I'm aiming to sit and pass JLPT 2級 in December. At the moment I would put my skill level at 'Intermediate'. I'm just beginning RTK2 and am aiming to finish it in 3 - 4 months. I've never sat a JLPT exam before, but I had a look at the 3級 syllabus and it seemed a little too easy for me, meaning that any little points I haven't learnt, I could probably learn in less than a week. Therefore, I'm aiming for 2級 in December, but need direction as to how to study for it. I'm using 'An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese' currently for grammar, and am picking up vocabulary from a variety of places (TV shows, podcasts, books etc...). I hear books such as "どんな時どう使う" and the Unicom series are good companions for 2級, but I'd like to hear your experiences and opinions before forking out money for them. I hear that JLPT is more of a literary proficiency test than an all-round fluency test, so I'd also like to keep improving my conversational and listening skills, all suggestions welcome.

Get all the kanzen master books for L2. Put anything you don't know into your favorite SRS and review daily. Some listening practice is a good idea, but it's probably the easiest part of the test, and if you memorize the material it's not difficult to recognize words you already know.

Read volumes 14 to 20 of ナナ.

My listening ability has improved dramatically by using smart.fm
As listening comprehension is half the test, it would seem to be an important area to work on. I am going for 2級 in December as well

bodhisamaya Wrote:My listening ability has improved dramatically by using smart.fm
As listening comprehension is half the test, it would seem to be an important area to work on. I am going for 2級 in December as well

The listening test is only a fourth of the whole test...

Ah yes. It is only 40 minutes out of the 145 minutes for the whole test. I wonder why I was thinking half :/

There's a huge gap between 3級 and 2級. And actually Reading Comprehension is half the test as you can get 200 points for it out of 400 for the whole test. I took the test last December in Shanghai (ur already lucky to even get a spot there) after about a year of study. I knew that I was up for something tough but boy did I underestimated it bigtime! By far the easiest part was 文字/語彙, then listening, and the horror (it really was) part: reading. I think there were about 10-plus-something articles, but each article got longer and longer after the first. I mean, you don't get much time in the first place but for articles being a whole page long, man, my advice is READ and READ and READ like you've never read before. I didn't had enough time to finish 3 or 4 articles and had to randomly guess the last couple of questions. Practise speed reading I'd say cuz that part weighs the heaviest.

Seems to me that if RTK2 is going to take 3-4 more months to finish, dump it and pick up 例文で学ぶ漢字と言葉（2級）. You've got to cover a lot of vocab, and read read read - so drop the context-less RTK2 with 1000 kanji you don't need yet asap.

The most important component of passing JLPT2 is definitely vocabulary. It won't help you if you can pick up any japanese sound perfectly if you don't know what the words mean. Grammar knowledge is useless if you don't know what you're connecting. Experience in reading won't let you magically understand the words. However, if you know every single word that comes up, you have a great advantage. It won't garantee you a pass of course (one still needs to know grammar, still needs to know kanji, still needs to be able to pick up words while listening etc) but it's a HUGE help.

Learn grammar, listen to a lot of Japanese and read as much as you can... but above all, put as many words as you possibly can in your SRS before the JLPT.

After looking at a practice test reading portion: http://www.jlpt.jp/j/about/pdf/2005R2.pdf
Practice with long paragraphs does seem to important. For me, since I am close to a testing site, it is just curiosity for where I am in my progress. I don't plan on changing the way I study at all. Just continue what ever feels fun at the moment.

The vocabulary portion doesn't seem to test vocab as much as it tests spelling.

Tobberoth Wrote:The most important component of passing JLPT2 is definitely vocabulary. It won't help you if you can pick up any japanese sound perfectly if you don't know what the words mean. Grammar knowledge is useless if you don't know what you're connecting. Experience in reading won't let you magically understand the words. However, if you know every single word that comes up, you have a great advantage. It won't garantee you a pass of course (one still needs to know grammar, still needs to know kanji, still needs to be able to pick up words while listening etc) but it's a HUGE help.

Learn grammar, listen to a lot of Japanese and read as much as you can... but above all, put as many words as you possibly can in your SRS before the JLPT.

Yea, I thought that was already a natural fact. They say that you can fare better if you have a huge vocabulary and 'little' knowledge of grammar than vice versa.

I'm assuming you're using an SRS so the following applies. Full disclosure: I'm nowhere near 2 kyuu level so take advice with large dose pain killers prescribed by MJ's doctor.

Change up what you're focusing on every 2 to 4 weeks. Doing Onyomi well, add what you can during those weeks then change over to adding Vocabulary. Maybe add about 1000 words or more (via iKnow sentences or whatever). After 3 or 4 weeks, switch up and add some sentences from Kanken Master 2 kyuu. Switch up and throws some JLPT questions into your SRS. Go back to doing Onyomi.

