Preparation for this exam does not have to cost much. The information is free; what people pay for is structure and feedback.
Here is what is honestly worth using, starting with the sources that are authoritative rather than merely popular.
Start with the official material
The Japan Foundation publishes sample questions and learning support material for JFT-Basic, free, on its own site. This is the only material anywhere that is definitively representative of the exam, because the people who publish it write the exam.
Use it first, and use it as your reference point for what questions look like. Everything else — including this site — is interpretation.
Prometric’s pages for your country carry the schedule, the fee, the centres and the rules. For anything administrative, they are the source that binds.
Free things that genuinely help
A spaced-repetition app. Anki is free on desktop and Android. The method matters more than the app: twenty new words a day, review everything previously seen, every day.
Graded Japanese listening. There is a large amount of free A2-level listening material available. The rule is to listen daily and slightly above your level — audio you understand completely is revision, not practice.
Kana practice. Learning hiragana and katakana costs nothing but a fortnight of attention, and everything downstream depends on it being automatic. See learning hiragana and learning katakana.
A full-length mock test under exam conditions. Our free exam demo is a complete 48-question mock on one 60-minute clock, with picture-based listening, audio that plays twice automatically, and an estimated 10–250 score at the end. No sign-up.
A shorter practice test with explanations. Our free JFT-Basic practice test covers all four sections, scores you by section, and explains every answer in English, Nepali, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Burmese or Filipino. No sign-up, and it works on a cheap phone.
The per-section breakdown is the part that matters. A score tells you little; knowing that listening is dragging your total down tells you what to do on Monday.
Be careful with these
“Official past papers” that are not official. JFT-Basic questions are copyrighted. Material circulating as leaked or reproduced official questions is both legally dubious and frequently just wrong — rewritten from memory, with errors baked in. Practising against a wrong answer key is worse than not practising.
Question banks with no explanations. A bank of thousands of questions that only tells you right or wrong trains you to recognise those specific questions. The explanation is where the learning is.
Word lists presented as official. There is no official JFT-Basic vocabulary or kanji list. Lists can still be useful; lists claiming an authority they do not have should make you doubt everything else on the site.
Anything promising a guaranteed pass. Nobody can promise that.
What free material cannot give you
Two things, and they are the two that most often decide the outcome.
Correction. Free material can tell you the answer. It cannot see that you have been misreading a particle for a month, or that you are marking yourself right on listening items you actually guessed.
Consistency. No resource makes you open it in week five. This is the point at which most self-study attempts end — see can you pass by self-study for an honest account of when studying alone works.
If you find you have the material and not the momentum, the thing to buy is accountability, not more material.
A minimum viable free plan
- Kana to automatic.
- Twenty words a day, spaced repetition, weighted to daily life and work.
- Twenty minutes of listening every day.
- Official sample questions, read carefully.
- A full-length timed practice test every week in the final month, with every wrong answer reviewed properly.
That plan costs nothing and it passes this exam. The eight-week study plan is the same idea with dates attached.