Has anybody here on the forum passed ２級 and attempted to take 1級 the next year?

Did you pass?

What was your strategy/method?

In hindsight, what do you think are best study materials?

FYI - I am pretty confident I passed ２級 this year, and I live in Japan.

Thanks!

I did it. It can be done.

The best study materials are novels - young adult and adult fiction.
And also the book 日本語効力試験に出る文法１級, published by 国書刊行会.

Thanks for the reply!

Could you estimate how much you studied on average per week?

Thanks

I'm going to do it. Like yourself, I'm very confident I passed level 2 this year, and am looking forward to getting level 1 next year!

*get the grammar points under your belt and you've got yourself some easy points.
*with RTK you should be good at Kanji.
*with Anki, get the vocab down,
*with TBS online news, get listening owned!

日本語効力試験に出る文法１級 should be:
日本語能力試験に出る文法1級 btw

Whupps. Not sure how that happened. 誤字 gangstah.

I'll estimate that I studied about 1-2 hours a day, on average. To put it concretely, I read 5 books from the 世にも不幸な出来事 series and three regular novels. And worked on that grammar book. My kanji/vocab score on level 1 wasn't stellar (somewhere around 78, I think), but I believe if I had worked on the kanji from past tests on this site:
http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/Download.htm a bit more, I would have done a bit better.

i plan on doing it as well! to yorkii, i don't know if 1kyuu listening is heavily biased towards the newscaster styles but i'd mix in other stuff like podcasts and dorama to get a variety of speech styles.

New to the game, but please explain what Anki and TBS online news are?

*with Anki, get the vocab down,
*with TBS online news, get listening owned!

canji Wrote:New to the game, but please explain what Anki and TBS online news are?

*with Anki, get the vocab down,
*with TBS online news, get listening owned!

Anki is a spaced repetition system program, amazing for memorizing things. I recommend using it in conjunction with the sentence method provided at All Japanese All The Time to learn vocab/grammar.

TBS News has a lot of video clips with very close transcriptions available online; useful for learning to understand the news.