Tag: jlpt

Passed JLPT N1!

With flying colors, I might add. I got the certificate in the mail. It’s like college apps all over again: big envelope means you passed, small envelope means you didn’t. The certificate itself is pretty soft and flimsy, though. I prefer hard paper.

But I digress. The pass mark for N1 was 100/180, if I recall correctly. Pretty low standards, if you ask me. I got 150/180, which is 83%. Not bad at all. The breakdown was 57/60 for grammar, 44/60 for reading and 49/60 for listening. I should have worked on my reading skills some more, I suppose. A pass is a pass though. All that traveling up and down and going back and forth paid off.

The real question though, is “what next?” Now I have my N1 certificate, what now? I don’t have an answer for that. I didn’t take it for any practical reasons. I just wanted to have that qualification “just in case”, and just so I could say I did. For now I have no intention of going to Japan or working for a Japanese company. In any case, any company worth its salt should be more concerned about my actual ability than about any piece of paper I possess. However you never know when that may change. I doubt the certificate will ever make or break any job application or school application I write, but it could sway things in my favor a bit. And it looks good on my resume, which never hurts.

In short, I’m going to pack the certificate away somewhere safe for now. Maybe in the future I’ll have a use for it, maybe I won’t. For now, I’m just happy I have it.

Canto-ing it up!

I mentioned last time that I was adding vocabulary items from my JLPT studies to my SRS. I did that, got a nice healthy number of items. There was an unfortunate side effect from inputting them as just kanji and kanji compounds though. What happens is that I always go straight from working on my Cantonese items to reviewing my JLPT words, and then I get completely confused and try to read them in Cantonese. Stuff like 膨張 looks completely Cantonese, doesn’t it? It takes me several minutes to reorient myself every time.

Apart from that, everything’s going swimmingly. I’m not even letting the Christmas holidays distract me (though I did skip SRSing on Christmas day). As a matter of fact, I’m starting to see the lack of Cantonese learning material as a clear advantage instead of a disadvantage these days. When you start learning a language with a ton of resources, there’s the temptation to spend days and weeks and months just gathering material, reading reviews, discussing best approaches, etc., etc., with fellow learners.

With Cantonese there’s very little to talk about, you just take what you’re lucky to get and dive in. There’s a limit to how many Canto-learning blogs and forums you can waste time on, and fellow Canto learners tend to be at a relatively low level so you can’t spend all day feeling intimidated either. It’s pretty swell.

So without much ado, back to Teach Yourself Cantonese! I try not to put too much pressure on myself, but I want to be done with that book by March, God willing. I skipped along to the end and there’s a ton of vocabulary in there so I should be pretty far ahead by the time I’m done with it. After that, well, we’ll see.

JLPT is over!

Phew!

When I posted last time about taking the JLPT level N1, I never thought the day would actually come. I have a habit of signing up for stuff and then going “Oh crap!” as the day approaches. I didn’t start studying till pretty late in November, but I was surprised at how much I knew already and how little was “new” to me. The majority of new things I learned were rarely used kanji for common words, like 頓て for やがて. The exam itself was no big deal, I finished with time to spare. The new N1 supposedly tests more advanced skills, which is why there’s less straightforward quizzing and more reading comprehension.

The best tip I can give anyone who wants to take it is: Work on your Reading Skills. The texts aren’t hard, but there’s a lot to read and not that much time. If you keep reading, your reading speed will grow and you should be able to finish everything. Otherwise you’ll be crawling along in a helpless panic, which you really don’t want to go through. As for the listening section, the pace is actually quite slow and they speak in clear, deliberate tones. You shouldn’t have any problems with it if you’ve been watching shows in Japanese for a while.

And that was it! I’m pretty sure I’ll pass, “I had a good feeling!” I’m just glad it’s over with! One of the criticisms of the JLPT is that you study your ass off for the test, pass, and never use half the stuff you learned again. Well, I’m not going to let that happen. That’s what my SRS is for, chock full of anything I found remotely useful. I made a separate deck for the JLPT stuff, even. If I can learn new vocabulary and constructs from the exam, then whether I pass or not, it’s worth it.

Now that that’s out of the way, it’s back to Cantonese! I finally figured out how to split audio files using Audacity (ah, the magic of Google!). It’s easier than I’d thought, and lots of fun too. I sit down and take a few minutes to chop up the file before adding the lesson to my SRS, and then everything goes smooooothly. I also discovered that my university has Yip’s “Intermediate Cantonese Grammar” or whatever that book is called, available as an e-book. I’ll leave that alone for now, but that’s my next step after I finish the book I’m working on. Why let free materials pass me by?

And that’s all that’s going on with me so far! I feel like a huge weight fell off my shoulders, lol!

Slowly but surely

Right now I’m in the process of entering my Teach Yourself Cantonese book dialogues into surusu. It’s slow going because I’m really not used to typing in Cantonese, but I’m already up to chapter 7 and going great. Entering the dialogues really helps me remember the vocabulary and the grammatical structure without feeling like I’m cramming unnecessarily. I think I’ll do this with any other textbook I pick up, though I really feel I should jump right into real texts once I’m done with this book. Well, we’ll see.

What I’d really like is to cut up the audio and include that as well, but I’m hopeless at making Audacity do anything I want, and too lazy to download any other audio editing software, so…yeah.

Only other thing to report is a site I found, dramacrazy.net, where I can stream Japanese/Korean/Chinese dramas, movies and anime at will. In the past I didn’t bother with such sites because my internet was a slow piece of crap, but now I’ve switched ISPs, I can play around a bit more. Following my failed experiment with Last Friends a while ago, I don’t feel like watching any J-dramas, but I love Cantonese period dramas, so I’m going to be working my way through them in a while.

Oh yeah, I signed up to writ the JLPT level N1 in December! Just for the fun of it, really. Bragging rights and all that, “all my friends have one, why can’t I?” etc etc. Unfortunately I haven’t started studying for it yet, I keep telling myself I’ll do it from November. Will I really? Hahahaha…