So, I randomly had 125 hits to this blog yesterday with no referrer (which means people are typing henrymatt.com into their address bar). I have no idea what caused this. The internet is weird.

Today was the culmination of a lot of hard work. True, a lot of times I say that I work hard and I don’t really work hard, but I spent four consecutive weekends in the library, including the afternoons of Tuesday and Thursdays and whatever time I could fit in the cracks going back about three months preparing for today, the JLPT.

Back in June, I figured that by this time I could take level 3 if I was feeling bored, but level 2 was way out of reach. But during midterm consultations with one of my teachers, she told me that I could probably take level 2 and have a good chance at passing it. Considering that I usually have much more delusional expectations of myself than others, this surprised me enough that I decided to give it a shot.

The course content of level 4 at KCP targets some JLPT 2 material specifically (under the creative title of “JLPT 2 Grammar”). The idea is that by level 5, all the material for the JLPT 2 has been covered in class. Me and many of my classmates who also took the test, being in level 4, had to do some significant work outside of class in order to have a chance.

Regardless of whether or not I actually passed the test (which I at no point considered a done deal — even now), it was nice to have some sort of guide post to look to. As I’ve thoroughly documented in this blog, I came to Japan with a very lopsided understanding of the language. I knew a ton of kanji but I didn’t know any of the words that people actually use in daily life. I could carry a conversation, but I would make about three errors a sentence and nobody ever corrected me. In my first semester at KCP, I would go from finding certain things incredibly easy to suddenly be completely lost in a five minute span. This is because I taught myself, and I’m a terrible teacher.

So one of the main things that attracted me to attempting the test is that it would allow me to get my skill level up to a certain, standardized point. Every category of the language needs to get to a certain, definite point. It forces you to work hard on the parts you’re weak at and balance everything out. So, while having a certificate that says I passed JLPT 2 would be nice, I was more looking forward to being able to concretely measure where I’m at. I now know that JLPT 2 books are going to contain material that I’ve already covered and JLPT 1 books are going to contain something new. All across the board. So I don’t need to think “oh, this book would be good for grammar but the kanji is way too easy” or “here’s a good book for kanji but holy crap these example sentences are ridiculous”.

Going forward, past the sheltered environment of KCP where I am protected from my own foolish mistakes, this is important for choosing my own self study curriculum. I also talked with a level 5 teacher and he said that I could basically just get some JLPT 1 test preparation books and it would be pretty similar to the curriculum I would have gotten in level 5 and 6.

But as for the test itself… I went to sleep really early the night before and woke up at 6:00 in order that I could act like a responsible student and take a shower, have breakfast, and be alert enough for test. It took about an hour to get to the test site, a university. The staff of the test were all very professionally dressed, with a yellow band around their arms indicating they were staff. I found my way into room 202, a large classroom with about 64 seats. The demographics were pretty predictable: mostly Korean or Chinese, with a lot of Malaysian students as well. Of the western kids, I found out that most of them were actually Italian. In my classroom, there were perhaps four Americans including me, although I can’t know for sure.

One thing I was happy about was that I was seated in the very middle, in the second row back. The listening comprehension exercises at school are typically from a cassette tape (seriously, Japan?) and the recording quality ranges from bad (the professionally made tapes) to awful (the ones that KCP teachers recorded themselves, from the sounds of it, in one of the bathrooms). It’s perhaps a cop-out to blame poor performance on this, but it’s kind of a big deal.

The JLPT is split into three sections, with a break between each one. The first section was Vocabulary/Sentences. This mainly focused on the usage of words, and matching kanji compounds with their readings. If it’s possible for me to say I have one section that I’m good at, it’s this. After the first section, I was feeling pretty cocky. There were also about three questions that I only knew the answer because I had studied them the day before. That’s probably more luck than anything, but so often in tests I get asked the one word that I didn’t study, so it was nice to have a reversal when it actually mattered.

The second section is the dreaded listening comprehension. But I found that it was surprisingly manageable when I actually hung on each word like grim death. In class, perhaps my eyes glaze over a bit during the long listening comprehension lessons. For the hour that this section took place though, I made sure to listen to every word. One of my teachers gave me advice when I brought up my difficulty with listening comprehension at the most recent midterm discussion; to visualize something while listening. I found that trying to listen to each word and hoping that no words I’ve never heard of pop up just results in my entire train of thought being shafted as soon as those words inevitably do pop up. Instead, my teacher told me to imagine the situation being described as a situation, cast friends in the roles, and just build the image in your head with the description from the audio. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, because I’m a visual person to a fault, but it made a lot of sense when I put it into practice and the listening section went well in part because of it.

After the second section, I grabbed just enough lunch that it would keep me running but not so much that I would get tired like I always do. I also had a chance to talk to one of the Italian dudes, who was a designer. I like to glorify what I do as “motion graphic design”, so I was able to talk to him a little about that. I find that getting burnt out is a state unrepairable by anything but sleep, so it was nice to talk about something completely not Japanese for a few minutes. Similarly, when I study in the library, I often go and look at the English books when I start to feel the onset of burn out.

The third section is reading comprehension and grammar. It was worth the same amount of points as the last two sections combined, so I couldn’t coast on it. Whether or not I can do reading comprehension well or not is depending on my mental state, and I haven’t exactly pinned down the formula to get to said state. Sometimes I’ll just look at a sentence and think “that makes no dang sense” and sometimes I’ll breeze through a paragraph.

The reading comprehension confirmed my suspicion that the practice books I was using actually contained harder material than the test itself. Usually in a long passage, there will be about eight very difficult words with footnotes that explained the meaning, but there were perhaps twice that many words within the passage that were just as hard. In the test, I understood almost all the words and even some of those that were called out in footnotes. The questions were a little abstract for my liking. There were hardly any questions that had answers that jumped out as definitely right or definitely wrong. I also had to read very quickly. Although I didn’t bring a clock with me, my internal clock was telling me to book it even though the meaning of the sentences were a little uncertain. After all, it would be a shame to not get to the 40 grammar questions because I was hung up on the 20 reading questions.

Accepting that I was not going to get a hundred percent on the reading, I finished up and moved onto grammar. Here, I also had to thank the books I used to prepare for the test, as I recognized a lot of question patterns. As I got closer and closer to the end, I started to think that it would probably be very cathartic to finally be done with this. Just ten more, just five more, just two more… I literally filled in the last bubble as the proctor called time. And rather than feeling as if I completed something large, I felt like there was still a lot of work to do yet. All memory of the first two sections were gone, and I was too focused on all the half-guesses I had to make during this section. I still had a lot of work to do…. not in order to pass the test — I think worst case scenario I still pass — but in order to get to the point where I can leave here feeling like I’ve really accomplished something. How’s that for lame? Look, I’m trying to feel good about my accomplishments, but my brain won’t let me. Oh well.

As a reward for myself, I went to Kinokuniya and bought a book in English. Reading it on the train back to Minami Senju was a nice feeling. Like, “ha, I can understand every word!” And then the word “exsanguinate” popped up and even that cockiness was gone.

Oh, by the way, we have a test tomorrow and some homework due as well. It’s a good thing I don’t have a social life over here…