How did you guys fare for the various JLPT levels? what was easy? what was difficult? Let's discuss
I took N3 this time again, having taken N3 in July but failed.
For me, I felt that the Vocab and Grammar were simpler. Perhaps I have become a bit more hardworking, but I felt that many concepts you would expect from N3 were not tested.
There was no gitaigo (mimetic words) and only a sprinkling of keigo. But of course, some other concepts that were difficult to me include various gouseigo cause I didn't put a lot of effort into it.
HOWEVER, the listening was madness.
Before the listening part, I spent about 10 min on my phone listening to Japanese news just to get used to it. It was pretty ok, being able to catch the gist of what was going on.
Yet when the listening started, the spoken speed was really fast. If I had to make an analogy, it would be similar to how friends talk in secondary school when deciding where to go after classes end. Fast and furious, typically faster than the news as well.
Not only that, the speeches often used short-forms that one will not be familiar hearing cause we usually use the full forms when learning. Vocab-wise there were some tricky words, but not too bad overall.
Thus for me, the main difficulty in listening was the speed and the sentence-shortening. I'm not making any excuses for myself because Japanese is probably spoken at a similar speed and manner in real-life. Indeed, I would probably be able to understand the same script had it been spoken in English or Mandarin. It's just that compared to the previous N3 I took, the listening this time was much harder.
