N4 exam is this Sunday. Listening skills are utterly atrocious, feel like my brain just doesn’t work fast enough to ever get any better at listening, and my vocabulary is missing a lot of the N4 words. Even for some words I’ve learned already I struggle recognise them when they are spoken. I probably get on average about 3/10 listening questions correct on the sample exam papers.
Has anybody ever successfully crammed for the listening part? I’ve pretty much resigned to failure at this point. But after that, I guess I need to get serious about practicing listening. Right now I just feel dumb and slow and like this is an unsurmountable hurdle
3 comments
Breath. Take a step back from your N4 resources. Instead pick something very easy. An absolute beginner podcast. An N5 listening practise. Something where you know >90% of thevocab used. And just train your ears with that for a bit.
Since you will know almost every word, you won’t need to stress yourself with ‘translating’ everything in your head and you should be able to concentrate on how things are said. Your goals should be 1. you are able to summarize what was said and 2. you can listen for a longer time. Once you can do that reliably with the easy practises, try out your N4 material again. Good luck.
listen to some practice stuff but don’t stress about it. get good sleep and eat some healthy food before going. nothing done in the last 48 hours will make a huge difference. even if by some chance you do badly, just take it again next year and do better. there’s no race here.
for what it’s worth, i’m probably failing the N1 on saturday, i’ve done so little studying and just coasted this last year. i’m curious what i get good or bad marks on, but i’m just at peace with taking the score as feedback for what to work on next year.
You should get 25% of questions right just by guessing. If you know the answer, select it. If not, for every one of those questions pick the same number. You could very well pass just by doing that.