Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

[gsbod]

I remember you saying before that you were so tired you had to take a nap during the test. Clearly you were not on top form during the test and it shows. I doubt your score is representative of your actual ability.

If I were you I'd be signing up for the December test and picking up a grammar drill book and a reading drill book to work through between now and then.

Also I'd do my best to get enough sleep the night before the test.

[kraemder]

I've studied Japanese almost every day over the past year and a half and yet the test reflects just a marginal improvement. At least it shows improvement... meh. I see why people get fed up with this thing.

I suspect that the marginal improvement just means you've only got slightly better at taking the test: I'll bet that the last 6 months has done a lot more than that for your actual Japanese ability overall!

I've always thought of the JLPT as a cattle prod to keep poking myself with so that I sit down and study, rather than as a valuable certificate. It would be nice to pass N2, but I'd trade N2 for speaking good Japanese in a heartbeat ...

Thanks for commenting. I think you're right of course. I guess anyone would be a little upset over missing a pass by just one point too. Yeah, I tend to think of it as a motivational tool too. With that in mind I would want to try for the N1 instead next to motivate myself to learn new grammar. But the N2 is actually a nice certification in itself so I don't think I will. I'd like to get that certification and if I went for the N1 I wouldn't be expecting to pass on the 1st attempt with just 3-4 months to study. It would totally be just a motivational tool. Had I passed this time around though... ahh.. one point.

[kraemder]

I remember you saying before that you were so tired you had to take a nap during the test. Clearly you were not on top form during the test and it shows. I doubt your score is representative of your actual ability.

If I were you I'd be signing up for the December test and picking up a grammar drill book and a reading drill book to work through between now and then.

Also I'd do my best to get enough sleep the night before the test.

Gbod! Long time no see it's nice to hear from you. I did do my best to get enough sleep before the test...I think I was too far behind on my sleep regardless and then I borrowed a bicycle to get to the test site and that was a mistake. The bike was too small and it took forever to get there and I arrived a lot more tired than I otherwise would have. The train would have been round about and cost more money but I would have arrived in a better state of mind. Anyway, I'll take your advice and properly study for the test this time.. and take a mock test to see where I'm weakest at regarding grammar and the way they test it.

[kraemder]

I still haven't done the mock test yet but I will soon. I'm currently a bit mixed up on my sleeping patterns... I'm so borderline insomniac I think that I'm prone to it. So if I go out and party and drink a bit too much... well I don't sleep well and then I guess this happens.

I'm reading as much as I can. I was reading the Wheel of Time in Japanese a few weeks ago but I've put that aside and I'm reading a light novel I got a couple nights ago. This is off the kindle store which I'm happy because it is easier to look up words in an ebook although I wasn't doing too badly with the paper book I don't think. One thing that has held me back I think regarding light novels and Japanese literature in general.... aside from a hatred of kanji... is that the whole format didn't reallly click with me. I couldn't get into the story, ignoring the difficulty of struggling with a large amount of words I have to lookup. I forget which novel it was but the last one I put aside in frustration I was thinking... this is just like watching a freaking anime. The story and characters... it's not like a story it's like I'm reading a cartoon. Is life just a big cartoon to Japanese people???? Mind you... a lot of anime has pretty unoriginal dialogue, plot, and characters. A lot of anime is fun to watch because the artwork is interesting. You don't get that in a light novel.

I found I liked translated stories a lot better even if at the same time they felt like they were lacking something just because, well, it's a translation and not an original story. I really appreciated 1984 by 村上 when I started that book. I heard so many times that it's super hard and that I should read something easier. It is a little hard but the style felt so western and familiar that it also felt a lot easier to get involved in the story than other Japanese books I'd tried. However, I have to agree that something easier probably is better and I have put it aside for a bit.

