I had the great pleasure of taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test this year for the first time.
It was actually the first time ever in Dublin, until now people wanting to take the test have had to go to another country, typically travelling to London. I think interest in Japanese has been steadily growing over the last few years and across all the levels there were over 100 people taking the exam in DCU ( Dublin City University )
I went for 3 kyu – Levels start at 4kyu and go all the way up to 1kyu and given the amount of study I had done ( almost none ) it was probably a bit ambitious.
I’m not a big fan of learning a language in order to be able to pass an exam, conversation and your ability to comunicate are a much better and useful indication of how good you are, but the JLPT can be a useful thing to have on your CV if you’re applying for jobs in Japan.
I’ll get my results in February and I’m not expecting much. The vocab and grammar sections I found really difficult but I thought the audio section was understandable and I think I did pretty well. The JLPT is notorious for having options in the answers thare are close to being correct but aren’t, trying to lead you astray.
The best thing to come from this was meeting some of my old classmates that I studied with and realising that I need to put insome consistent effort in order to improve. Hopefully I’ll get a bit better at sticking with the SRS and Kanji.
One of the people I was talking to at the exam mentioned that they spent a long time learning all of the Kanji “from a book” even though they were only going for 4 kyu which tests you on about 100 kanji.
Heisig?
Yes!
Did you use anki?
Yep, you must have spent some time on AJATT then.
We exchange knowing nods of agreement
Khatz at AJATT isn’t the only person recommending Heisig and an SRS but he’s had some great success with the method and his site is well worth checking out. It’s cool to see that some others are finding that it works for them too.