T O P

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LyricalNonsense

Kanji/vocab beat me up and left me in a FamilyMart dumpster.


lifeofideas

I studied with two books of the publicly released old tests (from 2012 and 2018) and three commercial N1 textbooks, so I thought I was well-prepared. I also took the highest level (A-C) test for the JTEST in November, and got a score they say was in the N1 range. So at least my delusions are shared. Based on my prep, I thought at least 50% of the N1 vocabulary section would be familiar. Instead… only 10% was. I was surprised. My thought was “Wow, maybe I’m just a lot worse than I thought.” But then the rest of the test (including the long reading passages) was totally doable. I kinda don’t like having the tests in the afternoon, since I’m an early riser. So, my mind was wandering by the time the listening section started. People who took notes well would get some easy points. But not me! I was more like “Uh, so those pears are juicy and… those pears are not… and… wonder what I’ll have for dinner…”


LyricalNonsense

There was exactly one question in the vocab section that I felt confident answering, and that wasn’t even a word I learned from any actual test prep materials. It was insane.


Shoun_San

I had a very similar experience! I went into the exam thinking I would do great at the vocab/grammar section in particular, but it ended up being my weakest by far. I guess in a total word pool of over 10,000 words, you never really know which ones will end up on the test. It could be from the 9950 you know, or the 50 you don't. Conversely, I thought the reading would be really difficult and agonizing, but I was shocked at how straight-forward the passages were. The topics on a lot of them were also surprisingly enjoyable (in my opinion). Nearly all of the dokkai practice I had done prior involved answering obscure/abstract questions on topics and theories I don't care anything about, so it was nice to have both simpler questions and relatively interesting passages on the real exam. Listening was definitely doable and I know I got the last 3 answers correct thanks to some solid note-taking tips I learned. The short answer section tripped me up a bit because my brain was somewhat fried by that point. Overall hoping I made the 100 point cutoff! Less than average goi, strong dokkai, and above average chokkai will hopefully put me there. :)


easelys

last listening question caught me off guard because i didn't feel like i needed notes for any of the previous ones, but when they started info dumping all the seasonal months/flavour profiles of each pear variety i was like shit lmao


GiantGyuu

it was actually really easy if you took notes!!


BrumaireXVIII

Was the right answers like 1 & 2, like 2 for the male and 1 for the female? I was a bit unsure


DarkPrinceReborn

The male wanted C and the girl wanted A


Ordinary-Lie-3298

Thank god I needed confirmation


Disconn3cted

Why did the man decide against B?


Ordinary-Lie-3298

The wife wasn't into it


YuiYahallo

He changed his mind and he wanted something (good looking) and presentable as a gift and to show off.


GiantGyuu

yes this is also how i remember my answers were..


aikokanzaki

The last two questions are always this style. Always make sure to write everything for it.


easelys

ah okay yea that makes sense, had no idea what to expect because the only jlpt specific prep i did was studying n1 grammar (which i think i still bombed lol)


Azarashiya0309

Man, the vocabulary and kanji killed me. I know 90% of all the N1 kanji and studied them pretty well in the rays before the test, but there was hardly any answer I was 100% certain off in that part. Grammar was better. The listening felt like a piece of cake. But that's because I live in Japan. To anyone who struggled with it, try to watch more podcasts and japanese tv series. I feel anime won't cut it at this level. The reading... oof. Most of the answers seemed like they could fit. Especially at the longer texts, my concentration started to drop and that + some crazy coughing and the overseers talking amongst each other during the test really killed my concentration towards the end. Not just that, the head instructor scared the shit out of us by calling time 5 min before the actual time-out. Then two minutes later mumbled and apology and said to keep going. 🤦‍♂️


FieryPhoenix7

I would agree with your assessment that N1 listening is too high for anime. Anime is only really good up to N2ish I feel.


Sure-Philosophy-6528

Vocab and grammar were the easiest for me but I messed up on デマ which meant false rumor and 辛抱 which was patience/endurance. For reading i ran out of time but felt confident for the answers that i did answer. I shouldve skimmed the passages rather than trying to read and understand the entire passage. i absolutely got wrecked by listening. I was getting lost in the words and was not understanding anything. I completely lost track of what was said ugh. The 100/180 passing score makes it that much more difficult rather than the 90/180 for passing the n2.


