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My final JLPT adventure

1 min read38 comments

…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.

JLPT

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

JLPT JLPT
Bus stop outside the MRT Station.
JLPT
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.
JLPT
Queuing up for the bus. Less crowded than previous years because level 1 is in the afternoon. The morning batch is much crazier.
JLPT
Here it comes!
JLPT
All aboard the JLPT express! One-way trip to your doom!
JLPT
Last-minute prayer on the bus.
I left all my notes at home so I had nothing else to do.
JLPT
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.
JLPT
Queuing up to take a test. How crazy is that?
JLPT
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.
JLPT
Got my room number. So long, suckers!
JLPT
The classrooms.
JLPT
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?

38 responses

  1. Pear Avatar
    Pear

    With your permission I’ll be linking to this entry when I get down to writing.

  2. Wei Zhong’s Online Diary

    JLPT and Operations Research…

    The time limit for the Grammar/Reading paper of the JLPT presents me with two choices: attempt the grammar questions or the comprehension questions. Some calculation appears to confirm my gut feel that it is wiser in my circumstances to start with the …

  3. wei zhong Avatar
    wei zhong

    Haiyo, why am I suddenly from the US?

  4. DarkMirage Avatar
    DarkMirage

    You trackbacked. Your blog’s server is in US.

  5. Peardruidの生きた証拠 » Blog Archive » JLPT1… For the last time?

    […] Pics […]

  6. Bridge Bunny Avatar
    Bridge Bunny

    Wow. So many people taking the JLPT tests? What was the age range of the people taking the tests?

  7. DarkMirage Avatar
    DarkMirage

    Mostly working adults. Generally below middle age.

  8. Tsubaki Avatar
    Tsubaki

    You’re only 16 and you’re taking JLPT1.

    tj’s really right. You’re a 40 year old trapped in a 16 year old body.

  9. hayase Avatar
    hayase

    Wow DM you still had the time to take pics!

    But at least not that many people took the exam where I’m from =p

  10. ダニー Avatar
    ダニー

    You know you already passed ^^

  11. AzureFlux Avatar
    AzureFlux

    LOL! You used the same classroom as I did in the morning, 3-15 :P Nikyuu this year didn’t seem very hard compared to the previous years papers, except that I didn’t study at all :O 合格できるかな～

  12. exalt dragon Avatar
    exalt dragon

    Zen V eh? Is it any good?

  13. Chicken Avatar
    Chicken

    omg the exam looks cool

  14. kikuchiyo Avatar
    kikuchiyo

    /me reporting from Hungary: this year’s 2-kyuu was relatively easy compared to the others I did while practising. It’s possible that even I will pass X.X
    BTW a record number of people registered for the exams here. 51 for the 2-kyuu and 134 for the 3-kyuu. They had to hold the 4-kyuu in a different building, because there were so many applicants.

    There is a question that’s benn bugging me: are the test contents the same all over the world? If that’s the case, how can they ensure that the answers remain secret – I mean I could have written to my hypothetic friend in America something like “watch out for the choukai question 13, the correct answer is Monday, not the next day”.

  15. Doraneko Avatar
    Doraneko

    >kikuchiyo

    Well, you are perfectly correct. Indeed I think there are people doing things like that every year. Certain centres do not collect the “straps” that sticks the 3 answer sheets together. Veterans can copy answers there, smuggle them out and post them online.

    For your information, the whole of the listening recordings, as well as many answers to the 06 papers are already out.

  16. sexualhealing Avatar
    sexualhealing

    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.

  17. mawi Avatar
    mawi

    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.

  18. LianYL Avatar
    LianYL

    @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.

  19. Thunderance Avatar
    Thunderance

    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. >.

  20. DarkMirage Avatar
    DarkMirage

    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. >_>

  21. wei zhong Avatar
    wei zhong

    They didn’t, for mine. My 2004 JLPT little-piece-of-paper is still lying around, somewhere…

  22. Kyoji Avatar
    Kyoji

    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 >_

  23. DarkMirage Avatar
    DarkMirage

    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

  24. exalt dragon Avatar
    exalt dragon

    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….

  25. Syock Avatar
    Syock

    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.

  26. DarkMirage Avatar
    DarkMirage

    exalt dragon: I bought it at the recent creative sale. Just a week ago. For the student price.

  27. exalt dragon Avatar
    exalt dragon

    Eh? I’m sure it was 89 dollars! Ah well, whatever you say..

  28. Beowulf Avatar
    Beowulf

    What! DM, you’re only 16?!

  29. rick Avatar
    rick

    @Beowulf hard to imagine right esp since he does all the eroge reviews. lol.

  30. wei zhong Avatar
    wei zhong

    Is he not 18?

  31. Pear Avatar
    Pear

    DM needs to get precisely 343 for his JLPT1… ^^ Good luck!

  32. AK Avatar
    AK

    Say, how exactly did you enroll for Jap classes anyway, at only 16?

    *AK plans to advance to advance to JC level (when he’s 17 years old, which is two years from now) before he takes up Japanese as an official academic class.*

  33. DarkMirage Avatar
    DarkMirage

    I’m not 16.

    That said, I started Japanese in Sec 1.

  34. AK Avatar
    AK

    Dai-yem! That is way cool. How’d you get to take up that subject anyway? Special classes by your school?

  35. DarkMirage Avatar
    DarkMirage

    Ministry of Education Language Centre. It was my third language option.

  36. Ying Avatar
    Ying

    Abit late but any 1 knows where to get the questions & answers for jlpt 2006 for all levels?

  37. jeremy Avatar
    jeremy

    wat do they test u on?

  38. Bryson Avatar
    Bryson

    OMG! I want to learn japanese too! You singaporean?

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