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!”

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?

So…

Wee! I apparently passed at 1 point below 70%. Thank god this wasn’t the level 1 test since that one requires you to succeed at 70% of the questions (70% is 280, I got 279…!). Luckily this was level 2, so 60% was the requirement.

Crossing my fingers for you others who took the JLPT that same day! Let me know how it went!

Then again, I’m comparing the outcome of “the real thing” to the exams I’ve taken at home, and I can only say there’s quite a big difference, even though I put in the effort to make it as similar as possible (time restraints etc. were all the same).

What had me worried before the exam was whether I’d end up not actually hearing the listening part, speaker-wise, but that wasn’t a problem at all. I may still pass, but that’d take some major luck. If I fail, I’ll be disappointed but not “you’re shitting me” surprised.

I bought two onigiris and one triangle-sandwich, two bars of chocolate and a bottle of tea on my way there, and realized that I should’ve bought more food and less chocolate.

There is a supposed 50 (I think?) minute break between the 2nd and 3rd parts but for some odd reason, we had to listen to the 12th problem one more time and so we only got something like 25 minutes of lunch-break. I wanted to eat more but I didn’t have anything with me and going to a store was out of the question (everyone else goes to the store on the lunch break so the lines are too long).

In any case, that’s it for 2Q, on to 1Q. I decided from the beginning that I’d take this one once and then move on, no matter how it went. With a bit of luck I might pass after all, so that’s what I’m hoping for. Will know “in the middle of February”.

In the morning, knowing me, I will get very little studies in and will simply doodle about doing nothing special, then dinner with the girlfriend in the evening, and then to bed early since I get up early. I will hopefully be tired enough from waking up earlier than usual on Saturday that I’ll fall asleep despite nervousness etc. Yeah, I’m pretty nervous about this in the end. I have this one shot and I paid money and all that so I don’t know how I will react to this all ultimately. I don’t think I’ve ever prepared for something for as long and as intensively as I have for this exam, so I guess it’s no wonder I’m antsy.

Anyway, wish me luck. I won’t actually know whether I pass or fail until February (…!) but I bet I’ll have a feeling whether it went well or not. The others of you out there — Thomas, Mark, Shiho, and all the damn Swedes zerg-rushing Kyoto, new and old friends alike, good luck on Sunday!

The test is divided into 3 sections – a kanji/vocabulary section, a listening comprehension section, and a reading comprehension section. The third section is by far the most difficult of the 3, and it comprises 200 of the 400 total points, that is, it is half the test.

In any case, my results in the individual sections below:

1. Kanji/vocabulary: 57/65 correct (87.7%) => 87.7 points
2. Listening comprehension: 22/27 correct (81.5%) => 81.5 points
3. Reading comprehension: 36/59 correct (61.0%) => 120 points

Thus I scored 288/400 points, which puts me at 72%. With a 12% margin and almost a month left of studying, I think this will go okay. Now my biggest enemy is, of course, relaxing TOO much because I think it’ll be a breeze.

I think back on when I in May-June asked one of my teachers if she thought I’d be able to pull off the Nikyuu test and she said “Um… probably not, but you should give it a try!”. I’ve come a long way since then, if I may say so myself.

Keep your fingers crossed for me on December 7th, regardless. I’ll update (on this topic) again once I’ve done the 2004 test in about 3 weeks and again once I’ve taken the exam. I guess it’s almost time to start focusing on Ikkyuu (Level 1) at this point. That won’t exactly be detrimental to my Nikyuu exam or anything, so why not…

The kanji/grammar part was surprisingly difficult, but I ended up figuring the right answer out on a lot of the questions anyway. The listening comprehension part was shockingly easy. I had heard before that the listening comprehension part of the JLPT is quite easy, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this easy. The reading comprehension was a bummer, because as I was doing it, a big argument ensued outside my door, which I knew instantly would cause me to not be able to concentrate and thus fail.

So I stopped the timer, put the book aside, and walked outside to see what was going on. That’s another story. When I returned, I was still on “problem 1″ though, and it took me nearly 40 minutes to finish it, out of the 70 minutes I had at my disposal. Once I moved on, things moved a little quicker, but I still ended up running 20 minutes over before I had gotten to the last question in the test.

Because of that I of course failed the test. The required percentage is 60% and I got 56%. If I hadn’t gone 20 minutes over (i.e. if my answers to the questions I didn’t even get to when the time was up were to count), I would have gotten 70%, which would have passed me with a 10% margin.

Thus, my #1 problem right now is reading speed, though I can’t help thinking that I would’ve done a better job if I’d not been disturbed halfway thru.

Some stats:

- Part 1 (kanji/grammar) — 65/100 points.
- Part 2 (listening comprehension) — 74/100 points.
- Part 3 (reading comprehension) — 85/200 points
(Part 3, if we ignore the fact I ran 20 mins over — 138/200 points)

Total: 224/400 = 56%
(Ignoring 20 mins overtime: 277/400 = 69.25%)