My final JLPT adventure
…hopefully. I just got home. Today’s JLPT 1 paper was the hardest Japanese paper I have ever taken in my whole life. It felt like an entire level higher than all the level 1 past year papers that I’ve been doing. I guess they were really out to fail people. Oh well.

Like any Singaporean who has taken the test before would tell you, it all begins at Tanah Merah MRT Station…


Bus stop outside the MRT Station.

Here is where you wait for SBS service no.2, the ONLY bus that goes to the Singapore Japanese School which is located in the middle of nowhere.

Queuing up for the bus. Less crowded than previous years because level 1 is in the afternoon. The morning batch is much crazier.

Here it comes!

All aboard the JLPT express! One-way trip to your doom!

Last-minute prayer on the bus.
I left all my notes at home so I had nothing else to do.

The entrance to the Japanese School. You have to show your exam slip to get in, or they’ll set the guard dogs on you. Post-9/11 safety measure.

Queuing up to take a test. How crazy is that?

The mad rush to find out your classroom. Pray that it’s an upper-primary classroom, because the lower-primary kids use fricking tiny chairs and tables.

Got my room number. So long, suckers!

The classrooms.

This is where I took the test. The chairs are almost regular size. :O
And the rest, as they say, is history.
So, how did everyone else do?



December 4th, 2006 at 4:53 am
I took JLPT 1 at Changi today too.
At Room 3-1X, where X is a number > 1.
Don’t worry… if you have passed your past year papers’ mock test attempts with flying colours, you should be able to pass.
I’m ambivalent towards my performance. Now we wait till Feb/Mar 2007 to find out.
And learning Japanese does not end with a JLPT 1 cert… it’s a lifelong pursuit. Use it and get used to it, or lose it.
December 4th, 2006 at 5:34 am
took jlpt 3 today in vancouver =___=
gahhhh vocabs were hard compared to the ones before…
listening was really slow o.O usually the people talk faster. guess it made things a bit easier.
grammar was okay. similar to the ones before.
December 4th, 2006 at 6:50 am
@mawi Rubbish. I think I’m gonna die in Listening. I was so fucking tired I couldn’t hear anything at all. I think I slept through a question. I ended up guessing what they said with my own imagination. Grammar was piece of cake and vocab other than the middle section, was freakin’ easy. I just hate Listening.
December 4th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Taking level 4, I ended up in classroom 3-10 with tiny chairs…Bottom hurt a lot after that :(
Vocab was way harder than I expected, but doable for me. Listening was crap quality, and they were quite evil with a few questions. Grammar was easy, and i ended up spending the last 20 minutes translating the question passages into queen’s english. >.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Danny: I hope…
exalt dragon: It does what I need. And I got it for just 109 SGD from the Creative Warehouse Sale.
Doraneko: They did collect the little piece of paper for mine.
sexualhealing: Yeah… I’ll continue to practice with eroge. >_>
December 4th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
They didn’t, for mine. My 2004 JLPT little-piece-of-paper is still lying around, somewhere…
December 4th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
合格できるといいね!
Wow, that’s a lot of people… Are they all Japanese entertainment (Anime, Manga, Games etc.) fans or is there a lot of Japanese business in Singapore? And speaking of which, are you planning to work over in Japan future?
109SGD is quite a bargain for that player. Is it the normal Zen V 1GB version? I’m thinking of getting one but hmmm, I want a player that has CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) support. Don’t think the European version has that kind of support >_
December 4th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Yeah it’s a normal Zen V 1GB. It should have CJK support. There’s no reason for Creative to remove them since I’m pretty sure it uses Unicode.
As for working in Japan… that’s hard to say. :P
December 4th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
haha lol 109 dollars? You might have been ripped of..depending on when you bought it. In the recent creative sale(just about a week ago), there was a student offer for the Zen V(not Zen V plus) at 1 GB for 89 dollars….
December 4th, 2006 at 9:21 pm
Uhh, how did you do? Just how hard is 1級 compared to 2級? I presume you might be a chinese系 so all those 漢字s and 読解 should be easier for you. I even have a friend here who just came like last April and he`s already taking 1級 so I was like “What the heck? You just came to Japan, studied Japanese for barely 1 year and you`re taking 1級? Even I have only passed 3級 you know? You don`t even know what 小さじ and 大さじ is!” (we were reading a microwave cooking recipe book on how to bake a chocolate custard-cream-filled cake. Yeah we baked it yesterday. Tasted pancakey.)
I think I`ll try 1級 after a couple of years. In the meantime I`m going to study for 財団法人漢字検定試験.
December 4th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
exalt dragon: I bought it at the recent creative sale. Just a week ago. For the student price.
December 5th, 2006 at 1:04 am
Eh? I’m sure it was 89 dollars! Ah well, whatever you say..
December 6th, 2006 at 8:09 am
What! DM, you’re only 16?!
December 6th, 2006 at 11:55 am
@Beowulf hard to imagine right esp since he does all the eroge reviews. lol.
December 6th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Is he not 18?