Thursday 26 November 2009

JLPT Past Exam Papers - All Levels, with Audio Files!

Big shout out to nihonhacks.com for pointing me in the direction of past exam papers for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

Here you can download past papers for all levels going back until 1991 and here are mp3 files for the listening section.

It's not all good news, however, as I've noticed some of the listening files are virtually incomprehensible, presumably because someone simply snuck a microphone into the exam center.

At least for the other two sections I now have a lot more to practice on, and in my first attempt at 1991 I managed to answer a little over 60% of the non-listening questions correctly - I don't know if this translates into 60% of the marks as I wasn't sure of the marks breakdown - but with a pass mark of 60% things are looking promising. I've pretty much nailed the Kanji recognition and production but my grammar could use a lot of work, particularly verb and adjective conjugations.

Right now the thing I'm terrified of is the listening section. This is worth 25% of the total marks and I'm completely awful at it. My strategy for the coming days is to transcribe 2002's listening section as an exercise and compare it to Peter van der Woude's at the JLPT Study Page. Ideally what I need is transcripts of the listening sections for all of the past papers I've now downloaded but these seem impossible to get hold of.

I do still have the book of 2004 - 2006 exam questions and answers which does include the listening transcripts and, hopefully, high quality listening audio but I'm still aiming to hold these back until Sunday, with a week to go, and treat them as proper exam rehersals.

Monday 16 November 2009

JLPT Level 4 Update: 18 days to go...

It had been my intention to provide more frequent updates on my Japanese Language Proficiency Test revision but frankly I've been too busy actually revising to even think about updating my blog.

If you recall, I had planned on making Anki flash cards from the large collection of example sentences and short conversations found in The Preparatory Course for The Japanese Language Proficiency Test, Level 4. However, in hindsight I believe there are two problems with this approach:
  1. It's incredibly time consuming to construct the flash cards
  2. I'm not sure the range of sentences covers enough vocabulary
Perhaps with more time to prepare this method may have worked out. Right now I'm really being held back by a poor vocabulary. I'm sticking to the Anki flash card approach but I'm supplementing the sentence flash cards with very basic vocabulary ones, and I'm about to make a new deck (of flashcards) for Kanji and Kanji compunds.

If you're also studying for JLPT Level 4 I'm sure you're already well aware of Peter van der Woude's excellent JLPT Study Page which covers not just Level 4 but also Levels 2 and 3. This is a great resource for the official Kanji list and vocabulary that I'm using to help make my flash cards. I'm also a huge fan of the Denshi Jisho web-based dictionary.

With 18 days to go and plenty of work still to do, I have no real idea whether I'll be able to pull this off. The plan is to do as much prep work as possible before taking a look at the past papers from 2004 - 2006 when I have a week to go, which should give me some contingency if these past papers throw up any concerns. がんばって ください!