Yeah, I was looking forward to the quick response section too... glaargh.

There wasn't a clock in DC that I remember, but I always bring a watch. Also, the proctor warned us a few times of how much time was remaining.

When I took the N1 in Nagoya last year, I don't remember there being a clock. (Again, I always bring my watch.) What I remember the most was that it was cold as hell, and the seats were tiny and painful. Georgetown is the best of the places I've taken it, even if the desks are tiny, which seems to be a universal thing. I would love it if there was a way to take the test with a normal-sized desk, so I'm not wasting time juggling books, sheets, spare pencils, test tickets, and erasers. Ugh.

This test is still stuck in 1984, in just about every imaginable way. (Except for the listening bit being on CD, I guess.)

deanmaka Wrote:Side note: There was no clock in my room, so I'm glad I bought a watch at CVS the night before.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:Also, minor nit: I was miffed that I bought an (admittedly cheap-ass) analog watch based on the test instructions, only to find there was indeed a clock in our room. Which isn't surprising; clocks are fairly standard in American primary and secondary classrooms.

Hmm, i was also miffed as they didn't even check people for mechanical pencils or digital watches. Both of which I would have preferred to use on the test. Also the desks were extremely small. I remember people dropping their test booklets at least three times during the test. The only thing worse would've been those egg-shaped chairs from Men in Black.

All in all a pretty miserable experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone except the most dedicated of us poor sods trying to learn this language. I'm sure I'll be back again next year or in 6 months if i decide to make a trip to Japan out of it.

If you had a horrible experience with the testing location you guys should write the JLPT and tell them about it. They may be able to find a better place next time.

The directions for outside of Japan really much be different though because the tests in Japan don't say anything about mechanical pencils or digital watches. In fact the test proctor specifically said "Either a pencil or mechanical pencil on the desk..."

Took the test in Takao. No clock in my room, the desk was so small that it wasn't actually touching the floor (though it was just barely off the floor) once I got my knees jammed under it.

I took it in Kamata in Tokyo and had no clock either and forgot a watch :/

Advice for future JLPT-takers: take. a. watch.

I'll give my 2 cents on N1 that I took.
The vocabulary/kanji section weren't too bad but I have feeling I screwed up on a few of them (it's those types of reading that are only so similar that I confused myself with it. I'm pretty sure I made mistakes on a few).

Grammar was alright but I know I should have studied more on that section.

The reading section wasn't so bad when I think about it now but I hate how they put answers that are so similar the chance of making a mistake increases.Overall it wasn't hard but I know I should have practiced way more (first time taking a JLPT test)

Listening section itself was hard. The first few questions were really easy but once it got near the end (it was really testing your memory since it was pure audio/answer the question based on audio listening). Overall I should have done more JLPT-style questions(got lazy).

I personally don't think I got it but I'm confident next year I will do well on it. Also it's also taught me how little I really know Japanese (not sure if you guys feel the same way but do you get that feeling that you've gotten so far but yet fell that you don't actually know that much).


P.S. it was raining that day. I was reading online that it also rained in Japan. Cool confidence

I'm at a point in time where I changing my study/review routine completely. Been learning for 3 years and I feel I should be owning Japanese. Then again, I have to think about it realistically. Put in the time and I mean a lot of time, experiment with new methods until I you get the results you need and lastly, put in more time.

Well, everyone has different needs at the N1 point, so they're going to need to figure out what works best for them. I feel like I need a little bit of everything, so I'll be reading more, listening more, speaking and writing more. And somehow manage to cram in a bunch of new vocab and grammar at the same time I keep my ビジネス日本語 up to snuff.

The only problem is that I have no idea how to do that without going insane.

Have any test booklets been posted anywhere yet? The answers by themselves aren't really all that useful to me.

erlog Wrote:Have any test booklets been posted anywhere yet? The answers by themselves aren't really all that useful to me.

They're included in the link Guoguodi posted on page 10 of this thread. After clicking the initial link, search for links that say 分析.

ta12121 Wrote:P.S. it was raining that day. I was reading online that it also rained in Japan. Cool confidence

Yeah, when I went to Kyoto University in the morning the weather was fine, but when the test ended it was raining fairly hard. I took a bus out of there, but it was realllly packed with people from the test, so I was pushed up against a ton of people. I rode until I was near the fairly famous shrine Heian Jingu and then got off and walked the rest of the way downtown in the cold rain, haha. Kind of a depressing post-test experience. I had an umbrella but a small fold up one that isn't so great.

Tzadeck Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:P.S. it was raining that day. I was reading online that it also rained in Japan. Cool confidence

Yeah, when I went to Kyoto University in the morning the weather was fine, but when the test ended it was raining fairly hard. I took a bus out of there, but it was realllly packed with people from the test, so I was pushed up against a ton of people. I rode until I was near the fairly famous shrine Heian Jingu and then got off and walked the rest of the way downtown in the cold rain, haha. Kind of a depressing post-test experience. I had an umbrella but a small fold up one that isn't so great.

It was raining hard going to the test center and not too bad going back home but I was like "Maybe it's a sign?". I was lucky I brought my umbrella that day.



I got to the registration hall and there where huge lines of people. I first thought "Didn't the registration start at 8:30am?" I got there around 8:50am since I don't live near the university but I asked a guy if if I was in the right line but apparently I wasn't. They had a representative for reach level (place where you can sign up). So I went from a big line to literally no one in the line for N1. Felt cool lol.

