Actually, I knew I’d failed all along. I’m actually surprised I got that high.

Next time Kalle will get the opportunity to (with any chance of success) try this test: approximately 2015.

Yes, I do indeed feel like a fucking loser. Now back to your regularly scheduled (albeit seldomly updated) blog.

This time I actually did my homework. I won’t fail this time around.

It’s the first time I go by myself to the test center. I was surrounded by friends the first two times, and I’m not entirely sure what impact this will have on my focus and such. Not to be mean to my friends or anything, but I have a feeling I will just end up being more concentrated over it, but it may also be that I lose some energy due to not being mutually “pumped”. We’ll find out soon enough (Sunday, two days from now).

After that I only really have ‘get rid of a ton of shit’ and ‘get on the plane(s) home to Sweden’ left, really.

It was nice though. It went better than expected, in particular the reading comprehension part. The listening comprehension part was a climax of sorts on my latest “trend” of simply not getting anything. It was idiotically easy there for awhile, but unfortunately I somehow lost that streak a few weeks ago. Today’s listening comprehension part was probably the worst one I’ve seen yet.

The rest was more or less as it always is, so it was just a matter of recognizing the example sentences and matching them to the appropriate word. I’ve wanted to say this for a long time, but the JLPT exams are in all honesty rather idiotic. People who “properly study for them” simply memorize the examples and answer based on what they memorized. That has nothing to do with one’s level of proficiency. Especially not when the answers are all limited to 1, 2, 3, 4.

In any case, I finally have the exam behind me. I can now focus on taking things a little easier for awhile (I seriously got strange in the head there for awhile), after which I will slowly but steadily pick up the rather heavy rock that I dropped awhile back (called “kanji studying”) and bring it to the goal line once and for all. It won’t even be hard, it will just take lots of hours. I can take the exam again in December, knowing all the grammar I need to know, and getting my kanji proficiency up to where it should be.

Beyond that it’s just a matter of feeding my brain with vocabulary. Reading more than I have done so far, watching TV more often, etc. I’ve learned (the hard way) that vocabulary is simply a matter of keeping your brain occupied with words. Doesn’t really matter which words as long as they’re not all words that you know. Repeating or “studying” vocab is mostly a waste of time. As a friend of mine said, you can sit and try to learn some set of words for the longest time, and then you just ignore them and suddenly a month or two later (during which you haven’t seen or heard said words even once) you just know them. You know their “essence”, beyond their meaning in whatever happens to be your language of studying (mine being English).

Then again, today’s exam was at a level where if I passed, I won’t be surprised, and if I didn’t pass I won’t be surprised, but if I pass or fail with a big margin I will be. I feel quite surely that I’m “at or around 70%”. I’ll get back to you regarding that once September rolls around. Unless I get like 50%, in which case I might just say “I failed. Leave me alone!”