新完全マスタ 日本語能力試験N3

I'm using this book to review and refresh vocabulary, and also familiarize myself with the question structure. The book is structured as follows: Each chapter introduces 2 lists of vocabulary (each about 10-15 words) selected by topic or other characteristic (e.g. adverbs, onomatopoeia, ...). They're presented as short collocations with a translation of only the word. It is encouraged to look up the words elsewhere. Then there are each 4-5 short fill in the blank questions followed by 2 pages of vocab exercises which mostly practice usage.

There are often questions that ask you to replace a phrase with the suitable vocab, multiple choice and fill in the blank. Sometimes the collocations used in the questions are not the ones listed in the vocab list so it's necessary to look it up (e.g the vocab list mentions 退屈な仕事 but the question is a. 退屈する or b. 退屈にする (the correct answer is a. 退屈する). There are 21+8 vocab chapters, 5 short practice tests and 2 mock exams.

There is no guarantee that the vocab presented here will be in the actual test, but the book does a good job imitating the type of questions. At first it annoyed me that they quizzed different collocations, however it is anyway useful to be looking them up in an external resource. I would definitely recommend to study comprehensive vocab lists with Anki, Renshuu etc., or by reading, to complement your JLPT study.

Not all N3 words are contained in this book, but useful to learn important collocations

After finishing learning all the words and collocations contained in this book, I started doing N3 mock tests. On those tests, I found words that weren't in this book. However, it was good enough to get me 85% or more on the vocabulary section of the test.