So I asked someone where the orientation is and he pointed me in the right direction (they also had signs pointing where to go which was really helpful too). The orientation was interesting since it was in a really huge lecture hall (packed to the point where people had to sit on the staircase until the executive director for Japan Foundation was done speaking).

Anyhow when I went to the N1 room we where told to put are jackets in the back and bags in the front and only take out pencils/erases and have your I.D. plus voucher ready. Out of the whole room, It was 95% Asian and 5% other. A lot of koreans and chinese people were taking the test.

Apologies for being slightly OT (I haven't taken the test yet, but I do plan to in the future), but people have been mentioning "Donna Toki Dou Tsukau" (romanized for forum search purposes, since I personally didn't find the answer elsewhere) for sometime close to forever around here. However, I found there's actually two books, the 200 and the 500. Is there a preference for which is more useful? Is 500 a continuation of 200, or do they overlap?

Thanks.

The 200/500 books are for the older JLPT test (as far as I can tell from amazon) that was using the １・２・３・４級 system. You want the book released in like 2010 that is for the N1~N5.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%81%A9%E3%82%...285&sr=1-1

Does anybody know if points are deducted in case of a wrong answer?

vix86 Wrote:The 200/500 books are for the older JLPT test (as far as I can tell from amazon) that was using the １・２・３・４級 system. You want the book released in like 2010 that is for the N1~N5.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%81%A9%E3%82%...285&sr=1-1

Whoa whoa, this is different. This book is a dictionary-like reference guide, the 500 and 200 are workbooks. The 500 book covers N3-N1.　 The 500 book was republished in 2011 and made changes for the new JLPT. I don't know anything about the 200 one since I've never looked at it (maybe it's for N5-N4?)

The reference book linked here is pretty useless, I'm sorry to say. It's like a really crappy version of the Dictionaries of Basic-Intermediate-Advanced Japanese Grammar.

Crappy is relative in this case. The DOJG books leave out a decent chunk of grammar you'll see on N1 and N2. Yes, the donna toki dictionary isn't hot, but it covers grammar points you won't find in the DOJG series at all. And when you're struggling to figure out what a word means, well, any port in a storm...

Also, the donna toki book is a hell of a lot cheaper than all 3 volumes of the DOJG series. Is it perfect? Oh, hell no. The definitions are too short and lack the detail you get from other sources. But it is thorough in scope, and will give you a starting point for some of the more obscure stuff.

rich_f Wrote:Crappy is relative in this case. The DOJG books leave out a decent chunk of grammar you'll see on N1 and N2. Yes, the donna toki dictionary isn't hot, but it covers grammar points you won't find in the DOJG series at all. And when you're struggling to figure out what a word means, well, any port in a storm...

Also, the donna toki book is a hell of a lot cheaper than all 3 volumes of the DOJG series. Is it perfect? Oh, hell no. The definitions are too short and lack the detail you get from other sources. But it is thorough in scope, and will give you a starting point for some of the more obscure stuff.

Yeah, everything you say here sounds about right.

But, actually, I think the Donna Toki workbooks are useful for JLPT study in that they have explanations of the grammar, example sentences, and then questions to do. So I think they are better for JLPT study.

And then, the DOJG have more in-depth explanations so if you are actually learning to use the grammar in your own speech or writing I think it's more useful.

The Donna Toki dictionary is like a weird middle ground that I don't really find useful for anything.

[Zgarbas]

What would be a good way to exercise the scrambled words part?

Zgarbas Wrote:What would be a good way to exercise the scrambled words part?

JLPT secret weapon: Novels.
Read. Lots.

The scrambled words part is just asking if you know the pattern, right? Like if you saw a scrambled sentence in your native language you'd instantly say "This is the only thing that makes sense!" because you've seen that pattern so many times.

I guess you can technically just prepare for the N1 by studying examples, maybe?, but I feel like it would actually take less time and be ultimately more productive to just plug into the language until it makes sense. I may have sold most of my free time to Japanese but I did it that way in just under 3 years. No need to rush..?

----

... I wish I remembered the name of the book I plugged into Anki for N1 grammar. It just had short and simple explanations in Japanese along with example sentences. Plugged it into Anki and continued reading and.. Great Success! (I was also pleasantly surprised to see most all of those N1 grammar points coming up in my daily reading. Most of them I was guessing from context already but it was nice to have a short and sweet Japanese explanation.)

[Zgarbas]

I don't know, if I see things which are already written I get it, but as soon as I have to assemble them myself it's all down the drain. I always thought that proper sentence structure was the hardest thing to nail down as a language learner (at least in English*) and it's hard for me to get that right, especially under exam pressure =/.

*actually corected some 10th grade English tests last week. It was weird to see how poorly some kids handled sentence structure. The vocab was ok, the spelling was passable, but having such poor sentence structure really made the fact that they are only learning English obvious. It's pretty weird, since these kids are going to successfully take their C1 exams next year.

Test pressure is the worst.
But putting the test aside- I'd still just suggest reading a lot. One day it all makes sense and then the test is easy. That's probably the prime time to take N1..?

I was always scared to focus on structure too much as I was worried that it would hurt my ability to warp the language and work with exceptions in the future. D:

Sooo, does anyone know chinese? Would like to get a translation of the analyses/breakdowns for the reading questions while I can still vaguely remember what I put down

I have been a JLPT proctor for 3 times now. Our local Japan Foundation made sure that all rooms have clocks, extra pencils, erasers and sharpeners, working CD players, etc.

If you experienced problems in your last exam, you should bring this up with your local JF. They usually are quick to respond to complaints (at least from my experience).