I’ve been studying using quite a few different resources lately, but for the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on TRY!N2 and the kanji book of Soumatome N2. As of this writing, I’m currently at Chapter 3 of the former and Chapter 6 of the latter. At my current pace, I see myself finishing both of them in the next few months. Below are my thoughts on each book up to this point:
**TRY!N2**
I had finished the N3 book more than year before starting this one, so I was already familiar with the format. The book starts each chapter with a brief reading on a specific topic, then proceeds to list out all the relevant grammar points from that reading. The explanations are both in English and Japanese. You get to practice each grammar point individually, followed by a larger JLPT-style test at the end of every chapter.
While I generally like the style and simplicity of this series, the N2 book specifically makes liberal use of N2-level vocabulary. Although it is not explicitly stated by the authors, the book assumes the reader has already covered N2 vocab, so if you are coming straight off of N3, right from the beginning you expect to run into a \*lot\* of unknown words. I’ve been keeping track of these as I go, but in retrospect, I feel like I should have upped my vocab game before starting this book. It’s not a big deal and I’m still progressing fine, though.
I would still recommend this book as a first book on N2 grammar, especially if you’re familiar with the TRY series and appreciate its teaching style.
**Soumatome Kani N2**
There’s a lot of different opinions on the Soumatome series as a whole, but I will say the kanji books have consistently been great in my experience. Every chapter has a theme, and each lesson with that chapter will have its own subtheme. Lessons starts with a simple question by showing you a kanji and asking if you can guess its reading. You will then go through the actual lesson and find the answer organically. There’s on average about a dozen kanji introduced per lesson, for a total of 700+ characters for the N2 book.
The book has 8 chapters in total, but I will say the first 4 or 5 chapters appeared to have a noticeable number of duplicate kanji I remember studying for N3. For a while it very much felt like a review of N3 kanji, but I also noticed how many of those kanji are introduced with new readings (and therefore new vocab). In any case, I’m using this text in combination with an Anki deck and I think that’s how it works best; I can’t imagine studying from this text without Anki. I must say it has definitely improved my kanji ability. When I’m done with the kanji book, I’m considering looking into the vocab book as well.
I think that’s about what I have to say so far. I’ve only really started digging into N2 material recently, but these two books have been a good way to ease myself into everything. I am also slowly going over Quartet 2, which incidentally contains a lot of overlap with material, reinforcing my knowledge in the process.