Vocab and Grammar – 26/60
Reading – 24/60
Listening – 38/60
It’s quite an L to fail by 2 points, but in a way, it’s a good thing also – the next time I want to get a score that I’m happy to announce along with the pass. So far, I’ve done quite a bit of studying in my own time, but not for the exam: compiling tons of sheets of vocabulary for conversational topics (which unfortunately, isn’t targeted at the JLPT syllabus, more for being to actually have a conversation about things), 30 pages of grammar tables for different categories of grammar, and just frequently watching shows but not for the reasons of passing this exam, which to me is just an indicator, but one I want nonetheless. During the exam it was clear though that I just didn’t have enough vocabulary relevant to the exam and relatedly, more sophisticated content, and it’s this that did me in for vocabulary and reading. I’m not sure I can replicate that performance for listening if I did it now, either.
With that in mind, I want to challenge the next round in the next July exam, with the aim of getting a high score. Are there any textbooks or dictionaries that are dedicated specifically to “guarantee” you can clear the exam – and hopefully with a translation included as well?
I know there are people who believe that one should learn language in the language – while I don’t disagree that is the case overall for whole contexts and understanding the flow of speech, for vocabulary cramming, the best way for me so far has honestly been to brute force memorise as much relevant vocabulary as I can until there are fewer and fewer vocabulary that I can’t recognise. I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time to pore over each unfamiliar word in a text or searching its meaning in a JP dictionary when I’m learning new words – previously I was going through about 50-100 words a day while making my sheets, but I’ve hit a bottleneck – it’s now more common to find words I don’t know in JP and then having to search for them, which is time consuming.
I’m doing college right now, and I want to go at the speed I used to learn at without having to expend the time to do extra research (which I don’t have right now). Which is why I want the EN-JP (if possible, JLPT focused) dictionary/grammar so that I can just commit 50 words or so to memory each day while I’m doing this term. Even if it’s not JLPT, as long as I can add 50 words a day to my memory bank, I’m happy. If anyone has such a resource, or deck, anything really, please let me know where I can find them.
2 comments
>compiling tons of sheets of vocabulary
>vocabulary cramming
>brute force memorise
>just commit 50 words or so to memory each day
So, in your entire post, I didn’t see anything regarding reviews, which would greatly improve your scores by way of long-term info retention. That you use “brute force” methods for “vocabulary cramming” tells me you’re not the type of learner to remember everything just by seeing it once. If you were that type of learner “tons of sheets of vocabulary” wouldn’t be necessary.
Without incorporating consistent reviews into your routine, a JLPT-specific vocab book (of which there are plenty, by the way) won’t necessarily help you. Not unless I’m wrong and it turns out you *can* learn 50 new words just by seeing them once.
Have you considered Anki for doing your reviews? I mainly use it for vocabulary, but there’s absolutely nothing stopping the user from reviewing grammar on it as well. Also, even if you didn’t want to do the work of inputting your own vocab lists, people have also shared theirs. As an N2 taker, you’ll almost certainly encounter a lot of words you really don’t need to review anymore if you do go with the sacred decks.
Go to a random page # on this list https://www.jlptmatome.com/jlpt-n2-vocabulary-list/15/
Just go through and for every word that you don’t feel familiar with, go find an example sentence of it being used somewhere on the internet. Don’t just take the easy route and use an example sentence database. Go find a Wikipedia entry that uses the word or something like that. Really make an effort to understand the surrounding context as well. The word will stick in your brain a lot better if you associate a strong memory (i.e., an entire session of reading about a subject) with its recall than if you don’t. Hence it is really not a good idea to use a pre-made deck IMO.
If you slowly do this for all the words you can’t readily read on one page (mind you this *should* take hours, maybe even *days* just for one page, but this is fine because you have months to spare ) then by the time you get to the next page you’ll have noticeably improved.