Two months ago, I took a practice N5 exam. Despite devoting so much of my time to listening practice over the last year, I still failed miserably on the N5 listening section, doing no better than chance. Today, I retook the test to see if I could do better.
More specifically, I took sections 2-4 (Point Comprehension, Utterance Expressions, and Quick Response), since I already got a perfect score on section 1 (Task-based Comprehension) when I took it before. I definitely felt like I could understand the questions more clearly this time, but it was still a struggle to figure out the answers sometimes and my performance overall was disappointing, particularly at the end.
My scores were
Point Comprehension: 5/6
Utterance Expressions: 3/5
Quick Response: 2/6
I did well on section 2 (point comprehension), but barely better than chance on section 3 and no better than chance on section 4 (sections 3 and 4 have three choices per answer, so you would expect to get 2/6 on average just from random guessing). Interestingly, I put the same (wrong) answers for the last two questions of section 4 across all three times that I took the test.
In other news, the 洞穴 lesson on WK said that it could be pronounced as either douketsu or horaana, but the later is less formal. I wonder if this is related to the thing about Chinese words being considered prestigious and formal in Japanese like Latin is in English, and thus the onyomi reading is more formal than the kunyomi. Interestingly, Jisho only lists the later reading.