JLPT 2022 thread(Results out now!)

Are you going to take it in July? N1, I assume? Are you even in need of studying anything?? I mean, you should be all set with kanji, vocab, grammar, reading, no? And you’re probably well-prepped for listening from voice-acted VN‘s?

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I signed up for N2 :joy:

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What level are you going for?
Ah I just saw good luck :joy:I’m struggling just on n4 but if I put effort in I think it will be fine :smiling_face_with_tear:
令和4年4月30日(土) 13:34 Iinchou via WaniKani Community <notifications@wanikanicommunity.discoursemail.com>:

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Yeah n1 in july.

Mmmm, I don’t know really, to be honest. I had a pdf of all the soumatome まとめ実践問題 and I did alright on them, getting around a 90% for the 250 questions there were total (didnt do the reading section, and just the other 3). I’m not sure what that necessarily translates into test wise though and leebo said usually the practice questions are easier. There were a few words I didn’t know, and obviously reading comprehension doesn’t necessarily mean you will do good on the types of questions they have, but its also not like you need a high score. I think I have a decent chance at passing without studying for it, but I’ve never taken a jlpt so idk what to expect.

I personally don’t consider voice acting in vns or jp subbed anime to count as listening. I also skip a lot of voice lines because I read a lot faster than the characters say it in the first place, and when I read ahead im ignoring the audio ofc. Excluding passive listening, I dont even know if I had 10 hours total of active listening practice before coming to japan 6 months ago, so it was pretty weak. Still is, lol.

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Not that great, but it’s only been a month and some since I started. To give an example my bunpro reviews have taken over the majority of my review time/count. Had about 80 of them yesterday.

Nearly covered all the grammar points shown in SKM N2. I’ll be letting that rest and maybe focus on other areas while improving over the next month.

Guess in terms of progress I’m 40-50% there. It’s not as much sink or swim as much as before, but yeah still somewhat confusing!

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Hm, don’t know about the Soumatome questions but I always thought that the Shinkanzen Master (grammar) questions are often a bit more difficult and trickier than the real ones. E.g. on JLPT you usually don’t get questions where you are asked to differentiate between super-closely related grammar points, or where they give you different grammar points to choose from, but the one that would fit best contents-wise is connected in the wrong way so that makes the answer invalid. SKM asks questions like these all the time :joy_cat:

True that. My biggest pitfall is that I sometimes start interpreting too much :grin: while they usually aim for something that’s written in the text fairly directly.

I can recommend that you look at real JLPT example tests, e.g. those that are linked here, to accommodate yourself with the question types (they are always the same). Especially for listening, the conversations tend to be pretty unnatural - usually they make sure to use all options in the conversation, but they contradict themselves or retract their statements, and in the end they say something like はい、分かりました!without ever repeating what they agreed upon. :roll_eyes:
Also there are some questions where you listen to a longish conversation and only get the question afterwards, so it’s good to know what kind of answers they are typically aiming for. On top of that, just listening to something without losing focus for a full hour is a challenge in itself ^^ If you need more practice material for listening, you can find lots on Youtube - just searching for “JLPT N1” should do the trick.

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Thanks, I appreciate the link!

Yeah there were a handful of questions like you described in the practice questions I did for listening. They were kinda annoying. If worse comes to worst, I can just hope the other two sections carry me close to the 100/180 or however much it is. Isn’t there like a minimum score per section too? I guess I just need to make sure I can clear that.

For the jlpt workbook, is it supposed to correlate 1:1 to the test? That is, someone who gets 120 on the workbook should expect a 120 on the actual test, for example? Or is there no scoring on the workbook.

I think that depends. It’s for sure not as tricky as in some of the English certificate exams. I still remember that already in FCE or later TOEFL the reading comprehension questions were occasionally quite tricky. But at least the answers were consistent - either something was stated in the text or not, no half-guessing.

There is a YouTube video about Yuta trying to take the N1 (link) and he blazed through the test (duh), but wasn’t 100% sure about some answers in the reading comprehension section.

:joy_cat: I see we’re talking about the same thing here :wink:

Yeah, you need 19 (out of 60) on each section (reading, listening, the rest), and then you need to reach the overall score which is 100/180 for N1.

The one that I linked above? Yes, it looks exactly like the real test, layout, explanations and all. (including the elevator music during the break :joy_cat:)

That’s where the preparations get a bit tricky :grin: The scoring is not determined up-front like for many other tests. Instead they score the participants of that year so that the overall test outcome of each year is sort of comparable. This is done because the upper levels are important for many people (for job search etc.) and so they want to keep the difficulty level of the test the same across all years. That means if they accidentally include an unexpectedly difficult question, then this question will not get as much weight as the others (or something like that, I forgot how it works exactly, but it’s a scientific method, you can read about it online if you’re interested). Also they might occasionally include experimental questions whose scores don’t end up in the actual grading and who are just included for the researchers to see how the test-takers fare with them.
But just looking at how many questions you got right and wrong should already give you a kind of indication of how well you are doing with the test.

