JLPT listening is easy?

Japanese Language Listening
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That didn’t happen to me when I took the test. No issues hearing (from a technical POV) that I can remember.

I think the bigger issue for JLPT is fatigue. The listening section comes last in the day. At that point, you’re at peak fatigue. It might not be the most taxing test section, but it’s easy to loose concentration for a second. And since you only get 1 shot at listening to each question, it’s easy to get stuff wrong for that reason. ^^;

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I took N1 last Sunday and listening felt really easy compared to the vocab and reading section (grammar didn’t feel very difficult either).
From my personal experience, I can think of two reasons:

  1. I lived one year in Japan and it was way harder to try to understand what was going on around me at that time (I went to a music training camp with Japanese students from uni and didn’t understand what was going on for the whole week haha) → completely personal reason, I had a lot of listening training
  2. since they play the audio for us, even if we don’t know the answer we just skip to the next question and it feels less overwhelming than the first part where we have to decide ourselves when to give up

But yeah in the end it depends on personal experience with Japanese listening and how well we do on listening exams in general (the girl sitting next to me fell asleep!!!)

Also I agree with everyone, they should really let us use headphones…

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I’ve lived in Japan for three years now, and took N2 two years ago. At that time, I felt absolutely terrible about the listening portion of the test, but when I got my results it ended up being half decent at a 33.

Last Sunday I took N1, and I was stressed like no other about it. That didn’t end when I started and the vocabulary section was incredibly harder than I was expecting (from everyone I’ve talked to, that seemed to be the general consensus this year). That being said, the listening did feel pretty easy outside of a couple questions that I missed a word or two of.
The area I live in has a notoriously hard to understand accent that is often jokingly simplified to “speaking with your mouth closed” due to how hard it is to understand what in the hell people are saying, even to Japanese people from outside the area. Going from 3 years of that to clearly annunciated scripted conversations felt like an absolute cakewalk.

So living in Japan is definitely a huge plus for anyone actually putting effort into studying. That being said, I agree that headphones should be the standard as the only thing ever repeated is a single section where the question is given once at the beginning and once at the end. One stray sneeze or coughing fit can ruin a question.

I also don’t see why it can’t be taken with a computer at a testing center with automatic and instantaneous results, but that’s a separate issue…

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That’s because the results are not instantaneous :slight_smile: Instead, the results are scaled based on the results of all test takers in that iteration, in order to mitigate small changes in difficulty from iteration to iteration. Therefore the full cohort is needed before grading can happen…
You can read more about it on this website, especially in the PDF linked in point 3.

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Shoot, right. I always forget this.

Not that I don’t appreciate the curve, but I wonder if this couldn’t be improved to allow for more convenient testing procedures.

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Also, at some point, something needs to be sent by fax, otherwise it wouldn’t be truly Japanese.

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I think the difficult things about the listening section (N3) isn’t the content, but the format, at least compared to when I took my Spanish certification exam (DELE).

It felt like 90% of the listening for the JLPT is listening to people talk about future plans or giving directions in a deliberately confusing way. The actual things they’re saying aren’t difficult, but it’s almost like a logic puzzle to figure out what the first thing the person should do after the conversation is. You can only hear the dialogue once, so you really have to pay attention. You’re also not really given time to read the answer choices before the dialogue plays, so you’re kind of racing to process all the information. There are also sections where the answer choices aren’t written in the test booklet, so you jut have to remember what the question, dialogue, and answer choices are, which I found to be mentally taxing in a completely non-linguistic way. On the flip side though, the answer choices were usually direct quotes from the dialogue and you weren’t really required to synthesize information.

In contrast, when I took the Spanish certification test (DELE) you were given time to read the answer choices and could listen to the dialogue twice. However, the content was more difficult and required you to apply your language knowledge more. For example in a dialogue, A would say that they’d been in the hospital because they “got an injury on the job.” The question would ask why A was in the hospital and the correct answer choice read, “A had a workplace injury.” So rather than just pulling the correct quote from the dialogue, you had to actually apply your language knowledge in a more holistic way to recognize synonyms, etc.

So I would say the JLPT listening section is a difficult test, but not necessarily filled with difficult Japanese content.

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