I finally got the results for the Japanese Language Proficiency test I took at the end of last year about a week ago. I’ve been busy with essays and making posts on Golden Eggs though, so I hadn’t written about it yet. But, I managed to pass!

It was the first time for me to attempt the JLPT exam and I went for 2 Kyuu (level 2) straight off. 2 Kyuu requires that the student know about 1000 kanji, 6000 words and have a ‘high’ level of listening skill. It’s estimated you can take the test after about 600 hours of study. Well, I have been studying for 5 1/2 years now, I know probably about 600 kanji (my weakest point) and less than 6000 words. I do have pretty good listening skills though, so I was hoping to pull my score up in that section.

My final results were average I guess. To be honest, I was a little surprised. I had expected to get over 300 points (the maximum being 400) but I just fell short of it with 294 points ~ 73.5%. The pass mark is 60%. Many of my classmates who also took it passed. Congratulations all!

Bearing this in mind, I have a lot of work to do before next year’s 1 Kyuu. I plan to first master kanji using the Heisig method recommended to me by Jacob, a friend of mine studying Japanese in his first year. I also need to start reading and writing more to push my reading comprehension up. Listening should be okay I think. It’s a shame there’s no section for speaking in this test after my recent success in the Japanese Speech Contest for University students ^^;.

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Here’s another nice Japanese song by Superfly. One of the ones that jumped out at me from a recent Oricon listing!

Download Superfly – Ai wo komete hanataba wo