If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember that I took (and passed) the level 2 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT for short) last December, and as of 2009, they are now holding the exam for levels 1-2 twice a year, instead of just once. So I’m now foolishly going to take the level 1 test next Sunday.

My preparations this time around were, frankly, lacking. I’ve been concentrating mostly on what school’s been handing me, and not so much on “my own self studies of the things beyond”, which was a major part of my life for the last year. One thing I did learn though was that preparing for the exam is all about knowing the exam — that is, knowing how it is layed out, and how well you do timewise on each part, and what kind of questions are being thrown at you, etc. I posted the results and my thoughts on each of the times that I took the test here on this blog, and while I won’t go so far as to link to the individual posts for your comparison (I doubt you’re that intrigued), I must say that my results took leap-like steps upward for every time I took one of the previous years’ exams.

This time around it’s all quite different. For one, I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail. Secondly, I haven’t prepared myself quite as well as I had — with the increase in level of difficulty, I doubt you can, in the time I have spent since I wrapped up the level 2 stuff. Last time around I did my first exam-at-home months ahead of time, and let about a month pass in between each try. The exams I took were also the real thing — 2004, 05, and 06 respectively, of the actual JLPT that people took in those respective years. This time however, I couldn’t find the book that had more than just one test in it, and most of the books I found said “level 1-2!”. Why would I want a book for level 2? I got that one already.

Anyway, so I ended up buying a book with two “pretend exams” in it, which also had commentary in the end which pointed out common mistakes people tend to do on the questions. It’s actually more useful than I thought (as you might’ve guessed by now, I took one of the two tests from that book).

In fact, I took it today. The exam is next Sunday (5th of July), and it took me this long to do this. There are several reasons for this, not all of them about my laziness. For one I’m now attending a “JLPT strategy class” (don’t know a good translation for 対策 other than that…) in which they are throwing TONS of old, real JLPT exam content at us. Thus, in hindsight, buying a real exam would have been pretty bad in the end since I’d be guaranteed to have the contents of that exam thrown at me in school, possibly before I even took it. But I digress…

Mostly it was just about the fact it ISN’T the real thing. “Even if I pass, it doesn’t mean that I would pass the real thing, since it’s not even the same guys who’ve made it. Even if I fail, it doesn’t mean anything, because it’s not the same guys who’ve made it.” So yeah, I procrastinated. But today I finally decided to do it anyway.

Results:
- kanji/vocab: 72.2% (72 points)
- listening: 71.9% (71 points — what the fuck? I usually score 100% on listening normally)
- reading comprehension & grammar: 64.3% (I knew I’d screw this one up, but I didn’t screw it up as badly as I thought I would)

Total: 271 points out of 400 points, which puts me at 67.8% and I need 70% to pass. *rip my eyes out* Yeah, that’s great.

I don’t know what was up with listening. I screwed up completely. I was totally expecting 80+% on that one, and in fact I’m counting on getting that amount on the real exam. If I had, I would’ve passed with exactly 70%. Heh. I guess I’m going to be taking this again in December, eh?