JLPT N5, here i come! Ehm... any suggestions for me?
More or less an year ago I decided to learn japanese for various reasons.
It mostly boils down to the desire I want to challenge myself but also because i have grown up reading manga, watching anime (before they were called anime in the mainstream so this reveals a bit of my age i suppose...) and I thought "how cool would it be to just pick a manga and read it in the language it was originally written? and wouldn't it be even cooler one day to go to Japan and speak with them in their language?"
That's more or less... it. That's the reason i have decided to take this "hobby".
Actually a couple of months after learning the first grammar rules i also thought "how hard could that be?" and i just got crushed by a little doraemon story. I understood the word "Nobita" :\
Anyway, so here i am now... In a month I'll try to pass the JLPT N5, the very super basic exam I'd like to pass just to prove myself that I can do it and I can move on to the next level.
I know that i could just skip it and keep on studying but after an year i feel i need a sort of... I dunno... a sort of token given from others. And if doraemon has proved something is that my mind alone cannot be trusted :)
I have seen that some of you know this language and I suppose, some of you have already tried and passed this exam.
So... any suggestion?
Is there anything i need to pay attention in particular? Anything i need to consider? Some hidden rule i do not have to break?
Something i should focus on in the last few weeks?
I'm open to suggestions because i keep on studying after dinner for an hour or so but, honestly, i am starting to feel a bit of tension.
p.s. I suppose my Achilles heel is the listening and comprehension. While i can read at a normal speed, I understand them only when they speak slow and sometimes, when a word is not immediately recognized boom... i just lose the flow trying to remember what that word meant and if i have ever heard it before.
JLPT N1 here.
Vast majority of examinees I've talked to spent the most time on reading comprehension, so if I had one tip to give it would be to make sure you don't read too slowly because it eats up time and there's a surprising amount of text to read. But I might have my perspective skewed because I've only focused on N2-N1 and never bothered to study for/take the lower levels, and those exams have page-long complex texts to parse for very specific info.
For the oral comprehension part there's not much I can recommend besides "listen more." The only way to get better at understanding Japanese is to get ridiculous amounts of input. But for N5 the audio will not be too difficult to parse and they speak relatively slowly, so I wouldn't be too worried.
If it serves as reassurance, I don't believe you will struggle much with N5 if you've actually spent a year actively studying Japanese, so don't beat yourself up and get stressed out (I know, easier said than done) The requirements for that level are very low and any adult learner should easily be able to fulfill them if they're actively studying for any decent amount of time.
Also, please don't worry if you don't get a perfect score. It's normal to get questions wrong because at the end of the day it's a timed exam and sometimes you end up rushing and messing up (or simply not having time to do everything). I don't know any N2/N1 learners with even close to a perfect score and none of them struggle to read a novel or speak in real life, so don't take the exam's score number to heart and focus more on the fact you passed.
Best of luck!
Ever so slightly off-topic:
As someone that wants to learn Japanese, what are y'all using to do so?
Things that really worked for me:
Ringotan: A kanji writing app, but starts with hiragana and katakana. It was instrumental in helping me learn the basics of the script. Once you learn the kana, your path opens up.
Renshuu: My favourite app in terms of learning vocabulary and grammar. Especially in combination with ringotan, it's the only one where I've been able to consistently keep at it, and feel like I'm progressing.
Renshuu is the way to go for SRS. It's got the richest integration between words, kanji, and sentences, so it can do things like showing you less furigana as you learn the kanji in the words you know.
The dev is also super friendly and the discord community is quite nice :)
Off topic, but just in case:
I just landed in Tokyo (literally taxiing to gate) from USA with my family, headed to Noto/Kanazawa area. If anyone happens to be either from there, or lives there now, let me know. I’ll be living there for ~3 years.
As a disclaimer, I haven't sat any JLPT tests so take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm working on N4-level grammar at the moment.
To me, the #1 thing that keeps me learning and motivated is just to read and listen more. Practice really does help, even if you're not focusing fully on understanding every little bit you'll still be training your ear to pick up the words you do know. If you're pretty comfortable with reading already, then maybe add some extra background listening through the rest of your day outside your dedicated study time? I listen to a lot of podcasts while doing other things, and it really helped my confidence and comprehension to just passively consume a bunch of episodes even if I wasn't catching every word.
If there's dedicated JLPT listening study resources then that's probably the thing to focus on with the exam getting close, but I'd recommend both "Sakura Tips" and Nihongo con Teppei's "Japanese podcast for beginners" if you want a change of pace. Teppei's is more conversational, while Sakura Tips is scripted and topic-focused, with transcripts available for the later episodes.
Good luck, and don't forget to enjoy the process! Nothing worse than studying so hard for something that it burns you out.
Maybe this will not be of help to you, since I'm not in your situation. But I've been participating in a Genki study group for over a year now (we're doing Genki II now) and I've been finding it harder to understand the listening portions, since they're now spoken too quickly and - I think this is significant - we've learned enough grammar rules that sometimes a base word is conjugated with a string of three or four suffixes and it's very easy to lose a tidbit of meaning that got dilluted inbetween other grammatical rules, which completely derails the whole sentence. I have to listen multiple times.
For me, the solution is to become familiar enough with the language that I will perceive everything that's in the sentence effortlessly. To that effect, my plan is to learn enough grammar that I can transition into reading books, even if I have to start slowly and having to look many things up. Then I'll just read until I sticks.
If you ever take a formal Japanese class...that's everyone. I took a continuing education class once and it was like 15 people who wanted to watch anime in Japanese, the old guy who wanted to travel back but speak the language again, and the old lady who insisted she learned it as a kid but never had any idea what was going on and the teacher eventually had to basically ignore all of her questions because she was wasting so much of our time.
Then there was me...I just thought it was an interesting language...