For my part, I have realised that I’ll need to read more and expand my non-WK vocabulary (especially verbs, adverbs, etc.) I plan to achieve this by looking for some native material (will head to Japan in late February if you have any suggestions!) which I’ll enjoy reading (unfortunately I get bored easily by structured prep reading materials
Ganbarimashou!
Teaches my I’ll probably be all right going for N3 in the summer, if I can apply myself to studying more.
Me too, sure about my wrong answers, mostly, except for listening. Hard to remember which parts made me miss a question or two. Also not sure exactly how many answers I missed. I got -3 on both Language Knowledge and Listening sections.
I got all of those right but missed 押す instead which you see aaaall the time everywhere in Japan but I had somehow not studied it yet But at least we all made it anyway
Apart from having a study plan again and trying to not to be stressed too much because of the test, I will focus more on listening for the N3. N4 listening was harder than I thought it would be. I’m giving an audio immersion loop with a mix of easy and harder content (so that my brain doesn’t just tune it out) a try.
I’d never heard of it. Later realized if I had just done one more chapter of Minna, I’d have seen it, haha. I just decided ot had something to do with 分かる・分ける-別れる and the like
seconded. I feel if I apply myself, I can get a decent amount of the grammar points just working through Minna no nihongo (though I haven’t looked into it too much yet). I’ve got book 3 (中級 I) ready to be cracked open. And with WK kanji basically study themselves, but listening exercises need a more focused aproach, this time around, I think.
Learned that:
-my listening skills are just dreadful, lol
-my reading comprehension skills are pretty good but I need to be able to read faster. I ran out of time near the last two passages of the reading comprehension section and had to fill out some bubbles randomly at the end, which was frustrating because at least with the practice materials I almost always got the questions right when time wasn’t a factor. Hopefully this will be easy to improve with practice.
The only vocab I didn’t know on the exam: うら
Now it’s permanently drilled into my brain.
In addition, definitely should work on grammar, N4 tricked me because all the questions more about verb modifiers instead of grammar points like ~ので、~たら、ETC. I should also listen to natural Japanese more and not just practice exams which are slower and easier.
Another point is for me not to rely on practice exams as a means to decide I’m ready. I aced all the listening practice exams and tests but the real one was so much harder.
Also, while I didn’t do well, I basically fell into a depression ball for a week after the exam because I was ‘100% sure’ I failed because of listening, so I should probably work on not crashing mentally after a presumed loss.
(At least I was prepared for actually failing, so prepared I was calm UNTIL I realised I passed)
During the test (before knowing the score) I already learned that my listening is weak. And I knew it was weak, but N5 is supposed to be weak right? It’s the lowest level, so of course I’m not going to understand natives all the time. But no, I learned I’m below-standard weak relative to everything else and need to focus on that until it catches up to the rest.
From the score, I learned that the test is supposed to be hard. This is not the kind of test I’m used to, where I can get a 95-100% with a little bit of effort and feel great about it. I felt like a failure, got a 61% (111 of 180 scaled score), and that’s all A’s. So I guess I learned not to panic if it seems hard.
Passed the N4. I’ve been working in Japan for ~half a year now. Predictably, my listening and reading results were great. But my grammar and vocabulary skills were not. I will try for the N3 in July, but I think it’s going to take a lot of dedication and actually sitting down with a textbook (something I haven’t done in a while now…)
I do wonder about those rankings at the end of the resultpage what does they say exactly? I failed the N5 with only 52/180 points. And yet I got B B C at the end. I‘m not reqlly able to interpret those.