Hi Guys
I took the JLPT N1 this time in Dec 2015.
The test went well except the dokkai section.
I think I will be able to pass overall, but with a low score in dokkai.
Vocabulary, grammar and reading went good.
What are you guys doing to improve your dokkai skills.
Did anyone do well in the dokkai section?
I personally hated the abstract mountain question.
Is there any way to find and practices for such questions in advance?

What were other things that you found difficult in the test?
For e.x., In listening, I found that last 2 questions were spoken very fast, with no time to take notes on who did what.
But checking the Chinese sites for answer, I think I got them correct. (http://jp.hjenglish.com/new/p758492/)

Love to hear about your story...

For Moderators:
I started a previous thread, which was closed by Watchman.(Zgarbas) and he suggested me to post in 2015 JLPT N2-N1 Thread. He thought it might get more replies there.
As suggested, I posted this thread 3 days back, but it seems to get lost there in pile of replies. No one has replied to this so far. So I am posting it here for a specific group, people who took N1 in Dec 2015.
Hope it is alrite.

fwiw, I failed N1 by a sliver in Dec. 2013, and passed in Dec. 2014 (so, of course I didn't take it again in '15 after passing...)
The only thing I really did to 'prepare' was to read a bunch of online news articles and light novels. I'm almost certain that making a point of reading editorials and/or non-fiction books would be more effective, but... meh. I can't really focus unless I'm reading stuff that interests me.

I feel like reading speed is the biggest challenge for N1... and the only solution to reading speed is to practice reading, by actually -reading- real native materials. Listening is ... well, sure it challenged me, but my listening comprehension is -terrible-. Even so, I passed listening -every- time I took the JLPT, even though I failed my first try at N2 and my first try at N1.

The fact is that the listening section is -realllllly- easy.... in terms of content. It -is- at very close to natural speed and it does -not - repeat, so it does pretty effectively test your ability to actually understand spoken Japanese. If you can't do that, then you're going to have problems... but if you can correctly interpret what you're hearing, then it's simple as anything. If you had the listening dialogues written out for you in N1, you'd wonder how you accidentally ended up in some beginner test! But of course, listening comprehension -is- its own skill and if yours isn't good enough you can easily get lost even in these simple dialogues.

Anyway, yes, you can purchase practice tests and run through them if you want to practice for the test. I think that's really worthwhile at lower levels, but at the N1 level I think you really need to just be practicing reading speed and basic listening comprehension. Which you do by well... reading and listening. Of course, that was my approach from beginning to end... I never actually explicitly studied for the JLPT, I just took it and kept watching anime and reading whatever ... manga, light novels, news-easy, actual news, etc.

Hey, same as Chris here - not Dec 2015, sorry. I passed (full marks) in 2014.
Most of Chris's post really resonates with me. I didn't do anything test specific, just lots of real Japanese/immersion. But all the reading I do (news, novels, academic papers, editorials...) must have helped dokkai, and all the TV I watch and chatting with friends I do would have helped listening.

If you do lots of reading of real Japanese you should be able up your reading speed, reading techniques (understanding words you don't know from the context and kanji), and general reading comprehension skills (here's the assertion, here's the evidence, here's the bigger point they're trying to make, etc.) and that should help immensely for dokkai.

One thing I thought during listening is that, at least for me, it's easier not to make notes. I found it less distracting just to store the info in my head like I would in a real conversation. I nearly lost track of what was being said on one question while I was trying to put what I was hearing into notes and stopped after that. Also, obviously I wasn't there for your Dec '15 test, but I doubt any of the listening was that fast. On my test I was surprised how slow and clearly spoken it all was. I don't know how much immersion you do already, but if you listen to lots of real Japanese (TV, podcasts, etc) then you'll probably feel the same way next time you hear N1 listening questions lol.

I think you can always pass these things just by having done enough "real world" listening, reading, vocabulary acquisition, and so on -- but the advantage of test-specific prep is that it can get you up to a passing grade a bit earlier. I also personally feel more confident and relaxed going into a test if I know I've prepared and the test format isn't going to throw me any surprises.

I completely agree that reading speed is really important in N2 and N1, and there's not really any clever trick to getting faster except practice.

(2015-12-17, 6:22 am)Ash_S Wrote: One thing I thought during listening is that, at least for me, it's easier not to make notes. I found it less distracting just to store the info in my head like I would in a real conversation. I nearly lost track of what was being said on one question while I was trying to put what I was hearing into notes and stopped after that. Also, obviously I wasn't there for your Dec '15 test, but I doubt any of the listening was that fast. On my test I was surprised how slow and clearly spoken it all was. I don't know how much immersion you do already, but if you listen to lots of real Japanese (TV, podcasts, etc) then you'll probably feel the same way next time you hear N1 listening questions lol.

I agree that it's easier not to take notes, especially since a lot of the time, they intentionally pull you around all the possible answers and then finally give you the real one towards the end (without it being explicitly stated). It's too much of a distraction to try and take notes while listening.

For me (N1 '15, don't know if I passed or not), the hardest part about the listening was the horrible audio quality. It wasn't the test CD that was the problem, but the test center (Atlanta)... It wasn't cripplingly bad, but I know I missed several things that I shouldn't have just because the audio was so muffled and scratchy (especially the fake radio and tv questions, which already have fake muffling and scratchiness filters applied to them).

This year didn't seem particularly fast, but the voice actors did (intentionally) slur a lot more than in my practice exams (don't know how it compared to other tests though).

For notes, I just take notes for last 2 questions, I think they are No. 4 and 5.
They involve around characters.
So I draw 2 boxes (Or how many characters are there), then write the main point in 1 word style next to these boxes.
Worked great for almost all mock tests.
But in real test, the speed was too fast.
Was not able to take notes as there were around 4 characters, with around 2 main things that each character did.