Countdown to the JLPT exam, are you ready?

Two weeks remain for the JLPT exam. I’ll be taking the N3 this year, and feel pretty good about it. Reading a lot and also watching Japanese TV (via cable) with my little girl almost daily helps.1 We’ll see how I do on the new test format and the new N3 test itself.

By now you should registered for the test and received your test vouchers. If haven’t already, contact the JLPT organization right away. Also, don’t forget to familiarize yourself with the scoring setup for your level.

By now, if you don’t know the material, it may be too late to pass the test with a reasonable score (cramming won’t help much). I assume you’ve been studying for a while, and so I can’t offer any useful advice about how to improve your score. However, I want to provide some advice for first-time test takers to make the test experience itself better:

  • Get a good night’s sleep the night before. It’s hard if you’re nervous, but definitely try to sleep early if you can. I’ll be on-call for work the night before until 11pm, so as soon as I am done, I’m going to bed and sleeping in a bit late.
  • Eat a good breakfast. The test is surprisingly long, and there’s not enough breaks in the middle for getting food apart from vending machines. Better yet, bring and extra sandwich (or onigiri!) you can eat during the break, but make sure you do it in the hallway, not in the test room itself. Junk food won’t help either since the sugar or processed carbohydrates make you tired and hungry soon after.
  • Bring lots of sharpened pencils. Last time, I brought a pack of 8 new HB (No. 2) pencils and sharpened them all the night before. It’s useful because during the test if your pencil breaks or gets dull, it’s easy to switch to another one. Time is pretty limited.
  • Like all exams, it’s good not to spend too much time on a problem you can’t solve. Instead, try to move on, solve other questions and come back to it later.
  • Also, try your best to finish early. It’s very helpful to go back and review your answers. You’ll often find one or two you got wrong.
  • For the listening section at least, work in as much time between now and then to listen to regular, spoken Japanese. You need to acclimate to the sounds, the speed and so on, even if you can’t fully understand the dialogue. If you hear a certain word, or grammar form, many times, you’ll be able to listen to it naturally, after all.

Good luck, fellow test-takers!

1 If you can’t watch a children’s cartoon like Shimajiro comfortably (I still struggle), you’ll find Japanese conversation still difficult. Because I watch the show so often with my little girl, it’s much easier than it used to be, so I know it works. Exposure, exposure, exposure!



Be the first to like this post.

Leave a Reply

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture

You are commenting using your
Twitter account. (Log Out)

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your
Facebook account. (Log Out)

Connecting to %s