meaning can either be inferred from context or are provided in a footnote.
If you can do well on the problems in this book, you will nail the exams.
After finishing this book, I tried taking the 2009 exam to see how I did with the reading section and I did ok overall regarding reading comprehension (I could still improve it though) I was a bit too tight for time though, so my objective is to read some light Japanese novels during the summer to get a higher reading speed, and go back to practise exam texts before the December exam.
Really helpful exercises to practice the basic, intermediate and advanced skills for the reading comprehension section of the JLPT N2 level. Includes useful and clear explanations regarding correct and incorrect answers.