JLPT: お天気がいいから散歩しよう

... said the voices, one after another, from the sound check CD.

A pretty much full seminar room at Hokuriku University had just returned from the gengo-chishiki portion of the exam. In classrooms all over Japan, examinees had just completed the first section of the new JLPT examination. For me, those 105 minutes really flew by fast, as I struggled to get through the reading portion of the exam. During June I had taken the 2007, 2008, and 2009 2-kyuu exams to practice, and had handily passed them. However, somehow this new N2 exam felt different, more difficult than the previous. One of the changes this year was the combination of the language knowledge section, if you don't manage your time you could spend too much time on the vocabulary/grammar section, and lose the valuable time necessary to work on the reading comprehension questions. I ended up having to shortcut the longest text, and just tried to pull the answers without reading the whole thing. One nice thing was the revision of the reading layout, it went from short to long, with the "graph," or on this test an informational bulletin, last; there's no need to skip to the end and go backwards anymore.

As for the listening part, there were two new types of questions for the N2 listening portion, both of them didn't give you the questions until after the dialog was spoken. The dialogs were simple, nothing different from the other sections, it just means that if you don't have a good memory, you have to take some notes.

I've never taken the old JLPT tests, but other than a slightly higher difficulty compared to the questions in previous years, it's mostly the same stuff. Perhaps the most dramatic change is that you have to pass each section in order to pass the whole test, and this change has me wondering if I'll pass. We'll all have to wait until September to find out. Pass or fail, it doesn't matter, time to get to work on studying for N1! Gotta break out the wallet for some new texts.