Title. What grammar points do you think are harder than their designated JLPT level? For me , it has to be the てくる/ ていく pair and the affirmative わけ. Both are labelled as N4 grammar points but the nuances are unbelievably difficult to grasp and I say that as someone who has been learning Japanese for almost 4 years. They should be N2+
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I don’t know about JLPT, but I want to solve your problem.
例文：持ってくる、持っていく
買ってくる、買っていく
飲んでくる、飲んでいく
てくる is to go somewhere and do something and come back.
ていく is to do something at a near place in present.
わけ is “That’s why”
例文：”I got the game I wanted!”
”That’s why you appear to be so happy😄”
例文：欲しかったゲームを買ったんだ
だからそんな嬉しそうな顔をしてるわけね（笑）
As an intermediate stage learner, I find several forms much more complex than their basic idea. I mean when we learn something like conditional forms in Japanese, then it’s very complex/complicated, especially if we start to consider hypothetical and counter factual meanings, and how something like ところ helps with that. We can literally spend a week or more just trying to figure that out. But we can do that and have a clear answer at the end. Similarly は vs が is a more complex topic, but again, read a book about that and you are completely fine, you have a very clear boundaries where and when to use it and how it differs.
On the other hand something like の only looks very simply, but suddenly it can be used literally in 10+ different variations and sometimes you have no idea about intended meaning at all, because there are no boundaries outside of experience. Like person says いいの. Does he try to explain that he is fine? Does he try to persuade like “hey, don’t push this boundary, it’s unacceptable”? Or maybe it’s used to share bonds, simply to deliver “we are good friends” idea? There are so many different usages expressed in the same way, that we literally need to spend a lot of time using Japanese to get a feeling for that.
JLPT grammar is not taught by difficulty but by how common/frequently used it is. I thought that most of N3+ was easier than N5+N4.
My hot take is that I think the JLPT introduces kenjogo and sonkeigo (which I’m just gonna call keigo for convenience) wayyyy too early. If I had my way, basic functional, conbini keigo would get introduced at the N3 level and an actual explanation of how it all works and how to use it yourself would be N2+. For reference, keigo is currently covered at the N4 level.
My reasoning for this is that irl, if you can barely string sentence together, absolutely no Japanese person will expect you to be using keigo. If it’s truely a situation so formal that keigo is required, there will either be someone translating or Google Translate will be doing the heavy lifting, or (as is often the case with customer service situations) the speaker will just drop the keigo so that you can understand. Basically you’re expected to achieve fluency in normal speech before you’re expected to be whipping out the business keigo.
I think the reason it gets introduced so early is that the earliest textbooks (Genki and MNN) along with the JLPT were designed in the 90s. At that point in time, a lot of people interested in learning Japanese were people who were trying to do business in Japan. Therefore business language got pushed way to the front. As the number of interpreters has grown and translation software become more accessible, there’s less of a need to crash course business Japanese. Unfortunately the tests and textbook curriculums haven’t been updated to reflect this.
Sounds stupid but causative still trips me up years later, way past N4 where it’s introduced. It just doesn’t come up anywhere near as frequently as potential or passive, outside a few polite phrases. Be better than me, lock that sucker down.
は vs が is not 100% clear even much later. My N1 class asked sensei for a lesson specifically on it and we only got the questions 75% correct.
Some of the grammar points are actually just adverbs or other vocabulary and some of the grammar points are actually more like language grammar.
I’m not saying those adverbs and such aren’t important, but it does feel uneven to group them together as grammar points. Maybe “vocab case study” or something. IDK what it should be called honestly.
The problem is that these grammar points are extremely common, so pushing them to the later levels wouldn’t make sense.
Also, as far as the JLPT is concerned, you only need to understand them, not be able to use them perfectly yourself.
And what’s so difficult about わけ?
The thing is that it depends of each person and the level of comprehension that they have. If your level is N4, well, the grammartopics from such level and avobe will seem subjectively difficult for you.
In my case I’ve been studying every grammar point covered in JLPT and I can get them pretty well the hard thing for me is remember them in an active speaking context.
When I was a begginer I remember that the grammar topic that I found the hardest at that time was this one about the たら conditional. there’s a rule that says that this condition is used when the action is not completed yet so I had a hard time grsping its “feeling”.