The book I'm reading now is a light novel. I suspect it's quite good among light novels as I found it on a list of books rated #2 all time. But from the outset I also made myself approach it with an open mind... I literally was visualizing an anime in my head and not real people. If the artwork in the book has cartoon style drawings, I think this is how the author wants you to approach it and I have to say I'm really really enjoying the book. I'm hoping I'll like other light novels as much with a better attitude but maybe they just really weren't as well written as this one. It's called 空ろの箱と零のマリア. I kind of feel disoriented like when I read House of Leaves (way way back in the day). It's a time travel story. If you can picture オカリン from Stein's Gate and how he can time leap and remember what happened prior to the leap... but nobody else can... this story is like that but the main character is NOT オカリン but someone else who can't recall what happened in the previous time lines etc.. at least not very well. He can remember a bit but it's really really foggy. Also, the story isn't told in chronological order. It seems to be ordered by 音無さん's time leaps.. as in chapter one is 一回目..... chapter 2 is 23回目... but it's not sequential.. it jumps around. I might read about 10000回目 next but 456回目 in the next chapter. I'm almost halfway through the book now and I have no idea how it will end and I'm very very very interested to find out. The book mostly takes place at or around a high school and I think this helps keep the vocabulary from getting too crazy. I like medieval fantasy worlds but some of the vocabulary they use in those... hasn't been used for outside of this genre for hundreds of years.

[kraemder]

I got some practice tests to take. I couldn't find good ones online for free so I just bought them. I think there is one free test maybe on the JLPT site but you can buy a paper copy for cheap so I did. Anyway, my first attempt yielded a 125.25/180. I'm mixed up on my sleeping so I have had only a few hours sleep the past few nights... I'm exhausted. I am hoping that helped compensate for being at home where I can think more clearly as opposed to test day. I'm pretty happy with the score. There's room for improvement however but I feel confident in getting a pass this time even if I'm tired. The biggest thing I'm doing is reading as much as possible and vocab flashcards from the vocab I'm reading. I am doing some grammar but not a lot. Although I corrected the test I haven't gone back to really analyze what I got wrong to see if I can focus on any spots in particular.

Although I had hardly slept, when I took the test, I didn't feel as exhausted as I did when I took the test for real in July. Maybe it's all the reading I'm doing that doing the test just wasn't as hard on me now as before.

[dampingwire]

Anyway, my first attempt yielded a 125.25/180.

That's encouraging - that's a good pass.

I'm interested in knowing how the listening comprehension is going. Do you feel that it's had a noticeable boost since you started living in Japan?

[kraemder]

That's a hard question to answer. I would say that the improvement in listening comprehension is a lot more gradual than I would like. Yeah it's gotten better. I would say the biggest way I can see that is talking to shop people. Part of that is just the word こちらへ. I have a mental block with this word. My brain says that 'here' is ここ. My brain doesn't want to assign 此方へ to here also. Probably because the kanji 方 makes me think this way and to make a long story short I had a hard time understanding anyone that said こちらへ to me for the longest time.

I haven't made friends with Japanese people who only speak Japanese though. I think that is really the trick. I just mix English or speak all English whenever I feel uncomfortable with Japanese or lazy. The people who want to make friends with me are people who want to learn English though so it's kind of a catch 22.

But my listening is better. When the Japanese people downstairs go full speed with each other I can follow the gist of the conversation but a lot of the jokes go over my head. I'm not really comfortable participating. I could participate anyway but it's stressful - it's pretty much a guarantee I'll reveal how I'm missing some of what's being said. If you make a comment you don't really want to slow the conversation down, you want to add to it.

[kraemder]

I was talking to a share house member this morning who's originally from Brazil. However, she has lived in Japan since she was 11 - but did not go to a Japanese school in Japan (if you plan for your kids to live in Japan why wouldn't send them to a Japanese school??? I didn't ask or talk about that though as it wasn't her decision anyway). But she grew up not speaking Japanese or knowing Japanese. There's a big Portuguese community in Japan working in factories it seems. I had no idea. She started working in the factory but got tired of it and decided to learn Japanese to get a different job. In her words she went from zero Japanese to passing the N2 in 3 months, and then 3 months later she passed the N1. This didn't occur to me while I was talking to her but I thought the test was only given once every 6 months. Oh well. Assuming she wasn't exaggerating, doing those JLPT books cover to cover is a lot more worthwhile than most of us probably give them credit for. Because we don't do them cover to cover haha. Getting a really good score on the test would be a very nice ego boost. I'm wondering if I should throw out my routine of just engaging native material as much as possible and do what she did.

