Tue, 04 Dec 2007
JLPT 4
I am sorry for the infrequent updates of this blog - I have been rather busy lately. One of my deadlines of the last month was the Japanese Language Proficiency Test exam, which was scheduled to the last Sunday.
There are only few exam sites in Europe, with the nearest one being in Budapest. Because the test was scheduled at 10:30 am, we have decided to go there a day before, and stay in a hostel over night. We have booked a room in Astoria City Hostel - it was relatively cheap with even breakfeast included. However, the beds were not very comfortable, and the hostel was quite noisy (esp. for those who want to sleep well before the exam).
The exam started an hour later than it was announced. The most annoying part of the whole process was the supervisor of our exam room: altought there were people from all over Central Europe there (even Serbia, Croatia, or Slovenia), he only spoke in Hungarian. The other supervisor was a woman which, when we asked "What that man said during his 10-minute speech?", said one or two English sentences, which we even couldn't understand, because the man was still speaking loudly :-(. Talk about rudeness.
As for the test itself, I think there is still a chance that I have passed JLPT 4. The Kanji and vocabulary part was quite easy (altough it would help if I could distinguish between the left and right side ;-). The listening was quite hard, as well as some grammar parts. An evening before I have tried to redo some exercises from our textbook, and I made the same errors like I did when we wrote those exercises before. Almost no improvement since then :-(. We will see some time in February or March, when the results will be announced. If I pass JLPT 4, I want definitely try JLPT 3 next year.