Sunday, October 01, 2006

More JLPT testing

2 months to go (9 weeks today, in fact), and I'm up to 66.5% in my latest practice JLPT test. That's quite an improvement on last time, but I think I got a little bit luckier than usual in a few guesses this time. It still seems pretty tough - in fact of course a score like that means I "know" the answers to less than half the questions, but can make sensible guesses for many of them. For the reading comprehension part, I'm still horribly short of time, so my strategy is to basically skim through the texts and trying to narrow down the answers to the 2 or 3 reasonable ones. I wonder if it might be better to do part of it carefully and just completely guess the rest. In any case, I've got plenty of reading practice to do still, which should help speed me up. I've got past 750 kanji on the study list (and already know many of the remaining ones too) so feel to be on the home stretch as far as they are concerned. That's also got me to the position of recognising ~90% of kanji by frequency, so the reading matter all seems more familiar, even though my comprehension is still slow.

Anyone who, like me, is quite close to the pass/fail threshold would benefit greatly from doing practice tests. I've got another two planned between now and the event itself. If I can get to 70% before doing it for real, that would give a nice safety margin...

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