The JLPT is on an exponential scale
The JLPT being on some sort of exponential scale is something that I’ve heard about for a while, but never really had explained to me at length. This link seems to make some sense of it, but, like the highest rated comment underneath it says, its hard to still consider the JLPT being written toward an exponential scale of difficulty. Zedrdave says “You realise that learning word 5000-10000 is considerably easier than learning 0-1000 for practically any foreigner. All these words are (mainly) compounds of the same 2000-some kanji, many of them are variants of each other (何か→何か的 etc) and once you are past a few thousands, it’s really hard to encounter a completely unintelligible word (sure, you will not know its exact meaning/nuance, but you’ll be able to infer a lot more than a beginner would).”
I think zedrdave is right, but even before reading his comment I thought that when you know enough Japanese to pass level 3 or 2 you can really start reading lots of stuff in Japanese like manga or news or whatever. While this isn’t really “study” time it certainly is practice time and lots of things can still be learned from whatever you’re doing in Japanese. This is why when teek says that understanding the JLPT system is a little scary at first he’s being a little alarmist. When you watch Japanese tv or read in Japanese you’re putting in study hours, but it doesn’t suck because you’re having fun. You don’t even realize the amount of study time you have put in because you don’t even count it that way.
It is good to know what kind of time you will have to put into studying for the JLPT, but it is also important to understand what the quality of that time will be like, which is something that I feel teek fell short in considering.
Nicholas' Nonsense 