Okay so remember all that yap about how the JLPT is just a means towards the actual goal of learning Japanese well enough to become conversationally fluent? And literate too — I need subtitles even for English movies for some reason (my brain’s weirdly incompetent in that area) so I’m definitely going to need to be able to read Japanese if I want to enjoy anime (I refuse to settle with English subs because why then did I bother learning a whole new langauge?).
Point being, remember how the exam is supposed to be motivation to build real skills, so that one day I can watch anime the right way and read manga and talk to people in Japanese?
Yeah? Well, throw that out the window just for a few days. Please.
I wanted to learn the right way, right from the start. I swore I wouldn’t study ‘just’ for the exam like I did in high school (and even university), where I’d prep in ways that got me great grades but only a mediocre understanding of the actual material, a lot of which I’d forget soon after the test. Standard exams at school and uni are set with more or less a particular format and if you practice the same type of question enough times, you can usually replicate the working during the exam even if you don’t fully comprehend what it means. I got pretty good at that, and it got me through my childhood education quite well. But I didn’t want to cut corners here.
I wanted to study for the language, not for the test.
Alas... I panicked.
It wasn’t a dramatic, manic panic. It was more of a subtle fall into the acceptance that I was probably going to succumb to doing what I resolved not to.
I was already using the Genki textbooks, but I didn’t count that as studying ‘for the exam’, especially since there isn’t a prescribed syllabus for the JLPT exams.
I hadn’t given much thought to looking up sample exam papers of even the N5 or N4 exams, let alone N3.
Okay I did open one briefly one day, just to see the question format, but promptly closed it and fell into a realization crisis that I understood nothing of an exam two levels below mine. But I got my motivation back and I told myself again that if I studied with only the intent to learn the language, the exam material should come to me as a side product of the process.
I wouldn’t be talking about this if everything was going according to plan. Of course, it isn’t.
Mom hit her own wall with Genki yesterday. Overwhelmed, she gave up on it entirely and switched to Duolingo.
Thing is, we were going to meet the rest of the family tomorrow — Onkar had already in Tokyo today, but by the time he’d booked his flight and hotel, we couldn’t cancel our accommodation in Odawara so we were to meet him tomorrow, and Dad and Bua had left to go from Jaipur — our hometown — to Delhi, where they were to fly out of.
We both knew that it would be a lot more difficult to study when they were around, and while mom gave in to the spirit of their arrival and stopped properly studying (*cough* Duolingo doesn’t help *cough*), I, instead, decided to squeeze out every last bit of studying I could. I was determined to finish Genki 2 — the ‘syllabus’ I’d set for myself — so that during the next few unavoidably busy days, I could at least get by with light revision.
But to actually finish all of Genki 2 in time? That would be impossible — if I tried to be thorough.
Hence, the corners began to cut themselves.
One shortcut I resorted to was OTO Navi — an app with audio recordings of the practice exercises at the end of each Genki chapter. I started out using it to get more listening practice (the exam’s listening section being the main motivator), but now I’ve begun playing to the answers to each exercise too before thinking through them myself — something that constituted a large part of my study time, but which was arguably one of the best methods to retain what I’d learned. If I continue doing that though, I won’t have time for everything else I have planned, which is the bare minimum that even a miracle requires to get me through the exam.
Speaking of retention, a few days into studying properly, I realised something: I tend to recall things better not the day I learn them, but the day after. Or even two or three days later. Maybe it’s common knowledge, hence the phrase ‘sleep on it’. But it surprised me how consistently this happened. I would struggle with hopeless hopes to memorize the vocabulary from a chapter as I was learning it, inevitably forget it in the moment, but then a few days later, the words would just magically reappear in my head.
So I stopped drilling vocabulary obsessively. I’d read through the list once, maybe go over the words in the practice exercises, and call it done. And weirdly enough, it kind of worked. The same went for grammar. Once I’d seen a grammatical structure a few times, it’d start to show up in the wild (aka the real world). That context helped lock it in way more than rereading the textbook ever could.
