Second childhood

Partly as a reward to myself for passing the JLPT 2 test, and partly to help with further learning, I decided some time ago to get a Nintendo DS lite. This took some time as the Yodobashi stores have been permanently sold out (and not even taking orders) and I didn't want it so much as to actually go to Tokyo and pay over the recommended price at the handful of shops that were price-gouging (yeah, "matching supply and demand").

By chance, I wandered in to the Yokohama store on Friday evening just as they had a batch in, so I joined the queue and am now the happy owner of a blue plastic child's toy :-)

As I said, it's for study really, and I've got a couple of kanji-learning applications, this Kanji Kentei drill program and this new release "Nazotte oboeru otona no kanji renshuu" (trace and learn kanji practice for adults"). Both of them go through the 1945 jouyou ("daily use") kanji in the standard order that every schoolchild takes about a decade to learn. The former application is aimed squarely at a series of kanji exams that this organisation organises, with lots of questions in that style. The latter is (despite the name) more like a children's learn-to-write program with patterns to trace over.

Although I had to learn to read about 1000 kanji for the JLPT test, that was just multi-choice with no writing required, so I'd hardly learnt any writing at all. In fact writing is completely irrelevant to my daily life in Japan (I've never found anywhere that normal Roman characters are not usable) and even native Japanese often struggle a bit when forced to write by hand. However I'm sure that the action of writing will help to embed the shapes in my memory and I'm also tempted to have a go at one of the kanji tests this year as the JLPT1 is too big a jump in one step and the Kanji Kentei tests are more finely graded.

I was rather surprised on starting up the Nazotte oboeru program that the first practice set of kanji which it presented me with were rather difficult ones which I had no idea how to read or write. It turns out that the program judges your starting level based on your age - I had thought it was a little intrusive to ask for date of birth along with name to personalise the game at the start, but hadn't thought it would really matter. So now according to the machine I am James aged 5 again :-)

Both the programs are aimed solely at Japanese, not foreign learners of the language. They rely on the user knowing a lot of vocabulary (written phonetically), and as such they are not really suitable for beginners. They certainly do not replace my home-brewed English/Japanese flashcard program but should augment it usefully. There's certainly plenty of japanese reading practice in the programs! I'm also going to try some graphic novel/adventure games, of which a select few are available in dual language Japanese/English versions.

Goukaku shimashita!

That means "I passed" and the kanji version is 合格しました. What this means is that my JLPT level 2 test results just arrived. I got 250 points out of 400, which is 62.5%, just scraping over the 60% pass mark.

The breakdown was:

77/100 Kanji and Vocab
59/100 Listening
114/200 Reading/Grammar

which was pretty close to what I thought, plus one or two lucky guesses. I'm not sure whether I should be more pleased to have passed or to have accurately predicted my result :-)

2006 JLPT 2kyu test & answers

No doubt breaching all sorts of copyright restrictions, but nevertheless, someone has posted 2006 JLPT 2kyu test & answers here (with a couple of mistakes at least, by my reckoning). Of course, it's too late for me to remember how I answered many of the questions, but I reckon I might just have sneaked a fail, which will be disappointing (not that it actually matters). Have to wait a few months for the official answer still.

JLPT done

...so I can now forget everything I have memorised over the last 6 months :-)

I won't reveal any details of the test as it still hasn't started in some parts of the world.

The day started rather inauspiciously with someone deciding that now was a good time to jump in front of a train. I guess if you are going to bring the network to a halt, early Sunday morning is one of the less disruptive times to do it, but there were still plenty of us up and about at that time. Fortunately I had given myself plenty of time, so after a brief panic I got a bus to Ofuna and still arrived at the exam site with plenty of time. It was interesting to note that (a) there were probably something like 1000 people, just for the 2 kyuu exam in the Yokohama region and (b) many (most? all that I heard speaking in Japanese, which was quite a few) of them were really pretty fluent in Japanese. I suspect I would have been in the bottom 1st percentile for that, but it's not a spoken test!

