日本語能力試験が終わった

[dorchadas]

And I don't think I did very well.

I was doing fine until the listening section. But the JLPT listening section never repeats anything and has all dialogue at faster-than-native speed (I'm listening to an interview with composer Hiyamuta Takushi literally right now and he's speaking about half as fast because it's not a rehearsed script), so you have to pay laser-sharp attention for forty minutes straight and if you ever lose focus even for a second, you've probably gotten the question wrong. That happened to me more than once because maintaining focus that long is extremely difficult and also my listening is just not that good.

Well, it's possible that I did better than I thought. When we were passing up answer sheets, I noticed that the person behind me and the person in front of me had answers that were broadly similar to mine. I'll find out in February. Until then, I'll keep practicing.

Comments

[nelc]

At the peak of my performance at my Japanese evening class (so, you know, not actually very good), I could compose short essays, skits or stories in my very limited Japanese in my head, but I was still terrible at listening to native Japanese speaking normally, or at least the tapes that our teacher played in class occasionally. Yuuko-sama spoke relatively slowly and succinctly compared to the people on the tapes, and I would still have trouble figuring out what she was saying.

I think languages are a collection of skills flying in formation, rather than just the singular skills that people tend to think of them as. I'm reminded of a YouTube video I saw where some Biblical scholars were talking about their ability to read Ancient Greek, know a lot about the historical contexts of words and phrases, but can't actually speak a word of it.

[dorchadas]

I think that makes a lot of sense. I always think (and get frustrated by...) how children will pick up languages just by hearing it, but have to explicitly be sat down and instructed or they won't learn how to read.

There's so much that can affect it, too. I remember some of the middle-aged women in Chiyoda talking to me at a festival complaining about their English instruction. They said that their high school English teachers all had strong Japanese accents, so when they heard native English in a native accent, it was gibberish to them.