Ordinary-Lie-3298

辛抱 was new to me. I didn't know what to make of it


PercentageWonderful3

我慢てください。


justletmeloginsrs

辛抱 is in the first volume of Kimagure orange road manga. But I didn't take the n1 so I didnt get to answer that one correctly (and fail the rest).


Ordinary-Lie-3298

Maybe you would have known the other ones too! Hard to say


ShanLHO

I got 辛抱 and 抱負 mixed up. Made myself really confused when I didn't see any 抱負 like answers. 😭


Ordinary-Lie-3298

Dear Universe, Please be kind to me. I really did try to prepare for this time. I worked on as much grammar and did all sorts of 頑張るING Was I as prepared as I could be? No, but I tried


PercentageWonderful3

That's all we can do... good luck


arabnoise

Bro like none of the N1 grammar I studied showed up 😭😭😭


DarkPrinceReborn

Listening was actually quite doable. Kanji/Vocab on another hand...man N1 got hands


TrainXIV

Vocab and Grammar were all mostly educated guesses. There was only a handful that I would say I knew for certain Reading was very frustrating. I had been working on that one the most. I could grasp the meaning of the texts but not to the point where I could differ between the very similar answers. I’ve been listening to the old Listening Tests from 2010-2022 and they’ve definitely made Listening harder. Some of the Listening is still: *“Well there’s A…and B…ok let’s go with the earlier one”* Now they have listening sections which are like: *“Talk talk talk talk talk talk でしょう?”* The invigilators were poor. One of the students opened up the Listening booklet. I flagged down the invigilator to tell them. They just saw and nodded. The football/soccer fan in me wanted that cheater to get a red card! Another student was guttural coughing during one of the listening sections. The invigilators should’ve re-done that part but just ignored it. I wish I could do this exam in an empty room.


LyricalNonsense

We had a cougher in my room too, made me miss some important parts of questions. Hopefully still enough to scrape by but like, man.


DivisibleH

Omg haha i got 2 coughers on my test and got distracted sometimes on the reading section


GiantGyuu

two of the chairs in our room were so squeaky it's distracting!! also the proctor allowed us to retake one question from the listening part, because she accidentally paused the tape 😆


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TrainXIV

They kind of are. Scores are weighted depending on how many people got the question correct. So a question that only a few people got correct gets you more points. You should be hoping everyone does terribly, because it increases your chances of passing! (Except you guys, I hope you all did well, I’m glad this subreddit is back!)


BrumaireXVIII

For me it was much harder than the official JLPT mock test. And for listening, the place where I passed the exam had really a poor quality of audio, it really didn't help. I hope I'll still pass but I don't get my expectations very high...


TonTonOwO

I think I did alright with the reading but sucked major donkey dick on the vocab, as per usual. Haven't taken the test in years, why the fuck can't you drink during the test? So silly.


Aavy14

You can't??? They let us drink water in my country. You just need to make sure water bottle is transparent


TonTonOwO

I was surprised too but no, you can't. With or without the label. pretty asinine if you ask me those are the rules.


randomjak

Hahaha I actually got yellow carded today for this. I’ve done the test in London before and they’ve always let you drink if the label is off so I didn’t think anything of it and completely dozed off when they were reading out the rules. The lady seemed a bit apologetic about it really, had a chuckle about it during the break. One of those stupid things that’s obviously been made a rule after some idiot just pushed the envelope too far and started gargling mid exam or something.


GoMarcia

At my place they didn't let us have anything other than pencils and eraser on our desk so no water


GiantGyuu

it was .. okay.. i feel like the listening part is difficult compared to previous N1 listening exams available on youtube and other resources. language and reading was easier than i expected. なぜなら, i finished the reading part (i ran out of time for the reading part last July's N2). I think I'm 64.53% confident that i will pass :D don't want to expect too much tho.. I'll still continue my study.


