RawToast Wrote:The last time this was discussed I believe the conclusion was that the vocabulary is ~N3, while the grammar is ~N4.

The articles are tougher than the N4 reading sections; if you can read them then the N4 reading section should be a doddle.

cophnia61 Wrote:Ariaaria thank you for telling us your direct experience! Could I ask you a couple of questions?
So, do you think reading NHK Easy is a good reading practice for N4?

cophnia61 Wrote:And what about the audio?

cophnia61 Wrote:Could you give us a brief summary of what resources you used to study for it?

ariariari Wrote:

cophnia61 Wrote:Ariaaria thank you for telling us your direct experience! Could I ask you a couple of questions?
So, do you think reading NHK Easy is a good reading practice for N4?

That's a good question. My gut tells me that NHK Easy News is not good practice for the N4 reading. The reason is that there is too much vocab and grammar in those articles that are outside of what they'll test.

When I took the test the reading section mostly used vocab and grammar that I knew, but there was some I didn't. The longest reading passage was like 3-4 paragraphs and the questions required me to go back and look up things in the text. There were also questions with signs about when some service (like a gym) was open, and then they gave you a sample time and asked who using the gym during that time. There were complicating factors like holiday vs non-holiday schedule, and so on, so you had to be careful. Over and over and over again. In a timed setting.

So if you are using material where you constantly need to look up vocabulary, you won't get to practice some of the main skills being tested. Because a lot of what they are testing is how you handle having a few words thrown at you which you are not expected to know.

Also, while it's now become good reading reading practice for me, I don't think that it will be sufficient prep for the N3 reading comprehension test. At the very least, I'll need to spend some time with a practice book like this that gives me questions along with the text. That's the skill they test.

cophnia61 Wrote:And what about the audio?

My summary of the listening on N4 is that it's all the same. It was two people negotiating a scheduling conflict. Over and over and over again. This is probably not accurate, but it was my impression immediately after the test:

Person A: Let's schedule something:
Person B: OK!
A: I'm free Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the morning. Other weekdays I'm free in the afternoon. On the weekend I'm free at night.
B: I'm free ...
A: It sounds like our schedules meet up on both x, y and z. Which would you prefer.
B: Let's do x.
A: OK!
B: Oh wait. I can't do x after all. Let's do the option we talked about after x.
A: OK!

So, like, I was asked to retain a lot of information that was being said, and process it and refer to it later in the conversation. With only listening to it once. It was hard, and it surprised me. I thought that I would be OK because I did a lot of speaking with native speakers, but I wasn't.

I don't think that a newscast is good preparation for it - there's only one person speaking. Note that at N4 there isn't a lot of native material (e.g. NHK Easy News) at that level. I felt that they did a good job of constructing a (lengthy) listening test using the limited subset of vocab and grammar that was on the test.

cophnia61 Wrote:Could you give us a brief summary of what resources you used to study for it?

Sure. But first let me say the resource that I learned about towards the end, which wound up being the most useful: online, experienced, cheap Japanese teachers who specialize in JLPT prep. I used Japanese Online Institute (JOI) but may other people use italki. They can give you an infinite number of mock exam questions, which is really helpful. I think that if more people used resources like this, less people would fail. Most people fail the JLPT - you can see the stats from the last exam here.

Anki was my main source of study. I had 3 main decks:

vocab: "Minna No Nihongo 1 Vocabulary Complete" (a shared deck), Genki 2 (which I made myself) and "out of class vocab" (which I made myself)

Kanji: I used RTK Lite, and had a good grasp of the N5 and N4 cards.

Grammar: Verb Conjugations, Dictionary of Basic Jap. Grammar (shared deck).

Overall, I felt that I did poorly on the grammar section. Since the exam I've developed a habit of going to lang-8 and writing example sentences of the grammar points I learn. When I get good feedback from native speakers I add them to anki.

In person classes: I took a night class one night a week after work for 6 months. It was helpful, but if I had to do it all again, I would have jumped straight to online classes.

Hope this helps.

cophnia61 Wrote:It helped very much! I didn't expected a reply so detailed, thank you to have put the effort and time in writing it!

anotherjohn Wrote:I struggled with NHK News Easy after finishing Core 6k. The difficultly wasn't so much vocab/grammar as general comprehension ability.

I see they've added annoying & broken furigana. What they should have done is made the pop-up definitions (which now seem to have disappeared) more Rikai-friendly.

yogert909 Wrote:ariariari, this is amazing. Thank you for writing this! Can you venture a guess as to how many hours you have invested in learning thus far?

yogert909 Wrote:Wow, thanks again ariariari! I love reading summaries of people's language learning journeys like this.