The beauty of an SRS is it lets you pause your learning of new things from one area to concentrate on another. I did 700 kanji of Movie Method before pausing that, but those 700 are getting reviewed. I have 500 RTK3 kanji just waiting to get added when I'm bored enough to go at them systematically, yet the other 2500 get plenty of love via the SRS. So use all the above methods mentioned by everyone, just do a little bit at a time using the SRS.

During all this, have some fun reading and listening to Japanese. Hell, maybe take 2 weeks and try to decipher an entire Japanese movie via subs2srs, strip the movie's audio and play it in 3 minute random segments on your iPod.

By the way, I say weeks as I do about 2 or 3 hours of studying a day. That equates to 15 to 20 hours a week. If you study more per day, maybe switch up study methods based on hours of study instead of days or weeks.

For reading passage tests does the JLPT hold true to the technique of reading the questions first before reading the passage? I've always scored extremely high in reading tests throughout my formal education (almost always in the 98-99% for nationally distributed standardized tests) by following that technique.

The reason is because the first read through is always a complete waste of time. If you don't know what you are looking for you are basically pretending that you are going to somehow remember the entire passage for when you get to the questions. This is of course ridiculous. What you end up doing is wasting precious time reading it the first time, then looking at the questions not remembering hardly anything, only to go back question by question looking for the answer....which you could have just done in the first place.

activeaero Wrote:For reading passage tests does the JLPT hold true to the technique of reading the questions first before reading the passage? I've always scored extremely high in reading tests throughout my formal education (almost always in the 98-99% for nationally distributed standardized tests) by following that technique.

The reason is because the first read through is always a complete waste of time. If you don't know what you are looking for you are basically pretending that you are going to somehow remember the entire passage for when you get to the questions. This is of course ridiculous. What you end up doing is wasting precious time reading it the first time, then looking at the questions not remembering hardly anything, only to go back question by question looking for the answer....which you could have just done in the first place.

Hmm, good tip actually. Normally when you do a fill-in-the-blanks type exercise it's also better to read the choices first.

Musashi Wrote:Hmm, good tip actually. Normally when you do a fill-in-the-blanks type exercise it's also better to read the choices first.

Actually to be more specific I should have said read each question one at a time and go back and look for that answer only. Reading all the questions at once is equally a waste of time. You want to strip down and focus on each individual answer as efficiently as possible.

How many reading passages are there on a typical JLPT2 exam?

activeaero Wrote:

Musashi Wrote:Hmm, good tip actually. Normally when you do a fill-in-the-blanks type exercise it's also better to read the choices first.

Actually to be more specific I should have said read each question one at a time and go back and look for that answer only. Reading all the questions at once is equally a waste of time. You want to strip down and focus on each individual answer as efficiently as possible.

How many reading passages are there on a typical JLPT2 exam?

Like 5-10? I think it depends. They also vary a lot in size and how many questions there are for each.

Personally, I skipped them while doing my JLPT2 test (which I passed). It takes AGES for just a few questions, it's much smarter to skip ahead to the faster grammar questions where you can make tons of points in no-time. If you have enough time after finishing the smaller questions, go back to the reading passages and do as many as you can.

Tobberoth Wrote:Personally, I skipped them while doing my JLPT2 test (which I passed). It takes AGES for just a few questions, it's much smarter to skip ahead to the faster grammar questions where you can make tons of points in no-time. If you have enough time after finishing the smaller questions, go back to the reading passages and do as many as you can.

Can't remember where I saw this, but I'd heard the following advice for the reading/grammar section:
1) Do the grammar questions first, try to finish in 20 minutes
2) Do the reading comprehension questions from last to first

I tried it out the other day on the 2006 ２級 test.
Point 1 is definitely a win - the grammar questions are short, so you generally either know them or not, and they make up a large part of the test. If you do the reading first it's too easy to lose track of time and not get to the grammar questions.

I'm not so sure about the ordering doing the reading questions matters that much.
The important thing is do not get bogged down on one question. On a couple of the passages I got completely lost, so just skipped ahead and tried again after doing the others.

The hardest part of any test is whatever you happen to be worst at. So, you can help yourself by taking a practice test before you decide where to focus.

Also, I just started (yesterday) using ALC's 『どんな時どう使う日本語表現文型５００』 [500 Essential Japanese Expressions: A Guide to Correct Usage of Key Sentence Patterns] for 1st & 2nd level JLPT, and I wish I'd gotten long ago when I was studying for 2nd level the first time. It has pre-tests for the 2nd level grammar, so you can see where your problems are. It doesn't seem as focused on 1st level, but it does include that grammar. All the explanations are in Japanese but with furigana, so you can look up necessary vocab if you hit a problem with the explanations & sample sentences.

