Tag: JLPT

My JLPT N1 Test Results for 2023

I finally got my results back from the JPLT N1 exam I took in December 2023, and the results were not surprising.

I failed, as expected.

However, the results were not what I expected:

CategoryResults
Vocab / grammar28 / 60 (pass)
Reading7 / 60 (not pass)
Listening26 / 60 (pass)
Total Score61 / 180 (100 needed to pass)

I had expected to fail listening more so than reading, the listening section was very stressful, and yet the reading section felt somewhat easy. Clearly, I underestimated things. After reading about people online who passed or failed the JLPT N1, it’s clear that the N1 assumes full adult literacy. If you can’t read a novel or two in Japanese, you will not pass the reading section. I haven’t reached that level yet, and the results aren’t that surprising then.

That said, the total score to pass has to be 100 out of 180, so even if I passed the reading section, my overall score was still pretty low, and probably not enough to pass.

Needless to say, it was a good effort, but my preparations all around were insufficient.

Will I take it again? This took considerable time, effort and willingness to go the distance, and so I have to think about whether I want to try again. Since I don’t need the JLPT N1 for work, it’s more of a personal project, and may or may not be worth the cost.

Going to think about this for a while. 🤔

Failing the JLPT

So, I took the JLPT N1 exam last weekend, and unless I got lucky, I am fairly certain I failed the test.

Wait, you might be thinking, didn’t I give up on the test this year?

Well, yes and no.

I did become discouraged and stopped studying for a few months. But after spending the summer in Japan, I realized how much I enjoyed studying Japanese, and I felt that if I put off the test for another year, I’d just keep procrastinating my test preparation. It made sense to press the issue by registering to take the exam. This was kind of a last minute decision, and with all the personal chaos happening in fall, I neglected to mention it in the blog.

The problem is that even though I work better with a deadline than without, the reality of parenting, work, and Fire Emblem got in the way, and I made less progress in my preparation than I would have liked. I spent a lot of time reading, and did some mock tests for the reading section, and that did help.1 However, it was clear that my vocabulary and listening skills were still insufficient. I banked too much on just reading essays.

When you look at online discussions, it’s clear that by the time you get to the N1, you need to have a general adult-level literacy in Japanese, including listening. People who read and watch Japanese media in general tend to fare a lot better. I have done some of this over the last two years, but clearly not enough.

That said, it wasn’t a complete failure. I definitely could see that my study and reading skills had helped, and there were questions I could answer comfortably without much effort. So, it’s not a question of study method, so much as time put in. I need to do more of the same, and probably on a more frequent basis. Listening, as always, is the hardest skill, but now I have a fresh baseline in my mind, so I know what level of conversation or content I should focus on. As with reading, I have plenty of books at home to finish, but I will try to broaden my subjects to more than just the 2-3 things I like to read (Buddhism and the Hyakunin Isshu). I can assure you that neither subject appeared on the test. 😉

Amen, Mercedes. Amen.

Assuming I don’t pass this time, which is likely, I feel positive enough about my progress that I will likely try again next year. I will not commit to anything just yet, at least until I’ve had a chance to see my test score next month or so.

Until then, I’m just taking a much needed break, focusing on playing karuta and of course more Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

1 I was able to manage my time pretty well during the reading section, pacing myself, and even had a bit of time to go back, review, and fix a couple questions. The last time I took the exam, I was definitely rushed, and did poorly in the reading section.

JLPT N1: Swallowing a Bitter Pill

Despite some early signs of success, it’s become rapidly clear that if I take the N1 level of the JLPT exam this year, I will get crushed. My scores in taking the mock shorter-length essays were pretty good (hence my earlier confidence), but my scores in middle-length essays were not very good, and I got nearly 0 points when testing myself on the long essays. Coupled with continued difficulties with listening, it’s obvious that I would most likely get a poor score. Even if I did manage to pass, it would be a just barely, and hardly something to be proud of.

As you get to the higher levels of the JLPT exam, the amount of preparation time greatly increases, as the complexity of the language being tested also increases. In my past experience, I could pass the N3 with about 6-12 months of study, reading manga, etc. I passed the N2 in about a year after that, but just barely (it wasn’t a great score). By the time you get to the N1, you need about 3000 hours if starting from scratch, but even if you have prior language experience, it’s safe to assume you need a subset of this depending on your background.

For a working parent not living in Japan, I cannot always get 1 hour a day consistently, so that means my progress is slow. I have definitely made progress this year, as I can see that all the new vocabulary I learned is paying off, however, what really matters is whether you can read adult material at a near-natural speed, and if you can follow adult conversations without too much headache. The essays, especially the longer ones, require you to read a lengthy essay, sometimes philosophical, sometimes business related, and pick up the main points, and answer the questions in roughly 5-8 minutes. Doing this in your native language is hard enough, now do it in a foreign language.

