Shin Kanzen Master JLPT N4 Reading Review

Shin Kanzen Master JLPT N4 Reading provides a comprehensive set of tasks designed to develop the reading skills necessary to successfully pass the JLPT N4. It offers a carefully structured approach to practicing Japanese reading, progressing in stages to build confidence and ability.

The content is divided into two main sections: skill training and a mock examination. The skill training section includes a variety of fundamental exercises featuring different types of texts such as emails, explanatory passages, and news articles to improve the learner’s reading comprehension through consistent practice.

You can read more samples from the book on the publisher's website .

Shin Kanzen Master N4 Reading is quite a unique book in terms of what it teaches students. In this case, it’s better not to review the book itself, but rather to provide a list of some of the unique things it covers.

Conjugation Stacking

One unique feature of Shin Kanzen Master Reading is that, in the opening chapters, it presents Japanese conjugations as an equation. It’s an approach I haven’t seen before. Typically, Japanese conjugations are introduced as patterns, such as Verb-ます＋なさい, for example. Here, however, the full extent of how conjugations are stacked is put to the test. Conjugated verbs are given, and the student must then add elements (a, b, c, etc.) from a tense key to determine the meaning (past tense + volitional + change, etc.). It may sound a little confusing, so it’s best to check the example below!

雨が降っていたので、出かけたくなくなった。

出かける　
a.      出かけたい　（　）
b.     出かけたくない　（　＋　）
c.      出かけたくなくなる　（　＋　＋　）
d.     でかけたくなくなった　（　＋　＋　＋　）

Even beyond JLPT prep, this is a great way to practice conjugations and tackle some of the difficulties students often run into in Japanese. After all, conjugations can get pretty long!

How to Break up Japanese Sentences

Another useful reading skill the book introduces is teaching students how to break up longer sentences while reading. It provides handy lists of particles and endings that typically signal natural breaks in a sentence. This helps students chunk sentences into smaller, more manageable blocks.

How to Identify Descriptors

One big difference between Japanese and English is the sentence order. When learning Japanese, it can be quite challenging to figure out where a noun’s description begins, especially when the noun itself hasn’t even been introduced yet.

For example, where does the description begin in the following sentence?

父は２０年前に買ったカメラを今も使っている。

The book helps students practice this by highlighting the noun that’s being modified in the sentence:

父は２０年前に買った[カメラ]を今も使っている。

It then asks students to identify which nouns and modifiers are being used to describe the highlighted noun.

父は２０年前に買った[カメラ]を今も使っている。

Understanding how this works is essential for Japanese learners, since it also ties directly into tense. Mixing up the noun modifiers here could lead a student to think the topic of the sentence is that the father bought a camera 20 years ago, rather than correctly understanding that he is still using a camera he bought 20 years ago.

Conditional Reading

Another thing this book teaches is how students should understand sentences based on their role within a larger paragraph. This is a fairly typical approach in language study, but it isn’t something you’ll find in textbooks like Genki. As a result, it could easily be an exam technique that some self-learners miss.

Shin Kanzen Master Reading helps students practice this skill by providing sentences with multiple-choice answers where each option is grammatically correct, but only one fits the context. Practicing this can go a long way toward boosting reading confidence.

For example, if the preceding sentence is:

母は日本料理が食べたいと言いました。

It is important to look out for key works in the sentence to accurately follow the train of conversation that follows:

（ a ）を食べようと言いました。 a =（すき焼き、ハンバーガ、ステーキ）。

All answers here are grammatically correct, but based on the subject being wanting to eat Japanese food, the answer must be すき焼き.

How to improve your Japanese Reading

After practicing the skills mentioned above and others in the book, students are expected to be able to fully break down more complex sentence structures than those usually found in beginner-level books.

While grammar is, of course, important, grammatical questions are often presented as isolated sentences. This approach can cause comprehension issues for lower-intermediate learners, not because they don’t know the grammar, but because of how they approach reading.

The book addresses this by having students break down entire paragraphs, looking for the signals they have learned. They learn to identify contextual links between sentences, determine which nouns the word あの refers to in each case, recognize sentence breaks, and more. By the time students complete this book, many of these skills will become instinctual, taking their Japanese learning beyond simple grammar drills to engaging with text as naturally as they would in English or any other language.