I feel like this kind of a silly thing to ask but it’s been driving me nuts for a week and I can’t find any answers online. I have read that the format for the Listening section of the JLPT is:
\-A brief description of what the audio will be (a male manager is talking to a female employee, etc.) and then the question that you must answer
\-Enough time to read the answers before the audio (for the questions that have printed answers)
\-The full audio, and then the question repeated
But I have no idea what “enough time” means for me. I’ve been practicing with these online listening practice tests on Youtube where there doesn’t seem to be any time to read the answers at all. There’s like a pause of 2.5 seconds before the full audio is played. I’m thinking, that can’t be the amount of time we’re given. But is it more like 5 seconds? 10 seconds? I imagine that being able to read through the answers is crucial to the note taking strategy because it introduces the key words and actions you would want to look out for in the audio.
I feel like I’ve been underperforming on a lot of the practice tests on Youtube because I’ve been trying to complete them in real time without pausing, so this means that in order to read the answer options I try to skim them either during the description time, or during the audio itself. It will make me lose focus on what I need to be paying attention to, or miss things during the audio. I feel like I should be pausing to let myself read the answers like how people describe the test. But there’s a huge difference between a 5 second, 10 second, or even a 15 second pause, and I don’t want to be blindsided by a quicker time than anticipated on the real test.
If you have taken the test before, do you remember about how long you were given between the stated question and the audio itself? Or if you can’t remember a ballpark time, how did you feel? Rushed, or like you had time to read through each possible answer fully? More than enough time?
Thank you for humoring me–I know it’s not really that deep.
2 comments
Interesting question lol I also wanna know how many seconds they give for the listening test. I actually took the N3 test and I have no idea if it’s 5s, 10s, before or after the question or what. But it felt like I had plenty of time, but maybe that’s just me since it’s my strongest section.
I took alot of Todai EASY App practice tests before taking the real exam, the listening part seems to have about the same timing as the real one.
You get roughly around 10-15 seconds.
Basically the format is something along the lines of.
1. Question that must be answered for the listening exercise gets read.
i.e. 女の人はなにをしましたか?
2. Audio plays (1-2 min)
3. Initial question replays (this is around 3-5 seconds depending on the initial question)
女の人はなにをしましたか?
4. Around 10 seconds of silence to mark the answer.
If you count the speaker re-reading the question as part of the time to answer it’s around 15 seconds, without counting that it’s around 10.
Overall it does feel a bit rushed if you don’t fully grasp the audio after listening to it. If you still need a few seconds after the audio finishes to “process” what was asked/what was said, you won’t have enough time.
For questions where you know what was said during the audio, and can answer the question while the audio is still playing, it feels like a breeze.