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 3rd, 2006 at 9:00 pm
With your permission I’ll be linking to this entry when I get down to writing.
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Wei Zhong's Online DiaryDecember 3rd, 2006 at 9:01 pm
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 …
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:02 pm
Haiyo, why am I suddenly from the US?
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:03 pm
You trackbacked. Your blog’s server is in US.
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Peardruidの生きた証拠 » Blog Archive » JLPT1… For the last time?December 3rd, 2006 at 9:28 pm
[...] Pics [...]
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:38 pm
Wow. So many people taking the JLPT tests? What was the age range of the people taking the tests?
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Mostly working adults. Generally below middle age.
December 3rd, 2006 at 10:55 pm
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.
December 3rd, 2006 at 11:34 pm
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
December 4th, 2006 at 12:08 am
You know you already passed ^^
December 4th, 2006 at 1:07 am
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～
December 4th, 2006 at 1:07 am
Zen V eh? Is it any good?
December 4th, 2006 at 1:34 am
omg the exam looks cool
December 4th, 2006 at 1:38 am
/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”.
December 4th, 2006 at 3:37 am
>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.
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?
December 6th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
DM needs to get precisely 343 for his JLPT1… ^^ Good luck!
December 8th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
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.*
December 8th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
I’m not 16.
That said, I started Japanese in Sec 1.
December 9th, 2006 at 12:19 am
Dai-yem! That is way cool. How’d you get to take up that subject anyway? Special classes by your school?
December 9th, 2006 at 11:57 am
Ministry of Education Language Centre. It was my third language option.
December 15th, 2006 at 12:45 am
Abit late but any 1 knows where to get the questions & answers for jlpt 2006 for all levels?
December 21st, 2006 at 4:24 pm
wat do they test u on?
April 5th, 2008 at 9:53 am
OMG! I want to learn japanese too! You singaporean?