I think the first couple of papers went about as expected. I was pleased to overhear a couple of people talking about the aural exam just after it finished, confirming that a couple of my "probably right" answers were in fact correct. I came a bit unstuck in the middle of the third paper - reading comprehension and grammar, which is always a bit of a desperate race against time - but finished with an easy reading section (3 questions, 15 points) which means it can't have been that bad overall.

The exam didn't seem particularly hard compared to the practice tests (and last year's exam) which means I should have passed by a modest margin. [For reference, that means that this book of practice tests which I had struggled with is clearly way too hard, and this one is much more realistic (although in contrast to the first book it doesn't explain the answers, and it also has a few misprints).] But I will have to wait and see. Since the answers are marked on a multi-choice machine-readable card, this will only take.....more than 2 months. Yes, there is no typo there. It's like getting reviews out of GRL :-) Probably they have to arrange a line of OL's bowing and making cups of tea while a Shinto priest waves hs magic wand at each answer sheet. And then arrange an meaningless interview for each exam sheet that passes the 60% threshold, which no one can give any plausible explanation for (sorry, in-joke there).

Pass or fail, I don't plan to take 1 kyuu next year. I guess I could probably just about make it if I really tried, but slogging though another 1000 kanji (and the rest) would test my patience. Rather, I would prefer to aim for "has the ability to converse, read, and write about matters of a general nature" which nominally describes a 2 kyuu candidate. Yeah, right. A language exam that doesn't actually test either speaking or writing ability is a strange (and rather badly designed) beast indeed. Still, studying for it has certainly enhanced my ability to read and comprehend Japanese.

Another JLPT test

Hmm..that's a redundant "test" there in the subject line...like when I use my personal PIN number at the automatic ATM machine. Never mind.

As had been threatened, my Japanese teacher gave me another test as practice - the real 2005 exam. Since yesterday was a rainy holiday ("Labour Thanksgiving Day"), I stayed at home and did it. She seemed rather surprised that I passed by a clear margin (67%), but that's because she doesn't realise that I've been teaching myself the half of the syllabus that she hasn't had time for in our lessons :-)

Obviously, the exam was at the easier end of the tests I've tried - especially the kanji/vocab paper, and the grammar section of the last paper both of which I got "personal best" scores on. The real surprise was the reading conprehension which was far longer than I'd got used to - 24 questions in all, compared to a usual 18-20. So I really struggled for time on that and had to mostly just scan the texts quickly and choose the most plausible answer. The little homilies are invariably written from a very standard middle-class liberal perspective so the gist is generally something about bringing up or children well (whilst allowing them their freedom to develop) or looking after the environment...rather mind-numbing-stuff, to be honest.

Not much I can do now except hope the real thing (just over a week away) isn't much harder.

Testing times

Did the last one of my JLPT practice tests last weekend, and got 67%. It was the 4th of the easy set though, which leaves me none the wiser as to my chances. If the real test (3 weeks away) is as easy as that one was - which seems unlikely - I'll surely pass. If it's as hard as the one I did 3 weeks ago - which I suspect is more likely - I might well fail. I'd be surprised to not get something in the range of 55-65% but that doesn't help much given the 60% pass mark! I did manage to pass each individual section for the first time which was moderately pleasing. I've also still got another 100+ kanji to wade through which might be worth an extra point or two - although I'm probably forgetting old ones as fast as I'm learning new ones now :-)

The exam is (for me) being held in some out-of-the-way place I've never heard of called Fuchinobe. I'd been hoping/expecting it to be somewhere around Yokohama but it's nearer to Hachioji - a full hour by train and then a 30 minute walk (ok, in theory there is a bus, but they warn it might be too busy unless I'm early enough that I might as well walk anyway). Since I'm half-an-hour from the station at this end too it will be an early start for a Sunday morning.