Did diagnosing your weak points and pacing actually help your N5, or was it just hours?
TL;DR: self-studying for N5 in December. instead of just grinding Minna and Anki, I sat a full timed mock to find my actual weak spots, and it changed what I focus on. is diagnosing weak spots and pacing actually worth it for N5, or does it just come down to hours?
for months I was studying N5 wrong and couldn't see it.
not lazy wrong. I put in the hours. Minna no Nihongo, Anki, head down, every day. the trouble is that grind never tells you if you're learning the right things or just the comfortable ones. you feel productive and have no idea if you're actually getting closer.
then I read on here that you should sit a full mock now and then, just to see where you really stand. so I tried one under real conditions. (I used the unagibun sim, found it through the renshuu server.) full timing, the works.
the score was fine. the breakdown was the gut punch. it barely cared about my grammar. what it flagged was how I take the test. I used basically all my allowed time and still missed questions, which isn't rushing, it's slow processing. and my weakest spot wasn't vocab, it was reading comprehension, actually pulling meaning out of longer passages. (dropped a screenshot of the timing breakdown if anyone's curious.)
so I stopped grinding random decks. now I do timed reading drills and redo sections against the clock to fix the pacing, plus targeted review on the exact weak points it surfaced.
here's where I want a gut check. I'm self-taught, the test is still months out, and I haven't sat the real one. for those who've passed N5, did diagnosing your weak spots and timing actually move the needle, or did it come down to raw hours in the end?