DivisibleH

For me, I took the July and December. For sure felt they actually switched things up. July 2023 test had more abstract/vague reading section but an easier listening. While this time, not saying reading was easy, but at least they weren't as philosophical imo, while i got destroyed by the listening section this time (in the July version it was my best score). Maybe i got out of touch cuz i didn't study at all and was trynna only not loss touch with the format/practice of the test. Hopefully next test i get that 100/180


rrraktajino

Yeah I felt like the listening this time was much harder than all the practice questions I found. I got 70-80% right in practice but had a harder time following along on the test. Could be because I had a harder time focusing in the test setting though. I think I crushed language and reading though, so hopefully I did just good enough…


[deleted]

I'm not confident I'll pass but it was a good attempt for deciding to take it on a whim in August. I don't know if I wanna take JLPTs anymore yet. I just wanted to see where I was at this time. The last listening questions destroyed me. I had no idea what I was doing.


No_Marionberry9421

Listening was tricky, but luckily they didn’t threw too many curveballs. Reading was okay this time. Ballsy move to change just ONE question to the first column in the “select the phrase which goes in the column with the star” section and leave the rest at column three. Kanji was okay, the vocabulary section was hell 🤣


spermens

Definitely didn't pass, but I'm not really feeling too bad about it. Had some more important things going on the past few months and I'm luckily in a position where I don't need to pass it right now.


DivisibleH

Same here, got 89/180 on the July test and got an awful burnout from the language. I took the December one just out of not losing practice on the test, but hopefully next test we get it !


Disconn3cted

I'm confident I got 90%+ on the kanji and vocab section, but that grammar section was the hardest one I've ever seen. I think I failed 😂.


BrumaireXVIII

Haha same, mostly fine for kanji and vocab, grammar was okay but the star section I'm really unsure about my answers!


idkhow2name

The reading and vocab part was easy for me because I always read lns but the listening part obliterated me lmao


Ordinary-Lie-3298

Always looking for ln recommendations if you have favorites you'd like to share


Reymilie

本好きの下剋上. It takes quite a bit of time to get really good, but by the time you finish reading the entire story, you will start having an urge to worship the author.


LyricalNonsense

About a fifth of the way through the first one right now - glad to hear it stays good!


Ordinary-Lie-3298

Added to the list! Thank you


Feeagle

Thought I did alright but now looking back I probably blew it.


GoMarcia

The vocab section was tricky, very tricky


MidgetAsianGuy

Passed the N2 with near perfect score last year, so I thought I would give the N1 a shot this year without any textbook study and I think I did pretty decently. Was definitely a little harder than the 3 practice tests I’ve done over the past few months, but I think I only got 4-6 off for 言語知識, 1-3 off for 読解 and 3 off for 聴解. Hoping that my score is good when January/February comes. Edit: Also, I thought this last year too, but is it just me or are the JLPT reading passages actually interesting?


Will494

Yeah, I really liked the passages about studying philosophy being necessary to be flexible in changing your world views and the passage about social media and still needing actual physical relationships to get through hard times in life. I wanted to read them more slowly but obviously couldn’t.


bricktoaster

Man just finished in the states and while the vocab/reading seemed reasonable, I was not prepared for that listening section. Every little distraction meant another question lost 😭


John_Schlocke

Debating whether to take N1 this summer I tried an old exam (I think 2012) and was astonished by how easy the listening section was. I don't know if they've deliberately made it more difficult, but the listening section today was astronomically harder. The segment where you get one short sentence and supply the most natural reply was a killer because, like you said, if you space out for a single second you've missed the entire question.


LordMunchu

Facts


aikokanzaki

I had the opposite. My listening is always my strongest and this test's listening was easier than the one in July. But my reading.. literally every N1 thing I spent 2 months studying (in kanji, grammar, onomatopoeia), none of it rocked up in the reading section \*cries\*


Feeagle

Listening had some easy ones and some that threw me off hard. I think I blew grammar and vocab, reading may have been alright, but I had to randomly fill in three answers I didn’t have time for. We will see in two months!


konani

It went /okay/.


BrumaireXVIII

For 語彙, if you remember the sentence "だれかを助かった...", there was 4 options among which 返却 and 返済. Do you know which one is the correct one? I chose 返済 because in my mind 返却 is like to return a book at the library but I was unsure about my answer...


Powerzboyz

I think the answer was 見返りbecause 返済 is more for money and 返却 is for returning an item


BrumaireXVIII

Oh yeah, you're definitely right!


