How was it for you?

[hairlet]

Yesterday I took the JLPT4 in London.

Firstly, I was quite surprised at how many people were taking the test! All ages, race and gender (although mostly white men in their 20s). I would guess about 70-80 people taking JLPT4 and again about 70-80 taking JLPT3. Not sure about JLPT2-1 as this was a different building...

And the test. The first section - reading and writing - was easier than I was expecting. But the listening took me by surprise. I thought I was well rehearsed from listening to JPod every day, but I found this section difficult. And the last section - grammar - was a mixed bag. I found some easy and some difficult.

So, now the wait until MARCH. I find it hard to believe it takes so long to mark the papers. Maybe they have 1 person marking all papers for the whole world!

[Flamehearted]

Good luck ! Sounds like you have done well. I always hate the listening part - I can converse in Japanese pretty well with my Japanese friends, but for some reason I find taped conversations hard to follow. Also they only play it once which seems really mean.

I took 2 kyuu and think my fate hangs in the wind......scored around 63% I think Depends on what they set the pass mark at this year. I really struggled with the reading and listening.

[quistisgroupie]

I was in London for 4 kyuu as well but i think overall there were around 200 odd people taking it (the list of candidate numbers on the rooms guide went up into the 200s).

The smaller room i was taking the exam in in was more evenly gender mixed but mostly in the 20s.

I think your experience reassures me though! I thought the listening was notably harder than the 07 or 05 tests which I have done in practice for this years one. The sound test made me laugh though I almost wanted to cheer that it was the same voice actors and that i was very used to their accents.

Other two papers had the odd curveball but seemed okay.

I must admit I do wonder why it takes until March for the results, those exam papers are obviously marked via machine intially which should speed things up.

Due to the listening not so sure i passed but *fingers crossed*!

Q

[hairlet]

Ah good. I find it reassuring that you found it hard too.

And yes, there were MANY people there. I probably was being a little conservative.

[maddict]

Hihi,

Wow, its finally over and the wait to March seems like forever. I took the JLPT 4 on Sunday. I find the writing vocabulary paper pretty easy, I probabaly had 1 or 2 wrongs in the entire paper.

The Listening paper was pretty easy at first until the 2nd section. There was one point during the 2nd section, this lady beside me tried to have a peek at my answer and once I realized what was going on, I immediately lost concentration for that question (well you know what happened ).

Grammar paper is pretty difficult for me as compared to the previous year papers that I've done in preparation for the exam.

Overall, I think this year's paper is a bit more difficult to me personally as compared to the previous years (2002 - 2007 as I've done them all). Lets all hope that we pass this year's 4 kyuu and lets prepare for 3 kyuu next December

[lazysunday]

New York was very diverse. All ages, good gender and ethnicity mix.

I thought sec 1 was harder than 2004-7. There were a few real extreme curve balls for me. I had been acing this on the 2004-7 tests. Sec 2&3 were not insanely tough although 3 part 1 and 2 are my weaknesses, but I do advise memorizing "Who's on First" to practice your mental agility for the listening section.

My big realization is that I should have practiced filling out the dots. I wrote the answers in a notebook to avoid messing up the sample test books, but filling out the dots was tough.

[lazer85]

2kyuu, Well a 90 on Kanji/Vocab and a 10 on Listening.....I don't wanna have to hope for a 160 on reading and grammar. I just couldn't focus; despite being within my ability (at least half of them were) it was so much harder than the samples I did online so I wasn't prepared.

I'm ready for 1kyuu kanji/vocab level
2kyuu grammar and reading
and 3kyuu listening. To bad I cant average out the vocab and listening