Updates on preparing for JLPT listening section

So, as part of my year-long effort to prepare for the JLPT3 language proficiency test, I have been turning my efforts lately toward listening. I studied the vocab and grammar already, enough that I am familiar with the material. Not proficient, just familiar. But listening still proves to be the most difficult skill to master, and I believe that relying on just vocabulary and grammar alone will not guarantee a good passing score.

On my last practice test, I finally reached a passing score, which helped increase confidence a lot, but I found that my listening score, while much improved, was still below the 60% passing mark. Ideally, all sections should pass with 60% or higher, otherwise you might be at risk. That’s my opinion anyways.

So, I continue listening to Japanese streaming media at least a few times a week.¹ This is hard to do though on weeks when I am on-call and crazy problems come up, but overall, I have tried to stay consistent. I think the listening here helps because it gets my ear used to hearing Japanese, without having to strain myself.

I noticed before that if you strain to understand what’s being said, you’re not really able to understand the whole conversation anymore, just those things you strained to understand. By contrast, if you can learn to relax, and get used to hearing Japanese a lot, you can take in the conversation more easily and easily parse what you want to know. This helps in the JLPT listening section too because they intentionally make the dialogues confusing, vague and with lots of points that go nowhere.

So, a few weeks ago I picked up Unicom’s Listening Practice book from Amazon JP for the JLPT 3. Used copies are also on Amazon US as well.

I thought this book was a bit confusing at first because there isn’t really much instruction in the beginning as to what to do. Instead, what they do is they divide the many conversations into groups based on common themes, like looking for something lost, or sports, or finding directions. In the back, each dialogue does have a pretty nice breakdown, including useful vocab words, and of course the correct answer (and why it’s correct).

So, lately, in my efforts to shore up my listening score, I am trying to listen to at least one or two of these sections at a time, and then compare answers later. There’s too many conversations to do at one time (approx. 60-90 minutes if you try to do the whole book), and I don’t want to kill myself yet trying to get through them all.

The good news though is that so far of the 23 dialogues I went through so far, I got 17 right, which is a score of 73%. I have to admit the dialogues in the book are well-done and definitely seem to reflect other JLPT conversation dialogues I’ve practiced so far, so if all goes well, I can reach a passing score on the real thing. On the other hand, I may still find some sections harder than others, so it’s too soon to tell yet if this is an accurate score so far until I finish the book.

Only 5 months left, much work ahead!

Update: Took the rest of the illustrated section of the book (questions with pictures). My overall score worsened to 37 out of 59 correct. Most of the mistakes were in the “math” section dealing with telling time, calendars and such. Also didn’t do that well in the “graph” section either. Still the score is 62%, which is still passing but a little too close. The non-illustrated section is quite a bit harder I think, so I think my score will worsen.

¹ My daughter also watches kids shows on Japanese TV (NHK, Shimajiro, etc), which I am embarrassed to admit are a challenge to understand. Fun to watch though, and good quality time with my daughter who likes to sit on my lap sometimes.