Hey, just wanted to leave a spreadsheet here for any high-schoolers planning on taking the AP Japanese Language & Culture Test. If you don’t know about taking it, I would recommend it if your college accepts the credit. For the University I’m going to attend, a 5 on the AP test would translate to four semesters of credited classes.
Here’s the spreadsheet. Column A is the ~400 Kanji required by the College Board, found on the AP Japanese exam page. Column B is the Kanji found in Wanikani through level 20 (possible to attain by test day, May 9 2018, if you are already a few levels in). The green column is the set of AP Kanji that are covered in Wanikani (up until level 20), and the red list (only 20 characters) is the list that you may have to study on your own to know the 400 Kanji required for the AP Exam.
Good luck on the test!!! I took it last year and ended up getting a 5. The reading and listening sections aren’t too hard, but I would practice the cultural presentation part at least once a week for a couple months before the test. Last year it was about the geography of Japan I think. Also, this website (AP Japanese Language and Culture Course – AP Central | College Board) has practice questions and general information.
If you have any questions, you know who to ask!
By the way, are you self studying or learning in school?
Thanks! I’m studying with a tutor outside of school. Since I haven’t actually done a formal Japanese class, I’m not exactly sure how well prepared I am. We have covered pretty much the entirety of “Nihongo Dekimasu,” found here. I have also been learning the grammar found in Tae Kim’s guide and Genki I+II, and plan on moving on to tobira very soon. For Kanji, I’ve been using Wanikani. Hopefully I should be OK on the grammar and Kanji. Did you have to do any additional vocabulary practice in addition to your courses (assuming you took Japanese in high school?)
Also, what do you think of the “Strive for a 5 AP Japanese” resource for sample questions? We’re going to run out of the samples found on the collegeboard site (not to mention we can’t find any multiple choice samples anywhere besides this book). Would you recommend any other resources to help with AP Japanese? thanks.
I did drop the request into the [STATS SITE] thread around a week ago, but I’m also pretty sure it’s a bit too niche to go through the trouble to implement on the site. I didn’t want to wait so I decided to make this spreadsheet instead
I studied with a tutor outside of school too
We actually used the Strive for a 5 book and it was good, lots (looots) of practice questions that were pretty close to the College Board ones. I never did any multiple choice samples from it, but I expect they would also be pretty close to the real test? It’s worth buying for sure.
Whether or not you should do extra vocab practice depends on your level, but I don’t think Wanikani would be enough by itself. On my test there were words like 地球温暖化 and 飼う which I don’t think Wanikani up to level 20 covers. Have you been understanding the vocabulary in the practice questions?
I would highly recommend absorbing Japanese media, because it can help with vocabulary and listening, while also getting you used to native sentence structure (very important for conversation/text chat sections). Also, it’s fun.
There are huge Anki decks of vocabulary words, maybe check those out? I think they have a really wide range of levels.
Yeah, sometimes I can’t figure out the word because I don’t currently know the Kanji. I may be a bit behind, only being level 5 by the 4-months-left mark. I have made some progress through the core 6000 deck but have paused progression to focus on other things… maybe it’s time to resume it! I can generally understand the readings but sometimes I have to guess what words are because I either don’t know the kanji or actually don’t know the word, but hopefully that can mostly be sorted out before I even reach level 20.
what was your primary source of vocab? An anki deck from words found in articles?
If you can learn all the kanji before the test (which you definitely can), you can probably figure out ~90% of the words that show up, definitely enough for a 5.
I mostly picked up vocab through Japanese media over a couple of years (not a very good primary method). By the time I took the test, I knew 95% of the words I saw and the rest I could sort of guess. I don’t think it’s the best way for you though, because of your timeframe.
What I’ve been doing lately is an Anki deck with words from books I read, but limited to words with kanji I already know from Wanikani. I would really recommend it, and I’ve been seeing the words I study pop up over and over again. Obviously, you would just add words with the AP kanji.
Maybe try graded readers and NHK easy. http://www.ask-books.com/tadoku/en/ is a good graded reader site, and there are tons more resources out there.
The AP exam pretty accurately reflects real resources, so they should help.
Also, to save time, yomichan has a feature where you can directly import dictionary entries into an Anki deck. You should check it out
I can’t remember if I responded in the stats thread.
I’m currently holding off on making changes to the stats site until I can get all of my scripts (and the stats site) converted to Wanikani’s APIv2, since they’re eventually going to disable APIv1.
I’m glad you got your spreadsheet going! I took several AP classes in high school, and it made a huge difference in my college credits. The college scheduled class sign-ups by number of credits earned, so I always got to pick the best classes before they filled up, and it also freed up some time to take extra electives since the AP scores gave me credit for some required core classes.
I think I took the AP Calculus, Chemistry, and English tests. (It was a long time ago!)
Thanks for your response! Luckily the laws in my state require public state universities to accept all scores of a 3 or above as some kind of credit, so it honestly feels dirty to be able to enter college with so many credits. Since there isn’t too high of a bar to meet for most of my actual class-related AP tests, I figured I would try to get a 5 in the Japanese exam because you get more credits the higher you score.
Nice job on the site, by the way. I check it pretty much daily
