Two days ago, I finished my first JLPT, which also happens to be the hardest one. I thought, hey, I’d taken a JLPT prep course in school, and I finished two prep books, so I should be fine for this exam right? Everyone around me tells me that I’ve been in Japan for a year, so I should pass right?
I’d like to throw an air of caution to the claims that being in Japan prepares you for JLPT N1. Certainly, if you were taking N2, yeah, but N1? You need way more work than you think. Being in Japan helps with listening, but the listening section in N1 is about office situations, announcements about politics, radio advertisements selling a product… Also, in terms of vocab, if you’re just living there, you don’t get acquainted with words appearing in N1 that often. Many Japanese people also comment that they don’t really hear about much of the grammar points in N1. So it definitely requires a lot of extra study.
An overarching comment for the exam: You don’t have time to dilly dally. So you have to be very focused during the exam. No wasting time trying to understand one word out of 500 words in a passage. No wasting time re-reading the same line over and over. This theme will come up again and again in the coming sections below.
Some thoughts about each section:
Vocab / Kanji / Grammar
There are an estimated 1800 new words to learn from N2, and those 1800 words have to be understood in context in order for you to be able to learn them properly. That means to read. Read everything. Keep a notebook to jot down words as well as the context it was placed in. Underline grammar points you don’t understand (by don’t understand – if you can’t explain why it’s there, you don’t understand it) and ask someone who does. You need to put in consistent effort. An hour each day works.
I also noticed a trend in JLPT words. They tend to come up in the news. Reading the news everyday helped me tackle the vocab and kanji section. However, I didn’t study the words as diligently as I should, so I ended up just guessing some of the questions just by vaguely refering to what I read in the news. Unless you memorize all the words, don’t expect to know the answer to all the questions.
Each question usually requires you to finish them in between 10s to 50s. Any more than that and you should probably move on. I kept to that during the test, and found myself with 15 minutes to spare, to re-check the ones that I wasn’t sure about.
Reading comprehension
There are a few variations:
- 4 short passages, one question per passage, 3 minutes per question
- 3 medium length passages, 3 questions per passage, 2 minutes per question
- 2 long passages, spend 10 minutes on one, 14 minutes on the other.
What do they ask for?
The short passages require you to get the gist of the author’s message. Therefore, read the passage first. Underline important parts of the passage that hint at the author’s opinion, the big overarching question etc. Underline even words that don’t mean anything to you on first glance because they may come in useful later. Then read the question. Compare each option with the passage to see whether it’s actually reflected in the passage. Doing it by elimination is fast, and do it as you are looking through each option. You have no time to go back and compare two options. Within the 3 minutes, 2 minutes should be spent reading the passage, 1 minute to go through each option, and a little extra time if needed to deliberate, but no more than 15 seconds.
The medium length passages always like to ask you for the meaning of certain words / phrases. They are not asking you for the literal meaning, but always the meaning in context. So don’t go through each option hoping to find an answer straight away. Instead, go straight to the text.
The long passages are the killer. You’ve probably already spent an hour or so going through a whole lot of words, and then you’re faced with a dense page of words. What should you do? Go to the questions first. Write the requirements of the question in shorthand (in the language you’re more comfortable in), next to the paragraph that the answer is situated in. Then as you skim through the passage, underline or circle the words that you think might be related. Then evaluate.
These texts are usually abstract. They usually touch upon philosophical concepts, social issues, office politics etc. I rely on Newspicks for my source of opinion pieces and special feature articles in Japanese and it helped me read these passages quickly, and still get some understanding from it. I spend about 1hr reading Japanese articles everyday, and usually tweet out my thoughts so that I make sure I’ve really understood them.
Listening
Expand your vocabulary. Hearing words that you’re not used to hearing will throw you off guard and you’ll miss out on the words after that. Of course, if the JLPT is like next week, and you don’t have the time to expand your vocab that much, then the emergency solution is to try to put the word aside and keep your mind focused on the flow of the sentence. Look out for sentence endings like 〜ません or ですが and for the word you don’t know, write the closest resemblance to what you’ve heard in romaji and add notes to it. Say for example the word is 応急措置 and you aren’t so sure what it means, just jot down oukyusochi and if there is a いたしかねます or ありませんか that follows afterwards, get it down. The questions don’t always ask you things that require you to know what that mystical word means, and so you might, just might get away with it.
Don’t zone out. I zoned out maybe… a few times? I regretted it instantly, cause that’s an almost automatic 2 marks gone each time. Stay focused. I probably should have drank some water or coffee or had some sweets.
I think listening was the killer for me, primarily cause I don’t listen to enough high level material. I read difficult stuff, but if you can’t get used to hearing them, the listening test will be difficult no matter how much you can read. There’s only like 5-10 seconds between each question, so there’s also no time to think back to what you’ve just heard. What you heard, is what you have to work with right away. So I went on a hunt for high level material and… there is this podcast called TBS Radio, and native speakers listen to this pretty much daily. Then I found this website that lists all the good audio resources for Japanese. Some cool ones include stories about onomatopoeia and classical literature, Will do this daily from now on.
There you have it. Some initial thoughts right after JLPT. I don’t know whether I’m necessarily right on this, but I’m also doing this just for future reference as well. Also, I don’t have the will to write this whole thing out in Japanese, so 申し訳ありません！
NINJA WANDERER: Tales of Travels 