[kraemder]

I've decided to hit the textbooks hard starting with Kanji in Context (revised) edition. I think I feel guilty about not going through any of my textbooks properly and just sort of treating them like dictionaries and reading bits here and there off and on. As per my above score, I don't think the haphazard way is completely ineffective but I still feel bad. And the above mentioned girl got really good results from doing the textbooks even if she did exaggerate how quickly she did them... (almost everyone I know downplays how much effort/studying they did to learn a foreign language). So I'm going through KiC making Anki cards from everything in the workbook. Not just the sentences but everything. I skipped a couple problems that were simply too simple or obvious repeats but only a couple. I've gotten through the first section which is 11 chapters. It's a lot of Anki cards. I have to say that I didn't learn much. Skimming the rest of workbook 1 I can see that there's not a lot for me to learn in the rest of it either but I still want to go through this and get it done. Just something I've always wanted to do and I think it will help to fill in any gaps in my kanji knowledge and there's some very nice collocations and grammar practice in there too. But it's surprisingly easy for me. At least workbook 1 - I suspect workbook 2 is tougher. However, if you read the introduction to KIC, the authors talk about how the textbook will help you to pass the N2 and they make no mention of the N1 test. I found that odd considering they cover all the daily use kanji which I believe includes the N1 kanji. But the vocabulary and grammar perhaps isn't quite N1 level maybe or not thoroughly N1 level - just a little is mixed in. That's what I suspect.

I was going to use 新完全マスター for the grammar but instead I'm using this nice little book called u-can 日本語能力試験N2. I have a feeling they put some N1 grammar in here too but I have to double check it. It's great because it's all Japanese and it's setup to be used with one of those red plastic sheets so it's a lot like using flashcards. On the page on the left they have a sentence with multiple choice fill in the blank similar to the N2 test but on the right, you can cover it with the red sheet of course, they have the explanations and everything along with the sentence again with the answer in red so it's invisible... IE if you go through using the left pages you test yourself multiple choice style.. if you don't look at that page then you are testing yourself clozed delete style. I think that's a slick setup. I've just gone through 50 problems using the multiple choice pages too but am gonna go back and do them again and try it clozed delete. I really like this book and I might get some of the other books in the series too.

I've been wanting to try to do some MMORPG in Japanese but haven't gotten around to it until just the other night. I installed Phantasy Star 2 on my PS4 and went through the tutorial. I haven't done video games since WoW about 4 years ago and aside from WoW, I haven't played games since my early 20's. Really long time ago. I kind of figured I wouldn't like the game much and it would be like homework but surprisingly it's fun and the interface is nice. So far. However, I get the feeling this game doesn't have a big world to explore like other RPG's, it's mostly built around instances maybe. A lot is unknown. But if there's active chat in the game then that would be awesome.

I started watching Prison Break on Hulu Japan dubbed. I haven't seen so many shows because they were in English and I felt like it was too much of a time sink but they've got a ton of shows on here. Yeah, I would prefer watching good Japanese dramas but I don't know what's good... I am not sure any of it is really to my taste. Of course there's still anime but those characters are not really normal and talk funny. I'm 3/4 through 連帯惑星ピザンの危機クラッシャージョウ... This week I also listened to two audio books, Deltora Quest 2 and 3. Audio books are great - although I may want to relisten to them again to see how much more I understand later. Or read the books too.

And my PS4 ethernet cable that came with the PS4 is actually crap and it's losing connection. I've never had a faulty ethernet cable before although if I were having network problems and called tech support, if the person couldn't figure it out (often) they always blamed the ethernet cable and asked me to hang up. This time they would actually be right. Weird. What a crappy cable - stupid Sony.

[kraemder]

Ahh PSO2. Fun game. Can change your class at anytime(can be two classes at the same time too!), free fighting pets, clothes expensive but can get from market, the events every week . Really miss the game but the timezone for the cool events were always at like 3am for me lol. Also a little paytowin but not by alot. Could still play the game without spending money just fine. And yes, the whole game is instances based but the maps you go to a very larger and you could just hang out in them and wait for the monsters to respawn. The maps also have different stages leading the boss stage at the end. Urgh writing this down, makes me want to install the game again! Dx

Yeah I've never played my PS4 much. I'm really liking he graphics and the controls seem very smooth. How was the chat in PSO2? Was there any? I actually do feel like just reading the game text is challenging but the point is to interact with other players.