I would expect any Japanese native who graduated from middle school to be able to do that tbh. (Sometimes I hear natives say that N1 is supposedly very difficult even for them, but I don’t really think so.)

Haha, I remember I took the N2 mock test last summer with the forum group, and @Myria took the test together with me out of solidarity, and she got everything correct except for one reading question. She then checked back with a Japanese friend and he agreed with her and not with the sample solution :joy_cat: :woman_shrugging:

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That’s my hope as well :joy:
I still absolutely suck at listening (despite putting some effort into it) so N2 listening might be shooting too high for me, but if I somehow manage to not fail it, the rest should be okay-ish. Reminds me of the time when I was doing the TOEFL listening section (during the exam) on a full bladder and that was my highest scoring section despite getting a bonus sub-section (a TOEFL thing) at the end. The trauma erased any and all memories of that part of the exam from my brain :joy: .

From the sample test questions I’ve seen, I think you’ll do fine on the reading, vocab and grammar sections.

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I’ve been studying a bit here and there since March, and am now going for daily. (It’s not happening :sweat_smile:)

Still, I found out kanji and vocab is probably my weakest subject, so I’m focusing on that rn with SKM 漢字. I originally thought it’d be listening, but I guess learning kanji through reading only makes you good at recognizing kanji in context. Who’d have thought~
Still, I should probably also fresh up on listening before the test. Oh well, 2 months left, should be fiiine. :upside_down_face:

I don’t know what it is about the JLPT that makes me prepare so much. I’ve never studied like this for any other test. :joy:

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Lmao, yeah, if I am gonna study I wonder if it would be more effective to just practice the other sections to try and carry myself. I think I’ll do fine, but there were some things I’ve still absolutely never seen on the practice one I did. There was like 下火 which I’ve never seen in my life and appears only appears in 9 light novel series on jpdb.io (1%). Leebo also mentioned some stuff being words youd need to watch the news to know, and I’ve never watched the news in japanese.

I do wish there was some way to see roughly what a score on the practice test would have translated to or something, though. Not knowing how they score makes it hard to judge.

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Ah yes, that’s actually true. On the N2 practice tests there was also a couple of “common” words I’ve never seen before, but I noticed there is a strong bias towards words from news reports and sports. So if you’re into baseball, for instance… :joy:
(insert WaniKani baseball jokes)

What helped me a bit was fervently reading NHK articles on politics. But then again, it feels kind of unfair if the JLPT measures proficiency by how much of a 社会人 the test taker is.

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Yeah, its unfortunate but I can’t blame them for having a wide variety of words (the word for semiconductor also came up???) and its more 自業自得 on my part that I’ve only stuck to narrow contexts and am only learning rare words nowadays as a result. The only word I’ve learned in the past month that had the n1 tag on jisho was 長 which I learned today actually lol. The rest is crap like 誅する and 房中術 that probably wont show up. Probably.

I’ll give the practice test nicole linked a try though and see if theres any easy things I can improve on sometime next week or the week after that if I have free time at work.

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Not feeling confident. Started studying at the beginning of the year but that’s only a because I get about 30 mins of study a day so. Focusing on listening questions at the moment and I will start the practice papers I have in June.

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Aiming to take N2 in December (I would have probably taken N3 in summer if it was offered here but alas). I’m hoping to finish the bunpro N2 grammar points and WK by the end of the summer and then focus on reading/listening and more grammar practice through textbooks. Maybe use anki for the vocab that isn’t on WK? hm hm. N2 has always been my main Japanese goal so really hoping I can hit it this year and then just use Japanese to consume content so I can start studying Mandarin because I’m insane I guess

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Not so bad, if you consider that I don’t actually expect to pass N2 this july. I do take the exam so I can see what are my weak points (I expect grammar) and I will work on them to make sure I pass in december (cause I love wasting money). I am quite confident with reading, I practice N2 reading and it’s going okay and fast enough. Which is quite funny -and paradoxal- as I am really slow when it comes to reading a real book. I guess, in a N2 text I don’t really care if I understand the details, as long as I understand the theme and most of the text. But with a real book, I do want to understand each line of it. Getting the general plot isn’t enough.
For listening, not optimistic nor pessimistic. I am going to listen to N2 exam for the next months, but I already hate it. No choice I guess.

Anyway, let’s all do our best.

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I got the impression that it’s not a language test but rather a test to filter out ‘alien’ moral standards :joy: If you know how Japanese wants you to think you can guess through it rather comfortably without knowing to much.

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Thank you for the link. I was concentrating on solely the grammar book from SKM and I have to say it is misleading. I was doing worst in the grammar section of the real test today :no_mouth:

In my impression the grammar asked is quite different from the content of SKM and now I decided to change my strategy. Maybe there is too much content in the SKM series? I can not imagine how long it would take to seriously go through all the books and at some point I bought another textbook ‘The Best Complete Workbook’ from the Japan Times. It claims you can work through it in 12 weeks, however, I think I will give it a try this time…

kotoba quiz bot has grammar questions too if you want lol. gn1 is n1 grammar

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