I’ve never failed a test.
I’ve often come back after taking an exam, genuinely feeling like I was going to fail. But somehow, every time the results came out they’d prove me wrong.
I’m not saying I’m that smart. I just test well. Something about the pressure of a test environment makes my brain do better.
This track record seems to have instilled an overconfidence in me about the JLPT too, except this time the subject isn’t something I’m capable of winging on the day of the test. When I signed up I barely knew any kanji and still picked N3; somehow that felt survivable until today.
So lately, deep inside I’ve known that no matter how hard I study now, with the time that I have left (two weeks) and my current level of progress (not great), the chances of passing are realistically extremely thin, if not impossible.
To set expectations, I’ve been publicly claiming that I’m going to fail ever since I properly started studying and understood what I’d gotten myself into. Still, deep inside, I need myself to believe that the chances are non-zero, because if I lose hope, I’ll give up studying, and the point of signing up to the exam in the first place was more about motivating myself to study Japanese the best I can, than about passing. It’s with this shred of optimism that mom and I still cram all day long.
It’s not a good feeling to know that I’m incredibly underprepared though, and while I try to avoid consciously thinking about it, today I couldn’t and the realization kicked in deeper.
For starters, I discovered this app called OTO Navi, which provides audio files for all the end-of-chapter exercises in the textbook I’ve been using to study, Genki. There’s a listening section on the exam too, so this was something I knew I would have to tackle but hadn’t figured out how to go about it just yet.
I’d religiously been going through the exercises though, so as soon as I found out about this app I downloaded it immediately. I wasn’t ready for the confidence kick, but it came hard.
Even at 0.7x speed, even when I was reading along, I could barely understand a word. Things are spoken a lot differently to how I’ve been saying them in my head.
I also hadn’t tried any mock tests yet, and after realizing that listening was not my strong suit, I pulled out a sample N5 exam (the easiest level) in hopes of restoring my confidence just a little bit—and still barely understood any of it.
Maybe I’m just not good with languages? Building language apps isn’t nearly the same thing as actually learning languages, but in my head I must’ve gotten confused between my passion and my aptitude for it.
Maybe that’s not even a fair assumption given just how far out of reach this was.
I haven’t signed up for anything this out of reach before.
While I was in high school, I always felt way underprepared for math tests, and I would always have a meltdown before math exams, thinking I knew nothing. I would eventually be able to reason my way out (last minute study sessions helped) but that anxious feeling was truly horrible, and I got it again after a long long time today, except this time I knew that common sense and a slightly more active brain wasn’t going to save me on the day of the exam.
I’d just spent the entire day sitting in the guesthouse common area studying, and I’d made a lot of progress too. I knew that progress wasn’t for nothing, but it stung that it wouldn’t show up on my exam.
For the first time I regretted not just signing up for N4 like my mom. It still would’ve been a stretch (not for her — she started studying weeks before me and is still ahead, no matter how much she downplays it). But with insane effort, N4 might actually have been doable. N3 is simply beyond my memorization capacity. My brain physically cannot register the amount of knowledge I need it to in the time I have left.
I’ve been following this Indian influencer on Instagram who self-learned Japanese as a teenager. In one of her videos that stuck with me, she advised new Japanese learners to think their brain is like a sponge, and even though it may not seem like it’ll retain all the information you feed into it, it’ll remember more than you think it will.
I don’t have the time to perfectly memorize each chapter in its entirety before moving on to the next, so deliberately or not, I’ve been following Ananya’s advice.
I still receive this unearned respect from my old friends, who knew me back in school. They assume I’m still as much of an overachiever as I was. I’m not sure whether it adds to my false sense of confidence and actually played a role in how I ended up here. Either way, I can see how easy it’s been to internalize that unbacked perception of theirs and to still think I can pull wild things like this off just because that’s what people expect of me, even if I no longer have the foundation that once made it true.
But while I’m studying as hard as I can as much as I can, I’m obviously not willing to spend the entire next two weeks only studying and doing nothing else. It’s not worth being in Japan and staying indoors all the time, and it’s not a healthy study schedule either (I went out today after a long stretch of studying, and I could feel the overnight “soaking” effect — things I’d learned in the past couple of days started clicking.)
But, I also know that if studying full-time for the next two weeks means doing literally nothing else, it’s not worth it. My brain needs downtime. I went out today after a long stretch of studying, and I could feel the overnight “soaking” effect—things I learned in the past couple of days started clicking.
Another thing I sometimes do when I feel completely out of my depth is give up. Reject the opportunity before it can reject me. That’s not an option here. It would be a massive regret to come all the way to Japan and not use this time to actually learn Japanese. On a two-week trip, sure. But on this whole mega once-in-a-lifetime adventure? Absolutely not.
I think it’s a perfectionist trait, thinking that if I can’t do something fully, I’d rather not do it at all.
Like the time I dropped out of my bachelor degree in Astronomy and switched to Computer Science. I tell people I realized I wasn’t so interested in Astronomy and Computer Science appealed to me more, but a part of me wonders if I only switched because it was a lot easier? Was it just an escape because I feared I’d fail if I stayed? I want to do everything that I can to avoid that becoming the case this time, and thankfully, over the years I think I’ve learned to let it go. It happened during one term at university when I took up more courses than I could normally manage, and had to lower my bar to just passing instead of excelling.
I need to do that again now. The goal isn’t to pass the exam. The goal is to learn as much Japanese as possible and sit through the test, no matter how painful and self-esteem-crushing it’ll be to know I failed.
The N3 certificate itself doesn’t mean all that much to me. But actually knowing Japanese? That’s something worth pursuing. (Plus, anime’s going to be so much more fun once I don’t have to rely on dubs (or deal with my brother’s judginess for watching it that way).)
So I’m going to hang on to whatever hope I can still muster, because if I back out of the exam, I will stop studying. And that is something I’d regret.