At the lower levels, JLPT reading fails people who do not know enough words. At N2 and N1, it fails people who know plenty and do not finish.
Those are different problems and they need different preparation. Work out which one is yours before choosing a strategy.
The structural thing to know
At N1, N2 and N3, reading is a separately scored section out of 60 with its own minimum of 19. It can fail you on its own, no matter how strong your listening and grammar are.
At N4 and N5, reading is scored together with language knowledge in a combined 120-point section, so a strong grammar performance can carry weak reading.
That change at N3 is one of the reasons the N4-to-N3 jump feels larger than expected. See JLPT passing scores.
If your problem is vocabulary
You will know, because whole sentences are opaque rather than merely slow. There is no reading technique that fixes this — technique gets you the points your vocabulary has already earned.
The answer is unglamorous: spaced repetition, daily, for months. At N3 and above, vocabulary is the bottleneck for nearly everything.
If your problem is time
This is the N2 and N1 story, and it is trainable.
Time every practice session. Untimed reading practice trains comprehension and does nothing for the constraint that actually fails you. If you have never practised reading under a clock, you have not practised the exam.
Read the question first. You are looking for something specific — the author’s opinion, a reason, a contrast, what happens next. Knowing what you are hunting for before you start changes how you read.
Do not read every word. Long passages carry structure: the first and last sentences of paragraphs, connectives, and contrast markers do most of the work. Learn to find the argument rather than process the text.
Watch the connectives. しかし, ただし, つまり, したがって, 一方. These signal where the meaning turns, and questions cluster around exactly those turns.
Triage. If a passage is going badly, answer what you can, mark something for the rest, and move to the next passage. Two passages half-done score worse than one done and one guessed.
Never leave a blank. No negative marking. A guess is free; an empty bubble is a guaranteed zero. Fill everything in before time is called, even if that means bubbling the last four at random.
Building reading speed
It is built by volume, over months, on real material:
- N3 — short articles, blog posts, practical texts
- N2 — newspaper articles, opinion columns, business writing
- N1 — editorials, academic and specialised prose
Read every day. Twenty minutes of authentic material beats an hour of exercises, because exam passages are drawn from real registers and graded readers are not.
And read some of it without a dictionary, tolerating uncertainty. Getting the gist of a text containing unknown words is the actual exam skill. Looking up every word trains a habit the exam will not permit.
The practice that tells you the truth
Full past papers, timed, by section. Then ask one question about the reading section specifically:
Did I finish? If not, how many questions did I not reach?
Unattempted questions are the clearest possible signal, and they point at pacing rather than at Japanese. Candidates who conflate “I scored badly on reading” with “my reading comprehension is weak” study the wrong thing for months.
A note if you are preparing for JFT-Basic instead
JFT-Basic reading is a completely different object: short practical texts — notices, messages, signs, advertisements — with no sectional minimum and one clock across the whole test. The strategy barely overlaps. See the JFT-Basic reading section.