Similarly, if you’re not able to keep up with adult conversation, adult podcasts or TV shows, you’ll have trouble keeping up with elaborate (sometimes artificial) dialog in the JLPT exams.

You cannot really cram for these things. Memorizing vocabulary is one thing, but actually comprehending a foreign language takes considerable time, and it’s obvious that for the N1, it will take years. I am proud of the progress I made, and I am proud for keeping my focus all these months, but unfortunately, it’s just not enough. I need more time.

So, regretfully, I will not be taking the N1 exam this year. Instead, I have a stack of Japanese books at home: manga, essays, history books, computer books, etc, that I plan to slowly read through over the next year, and I have a long list of Japanese language podcasts I use to keep up with my listening. If I don’t build up natural reading skills and listening skills, there’s just no point in taking the exam at this level.

Maybe next year will be a different story. I am worried about losing focus over the coming year, especially since I still dabble in learning Ukrainian, plus other projects, but I’ve been wanting to pass the JLPT for a long time, so I think that desire will carry me through. If not, I guess we’ll find out.

P.S. My supposed retreat hasn’t been going all that well in general either. More on that later. So much for taking a break from blogging.

JLPT: Listening, the Big Headache

Listening in general is one of the most arduous skills to learn for a foreign language. After I started studying Ukrainian for fun, I soon found out how little I could actually follow in actual conversation. It has been pretty demoralizing.1

On the other hand, I have been studying Japanese for since the late 2000’s, and married into the culture, so I do have some conversational skills, but for level N1 of the JLPT exam that’s still not quite enough.

Case in point: in the months leading up to the 2022 exam, I have started using mock exams and other study guides, but to my horror I have so far been getting about 40% – 45% correct on the listening sections which is just barely a passing score. So while I may have a shot at passing the JLPT, it’s far from certain.

There’s no rational way to cram listening skills either: you either grasp the conversation, or you don’t. And the only way to improve your grasp of Japanese conversation is to get used to it through constant, constant exposure.

It’s like stretching a muscle. You can’t force it or rush it, you have to ease into it over time. Stretching a little at a time, until looking back you can stretch it much more than you used to.

Another way to look at is is from a classic Roger Zelazny story, Doorways in the Sand.2 At one point, the main character Fred, is listening to two aliens having a conversation about him in their native language:

At some earlier time I had slowly realized that the thing that would most have surprised them probably surprised me more. This was the discovery that, when I gave it a piece of my divided attention, I could understand what they were saying.

A difficult phenomenon to describe, but I’ll try: If I listened to their words, they swam away from me, as elusive as individual fish in a school of thousands. If I simply regarded the waters, however, I could follow the changing outline, the drift, pick out the splashes and sparklings. Similarly, I could tell what they were saying. Why this should be, I had no idea.

Language is weird, but I definitely have the same experience when listening to Japanese language podcasts: if I focus my mental energy on trying to discern one sentence, I lose track of the rest of the conversation. So, it’s more about getting used to the conversation as a whole, and as any music student will probably tell you, it takes time to tune your ear.

1 I haven’t stopped learning Ukrainian, but it has forced me to re-evaluate my methods a little.

2 Out of all his books, this one is definitely in my top 5 favorites.

At Last, I Have A Shot at Passing the N1

While I’ve been blogging a lot recently about Buddhism, Japanese history and Ukrainian language, etc, I have been quietly studying for the JLPT exam in the background. 😎

As of writing, the 2022 JLPT exam in the US will be held in early December (as is usually the case), and so with only 4 and one-half months left, I’ve decided to switch gears and focus on taking practice tests instead. The two most difficult sections of the JLPT are (depending on your background) reading comprehension (dokkai 読解) and listening (chōkai 聴解).

The last time I tried the N1 level of the exam, I wanted to see if I could pass without practicing. I wanted to see if I had attained enough exposure to Japanese language by then to simply pass it naturally. I didn’t. The JLPT exam, starting with N2 and especially the N1 aren’t normal conversational Japanese. You’re being tested on various subjects such your comprehension of business, government, education, even philosophy.1 Day to day exposure to Japanese language helps to some degree, but you as these are specialty topics you need to also practice and study them.

In any case, I broke out my practice exams for reading and listening, both available from OMGJapan and other fine Japanese goods stores, and started taking practice tests.

My mind initially panicked when tyring to read the Japanese essays. Some of the words that I had studied had been forgotten, some words were unfamiliar. However, I fought my initial panic, and worked my way through the practice essays one after another. To my surprise, when I checked my answers, I got 75% correct, which is a passing score.

I was thrilled. I realized that with further practice, I have a genuine shot at passing the JLPT exam, level N1. The reading that I have been doing over the year almost certainly helped, as did the vocabulary study (even if I haven’t even finished half the study book).