KristinHolly Wrote:The hardest part of any test is whatever you happen to be worst at. So, you can help yourself by taking a practice test before you decide where to focus.

Also, I just started (yesterday) using ALC's 『どんな時どう使う日本語表現文型５００』 [500 Essential Japanese Expressions: A Guide to Correct Usage of Key Sentence Patterns] for 1st & 2nd level JLPT, and I wish I'd gotten long ago when I was studying for 2nd level the first time. It has pre-tests for the 2nd level grammar, so you can see where your problems are. It doesn't seem as focused on 1st level, but it does include that grammar. All the explanations are in Japanese but with furigana, so you can look up necessary vocab if you hit a problem with the explanations & sample sentences.

I'm interested in getting that book myself in around a month's time but I'm not sure which version to buy. It looks like that 500 one is for both JLTP1 & 2, but I'm not sure what the differences between these two are:

どんな時どう使う 日本語表現文型辞典 (単行本)
http://www.amazon.co.jp/どんな時どう使う-日本語表現文型...195&sr=8-2

and this one (the one you got)

どんな時どう使う 日本語表現文型500―日本語能力試験1・2級対応 (アルクの日本語テキスト)
http://www.amazon.co.jp/どんな時どう使う-日本語表現文型...195&sr=8-1

[Katsuo]

blackmacros Wrote:I'm not sure what the differences between these two are

Level 1 & 2 book:
First published: 1996
Physically: taller, wider, but thinner (233 pages).
Coverage: Levels 1 and 2 only.
Language: Almost entirely Japanese (Chapter headings and Introduction "How to use this book" are translated to English)
Order: By theme. Each chapter has a pre-test.


Level 1 to 4 book.
First published: 2007
Physically: Chunky. Smaller height & width, but much thicker (531 pages)
Coverage: Levels 1 to 4
Language: Japanese/English/Korean/Chinese. Grammar points and explanations are translated into the other languages (example sentences are not translated).
Order: aiueo.
Appendix: Includes a 69-page section where grammar points are grouped by theme.

The 1 to 4 book is more like a dictionary. It is the newer of the two. Most of the example sentences from the earlier book are also used in the later one, though some have been modified or replaced.

Something good for checking your weak points is にほんご５００問中級.

Katsuo Wrote:The 1 to 4 book is more like a dictionary. It is the newer of the two. Most of the example sentences from the earlier book are also used in the later one, though some have been modified or replaced.

Ah, thanks for the summary!

A few more quick questions:

Does Tae Kim cover the necessary grammar for levels 3 and 4? Having finished Tae Kim would I be able to move straight on to　どんな時どう使う Level 1 & 2 book or would I be better off buying the Level 1 to 4 book and covering it all?

Does the Level 1 & 2 book contain all the necessary grammar points for JLPT1 & 2, or does it miss some?

blackmacros Wrote:Does the Level 1 & 2 book contain all the necessary grammar points for JLPT1 & 2, or does it miss some?

I don't think any book covers ALL the necessary grammar since it's simply too much to list in one book. 'most' would be more appropriate to say. I was using a book that supposedly contained all the JLPT2 grammar, and then I read another one that still had quite some grammar not found in the first one.

[Katsuo]

blackmacros Wrote:would I be better off buying the Level 1 to 4 book and covering it all?

I would say so. Some of the L3 stuff may still be useful, and anyway three-quarters of the book is for levels 1 & 2.

blackmacros Wrote:Does the Level 1 & 2 book contain all the necessary grammar points for JLPT1 & 2, or does it miss some?

It covers the specified grammar points comprehensively, but having said that no book can guarantee to include everything that might come up in the exam.

The reason is that the body that sets the exam allows its individual question-setters some leeway. It produces a guide for them (日本語能力試験出題基準) with lists of vocabulary, kanji and grammar points, but also permits them to include other material of a similar level at their own discretion.

Thanks for the responses :-)

I think I'll pick up the Levels 1 to 4 book then; its not even that much more expensive.

And while I'm busy bothering you helpful fellows, one more (hopefully the last!) question.

Is it worth getting either the KM/Unicom books for JLPT 1 & 2 and working through them as my main focus, and using the どんな時どう使う for backup reference? Or is どんな時どう使う comprehensive enough to use by itself/would doubling up like that be overkill?

So many confusing choices....!

PS. And last (really, really last I swear) question: has anyone typed up the sentences for any of these grammar books like they have for KO2001, UBJG etc etc.?