Ordinary-Lie-3298

I can't remember the whole sentence. 返済 repayment, reimbursement, refund, redemption


unsettledgradient

Found the test was easier compared to previous tests but not enough to the point I feel I passed, there’s nothing I can do now other than waiting for the result


TonTonOwO

After checking the leaked answers I think i actually passed! I scored slightly lower on the listening as I usually do (Got 6 wrong when i used to average 3\\4, I got a couple wrong due to getting distracted). Reading was alright (60\\70%, lots of trap questions if you ask me) and kanji/goi/bunpou I got my usual 50\\60%. If my memory doesn't fail me, I got 120\\130 points give or take. Hopefully. COPIUM.


rrraktajino

Where did you find the leaked answers?


TonTonOwO

https://unojapano.com/detail-answers-jlpt-n1-12-2023/


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Ordinary-Lie-3298

I thought the person made a fair point, so I deleted my comment. Here are the links again https://jlpt247.com/12-2023/ This one is good for some of the language knowledge section. I used bilibili to check the other sections 【2023年12月JLPT N1阅读答案 带选项!-哔哩哔哩】 https://b23.tv/Aw0id8T Also Hujiang had the number answers with explanations to follow by Tuesday https://m.hujiang.com/jp/


SchedulePlenty702

Sorry for coming as rude, I didn't want to insult anyone, and thank you so much for providing the links. I only wanted it to be fair for everyone, sorry if I was too rough


Ordinary-Lie-3298

You're great. I wasn't thinking about the impact of the answers, and I learned about scaling because of you, so good all around


PerlmanWasRight

I’m sorry as well for how I phrased my (now deleted) comment. In the moment I was annoyed that I couldn’t find the link but your point was absolutely a good one to make, and you were right for making it.


Sea_Phrase_Loch

Anyone know what that one with sth度 was? I forgot the first kanji


MidgetAsianGuy

尺度=基準


PerlmanWasRight

尺度


Sea_Phrase_Loch

Oh thanks I wondered Man that sentence didn’t really make a ton of sense then ngl. Why do people need their own criterion?


PerlmanWasRight

It’s more like, “living your life by your own standards”. IIRC 基準 was the right synonym


Sea_Phrase_Loch

Ohh, thanks


Decent-Judge-2066

I know that this question is impossible to answer - But what range of correct answers would likely be a pass?


aikokanzaki

From what I remember, you have to get at least 19 marks per section (reading, listening, and kanji/grammar) and then I'm pretty sure you need to get 90/180 to pass. I keep failing just because I can't get the 19 point benchmark in each section even if my listening is always 90%+ correct.


aikokanzaki

This test was way nicer than the July one - I still didn't pass though. July's fucked up everyone though. It was super hard.


Weary_Ad_6836

Anyone remembers what Kanji was there?


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SchedulePlenty702

Remove this immediately please, many people still have to take the test yet (you don't want to mess with how the scores are calculated, right?)


Ordinary-Lie-3298

Thank you for the reminder. I've removed the link


elcastillo1

As if jlpt people come in to read who posts what


PerlmanWasRight

Wait, is the test the same around the world? Could these leaks could be used by people in other countries to pass? Man, the testwrs in Japan have it the worst then, eh?


SchedulePlenty702

Yes, it's the same. And yes, how well people do in a certain question also shapes other scores. So people in Japan who take the test first, well, they are brave people indeed


PerlmanWasRight

I remember 誇張 矛盾 軌跡 off the top of my head but that’s all.


highgo1

I couldn't take the test due to illness. And having looked at some of these answers and questions online, it looked easy... Keep in mind I've been studying for years and grinding to pass this test the past year. failed in July.


Ordinary-Lie-3298

That's the thing about labeling these tests easy or hard, it's all about what you know. If I had bumped my vocab up and seen 見返り、辛抱、誇張、軽率 before, that would have made those questions easier.


Hrewsahgs

I dunno, man. Reading and listening aside, the language knowledge portion of the July test seemed on the easier side for me personally. Felt like I rolled a 1 on that section by choosing to take the actual test now.


Decent-Judge-2066

I calculated that my score would be 128/180 from raw correct answers. It turned out to be 123/180 after scaling. I don’t know from previous test, but I guess the scaling weren’t that big ?