However, I also realized that I still have further preparation to do: learn the words I didn’t know, get smoother at reading, and learn NOT TO PANIC. That will come with repeated practice, I believe.

1 I was surprised to find an essay on what defines a peaceful death in the mock exam (I doubt this is in the real exam, btw). Clearly the author hadn’t watched Conan the Barbarian:

JLPT: Why Language Exposure Not Memorization Matters

The challenge with learning a language is less about the grammar, which you can learn in a matter of months, but gobs and gobs of vocabulary which you must learn, and internalize. This is especially hard when you have to consider nuances: when things are said, how word X differs slightly from word Y and so on.

Courtesy of Pexels.com

However, if you’re studying for a language exam, such as the JLPT certification exam for Japanese, this means you have to learn a lot of vocabulary in a shorter, more compressed span of time, and chances are you’ll be rushed and unable to really learn the word properly, in context.

For example, while building up my flash cards for the N1 JLPT exam, I learned the word 迫力 (hakuryoku) meaning force or impact. That kind of makes sense, but even in English that’s a bit vague.

Then, later, while watching a certain Japanese documentary on Buddhist temples, the host said in Japanese while visiting the famous Nio-mon Gate (仁王門) at one temple: 「迫力のある仁王門ですね」

This sentence is pretty basic, but shows a nice native example, in context no less, how the word 迫力 is used. I then looked up the word in my favorite Japanese dictionary, and sure enough other sentences used the same pattern: 迫力のあるX (“X has a lot of impact, or intensity”).

The point here is that if I had not seen an actual example of this being used, I would not have learned the proper usage and context of this word. So, memorizing just isn’t enough. Even though it takes longer, you will not really master a language, including Japanese, if you don’t take the time to absorb words through media and most important in context. Then, you can make flash cards using the sentences you saw, in order to properly practice new information.

JLPT N1: Setting Study Limits

As I mentioned in my previous post, as I build up my vocabulary for the JLPT exam, N1 level, the number of flash cards I have in Anki has exploded. In the last two months, I have built up more than 1200 cards in my Anki collection through studying vocabulary guides and reading Japanese manga we have lying around at home.

Because Anki is a spaced-repetition service (or SRS), the more you guess a card correctly, the less it appears. That benefits you by allowing you to focus more on cards you struggle with. But when you learn a lot of new vocabulary in a short span of time, even with SRS, daily practice can be a nightmare because a large number of cards can come in “waves” all on the same day. And if you don’t review those cards, more will soon pile up.

When you open your SRS tool and have 120+ cards to review and 20 new ones, and you are a working parent, this gets pretty discouraging. Plus, I am only one-sixth of the way through my vocabulary guide so this amount will grow a lot more in the coming months.

To deal with this madness, I learned a feature in Anki that lets me limit the number of new cards and cards to review per day:

This feature has been very helpful for me because it gives me a reasonable limit to practice daily, even though it slows down my progress. The idea is to break up the study into smaller, discreet chunks of time. It also smooths out “waves” of flashcards overwhelming me when too many of them are all due on the same day.

The question then is how much is the right amount? I’ve play around with a few values so far: 4 new cards + 45 reviews, 6 new cards + 60 reviews, 3 new cards + 30 reviews, and so on. In my experience, I found that smaller is better, so I’ve settled on 3 new cards a day and 30 reviews. If I have a slow day and more free time, I can do the Custom Study feature to learn extra cards, but if I complete my 30 reviews that’s good enough.

The difference in the long-run is small, and it’s mostly psychological, but smoothing out your study into small daily efforts helps in the long-run, I believe.

Starting up the JLPT N1 At Last

It’s been ten years since I passed JLPT exam, level N2, and after doing some careful thinking, I think it’s time to prepare to take the N1 exam. Last month, the family and I went to the local Kinokuniya bookstore to pick up some new manga for my son (who has become an avid reader in both English and Japanese), and I picked up some much needed test study material.

I spent a number of recent years debating whether to invest the time for the JLPT, level N1, given how much time and practice it would take. If you test for the lower levels of the JLPT, it can typically take somewhere from 3-6 months, and based on personal experience the N2 took about a year. The N1, being the most difficult, probably takes 1-2 years.

However, since my regional test site only hosts the test once a year, I will probably shoot for December 2022, which would be about 14 months away.

We’ll see how it goes.

As to why I finally decided to take the N1, it’s a long story. Suffice to say that I really miss going to Japan yearly since the pandemic started, and I realized that I needed to focus my creative energies on something longer-term and not just goofing around with amateur writing projects and such. I like having a concrete goal, so this is a nice kick in the pants, among other benefits.

Further, the N1 represents the one hurdle I never finished, and after taking some mock tests, I feel that I have a realistic chance to pass if I spend adequate time to prepare.

So, here goes nothing!