It’s still early to say. It would barely be the truth to say that I’ve finished Genki 2 — I’ve gone through all the chapters’ main contents (and blitzed through the exercises using OTO Navi), but I still have kanji readings to learn, and kanji is its own beast.
In Japanese, there are three writing systems — hiragana and katakana (syllabaries), and then kanji (image-like characters borrowed from Chinese). I learned the first two early on and can read them pretty comfortably now, but kanji is on a whole new level. There are thousands of characters, and for the N3 you need to know several hundred.
If the characters’ appearance and sheer population wasn’t enough, each kanji has multiple readings (ways they’re spoken) depending on whether it’s used alone or as part of a compound word, and which context it appears in. Sometimes the reading is Chinese-based (on’yomi), sometimes it’s native Japanese (kun’yomi), and there’s no surefire way to guess which one you need. It’s not like English phonetics where you just string the sounds together (which can also get quite tough for non-natives (*cough* *through* *though* *rough*), but it’s nothing compared to this).
It would take forever to memorise all the kanji in new words as I learned them, as I was trying to do initially, but for the sake of speed and efficiency, I found it more beneficial to prioritize grammar and new vocabulary, basically tackling the breadth of the language before deep-diving.
It’s a much-required deep-dive though, and it’s high time to get into it.
Kanji chapters in Genki are difficult for me because the characters are so complicated that I read and then forget them. As a result, at the moment I can only read sentences when the hiragana readings of Kanji are provided. Before starting with Genki, I used to use this website called Wanikani to learn kanji through hilariously absurd mnemonics. It helped that Wanikani first covers ‘radicals’ — smaller, simpler components that constitute kanji. Through Wanikani, I could memorise kanji meanings by understanding how the radicals involved in each character worked together and then piecing them together to recall the meaning. At the time, though, I struggled with the different readings of each Kanji without seeing them in context of other words, which at that point I didn’t know.
I was trying to learn to read first, before learning to understand. Now I can understand more than I can read, so there’s still a gap, which revisiting Wanikani at this point could nicely bridge.
I’m seriously considering it as part of my last-minute prep, along with skimming the kanji chapters in Genki, just to be thorough and know which ones I should learn for N3 (because there are quite literally thousands).
Finally — I’m planning to attempt a few real JLPT practice papers (I didn’t want to make practice exams my entire basis for studying, but it’d be dumb to not go through a few before the real thing).
This is my study plan for the next few days.
If I were studying just to learn, I would’ve taken it slower. More thorough. I would’ve read more, and taken time to systematically learn new vocabulary and kanji in congruence with each other. I would’ve practiced what I learned in each chapter a lot more, and I would’ve done it on my own. And of course I would’ve skipped the exam papers part completely because I wouldn’t have needed it then.
It would’ve been a steady jog to build endurance, but instead, here I am, sprinting, knocking over hurdles instead of jumping them.
The methods I’ve given in to adopting as of late work for the exam. OTO Navi helps with my receptive skills, and that’s all I really need for the exam — it’s multiple choice.
If the test required me to write or speak, I would’ve studied completely differently. As it stands, I’m not improving my productive skills at all. I still can’t hold a proper conversation in Japanese.
Which is ironic, considering I literally built an app — Fluenci — to help people practice exactly those skills. The whole point was to get people talking and writing in their target language, because that’s what most learners avoid, due to the relative ease of passively absorbing content and falling into the illusion of learning. That’s what I’ve avoided, too. And it’s hard not to feel a little hypocritical.
But this is a short-term compromise — five more days.
After that, I’ll pivot. I want to bridge the gap between my receptive and productive Japanese skills. Especially once Onkar’s around, because I know I’ll be way less shy talking to him in Japanese than I would be with strangers.
I realise a lot of this is me justifying unideal decisions I’ve already made out of stress for the exam. But it’s not the worst outcome. Not by a long shot.
I haven’t given up all hope. Not just yet.
And it’s optimistic — stupidly so, I know — to even hope to be worthy of passing the damn thing. But what would the world be without a little stupid hope?