Level 3! Passed! Now on to Level 2! An order of magnitude more difficult! :smack:
:: cues up “Linus and Lucy” on the good ol’ iPod ::
:: performs “Snoopy Happy Dance” ::
:: apologizes to neighbors for the noise ::
Congratulations! Quite an achievement! Evil Captor Jr. is taking Japanese at his high school. He’s not “proficient” yet but he can read some of the stuff on menus. And that’s good. Damn good.
Well done!
I took level 2 in 1995 and failed it by 2 points - bummer. A resounding failure would have felt better than that.
Then I got pregnant with number one kid and never opened a book again. Judging from your name, this won’t happen to you…
There is indeed a huge jump from three to two, and it was at that point that I started paying for lessons. They really helped. If you can find a good teacher then I’d heartily recommend it.
I got 3s in Arabic.
the higher levels of the JLPE isn’t always the best metric, though. By the time you hit level 1 it seems to be less a test of your Japanese and more a test of how many kanji you know.
おめでとう御座います。
ファンキーに行こうぜ！
Thanks, everyone!
Had one, a couple of years back – but now I’m in a job where I work most evenings, which is when most classes are. Fortunately, I work at an English language cram school, and the boss allows (encourages, actually) me to ask for help in our spare time.
Johanna – is that good?
Caseinpoint – I’ll keep that in mind. If the study books that my boss “highly recommended that I buy” are any indication, the biggest problem for me from 3 to 2 will be the grammar…
EC – good luck to your son.
I thought about starting a thread on this over the weekend, so thanks, RobuSensei.
Level 2 合格した! Woot!
Made it past the cut-off mark by just four points. Kanji and listening were a snap, but the grammar section was a real SOB.
Which test site did you go to?
This is actually the first time in four tries that I’ve ever passed the test at any level. I tried level 3 when I first got here in '95 and missed by a wide mark, then tried again the next year and missed by one point. Then in 2001 I decided to try level 2 and missed by about 20 points. For some reason I decided to sign up last summer and try again for the hell of it.
What I like doing now is taking the Kanji Kentei exams, since those are designed for native speakers and require you to actually write your answer, rather than multiple-choice. Plus, they’re every four months instead of only once a year. I managed to pass level 6 in October, so I’ll try level 5 with the junior high kids some time this year (when I took level 8 I was in a room full of 9-year-olds).
My third grade son just did level 9 of the kanji kentei which is meant for second graders - he is a bit behind with his Japanese reading and writing partly because we have an English world at home (his father also speaks mostly English at home) with English books and videos rather than Japanese, and also because he has a concentration problem so sitting and writing anything is a misery for him.
Over the past few weeks of revision, I have said the same thing every night - if you just paid attention and actually thought about what you are writing, you’d pick up a lot more points!!! He drops about ten points a page for not putting in the dakuon (the dashes and circles) or missing a small tsu or yo or an u at the end of a word, or for scribbling a kanji and making it plain obvious that his stroke order was wrong.
So, the test was on Friday and we don’t know how he did as the results take a few weeks to come through. If he concentrated it would be a snap. If he spaced out, then God only knows…
Both testing systems have good and bad points - the JLPT is full of business and college words that I never met in real life as I learned Japanese by living and dating here. And the kanji kentei lower levels are full of animal names and plant names, and classroom helper names, and elementary school rules etc. Those were all alien to me too, though these days with kids in the system, and having sat with kid number one all those evenings, I am thinking that I should apply with him for the next one! (His elementary school puts all the kids in once a year and the school pays all the fees.)
Congratulations! Oddly, I also made it by just four points. The grammar section almost killed me too.
I first took the level 3 a couple years ago, and failed by 2 points. I would’ve tried again last year, but I was changing jobs and missed the cut-off date for the application. Almost missed it again this year, and I could have done more to prep for it, but now I’ve got the jump on level 2. (and man, I’m gonna need the extra time!)
Oh, and I took the test at Konan University in Kobe.
3 is kinda good, 4 is really good, 5 is perfection. Sometimes 2 is not good enough, sometimes it is. I do better on the written tests than spoken. If I could just take written tests I’d get higher scores.