My first time! First time taking the JLPT as well!
é å¼µć
My advice for the N2 is to start from the back and work forwards. This is because the back of the test is very text-heavy and as you get towards the front of the test, you require less concentration. The first questions in the test are just kanji readings, which donāt take much, so if you do those last, you might feel more comfortable.
Also, the story I hear most from people who failed by a little bit, is that they ran out of time on the reading section, so thatās why it makes sense to do it first.
Disclaimer: this is my own experience and every learner is different, so if anyone reading this tries my way and it backfires spectacularly, Iām not responsible 
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Yeah! When I read a practice test yesterday the back of the reading section had so much text that when I got to it my concentration was all over the place.
Iāll definitely give it a go and try to start from the back. The Kanji section was the easiest for me to get through.
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I see Japan is still scrambling to get vaccinations before the Olympics and still under 20%. How many of their test centers are closed? I think I read they originally have 47 but I donāt see whereā¦will everyone get a testing slot if they applied? Nonetheless, good luck everyone!
In US, of course they donāt have a summer session but ~1/3 are still closed for Dec 2021 so looks like no exam for me this year. This is fine I suppose, itās not something I really need and mock exams provide a similar study measure though there isnāt the 5% IRT scaling (just a raw score) which is only important for borderline pass/fail.
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47 test centres seems very low. Thatās the same number of prefectures in the country. It seems unlikely theyāll only have one per prefecture. I did my last one in December and in order to socially distance everyone, they put us in various high school classrooms across Mito. Iām doing it in the Mito Plaza Hotel this time 
Yeah they are seriously dragging their feet with the vaccinations. Thereās a lady who I give a lift home from church some weeks who is in her 80s and sheās only got her first one this weekā¦ Being in the car with her is pretty worrying tbh.
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Sorry, they say 47 prefectures but no test site number. Seems ass-backwards to me, stay safe Japan.
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When I timed myself doing the practise tests, rather than working my way from the very back to the front, I just did the reading section first from beginning to end. I found that starting by reading the shorter passages eased my mind into āreading Japanese modeā and by the time I got to the longer passages, I still had plenty of concentration and was more warmed up. Then after I did the other sections, so thatās another option.
Just heading out now. Good luck everyone! é å¼µćļ¼
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Ahh 
, Iām 99% sure I more than passed the first two sections, I finished the first section 15 minutes early, but in the listening section I couldnāt hear the CD well at all. I was seated at the back of a large room and they only played the CD from one small old-looking boombox sitting on a low table at the very front of the roomā¦ it was like this type of speaker.
The sound wasnāt clear and every time people around me turned pages or made noise I would miss words. For some reason during the humid hot summer weather in Japan Iāve been getting ear/sinus problems too where my ears feel like when you go up in an aeroplane and the air pressure changes and my voice sounds strange so I was having hearing problems to begin with. I got good scores for listening when I did 4 properly timed practise tests at home so if I fail listening Iāll be pretty disappointed. Not sure what I can really do to get around this type of problem in the future.
Hope everyone else had a good experience!
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What Level did you go for?
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At the beginning of the test they should have asked you to raise your hand if you couldnāt hear clearly. If they didnāt theyāre breaking the rules.
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I had a problem with the audio echoing a bit. I might have done okay anyway, but who knows. I totally guessed on a few of those listening questions. I did N2 btw.
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Some people in the back asked them to turn up the volume, but even if they maxed out the volume, the acoustics of the room were not good and the speaker wasnāt elevated, so sitting at the back of a big room with only that that old type of boom box in the front, the sound wasnāt going to be clear regardless. Especially with people around making noise and the fact I was already having personal hearing problems. Thatās just not a good way of projecting sound in that type of room and it wasnāt a good quality speaker to begin with. I could even hear the CD playing in the neighboring rooms because I was near the wall. It was my first time trying the test so I was kind of shocked that they didnāt have more than one speaker throughout the room or speakers on the ceiling for this kind of exam and I didnāt anticipate the situation. Next time if Iām having hearing issues I might try to get a note from a doctor for my application and ask to be sat closer to the speaker or something. Was pretty dissapointed about it because I didnāt want to just pass I wanted to get as close to a full score as possible. I already know that for section 1 I only made one mistake because people put the answers on the internet.
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This page doesnāt have everything but itās the only one Iāve found, so just sharing in case you guys want to know.
N1 - Dungmori - GĆC TRAO Äį»I ÄĆP ĆN KĆ THI TIįŗ¾NG NHįŗ¬T JLPT N1 THĆNG 7/2021
N2 - Dungmori - GĆC TRAO Äį»I ÄĆP ĆN KĆ THI TIįŗ¾NG NHįŗ¬T JLPT N2 THĆNG 7/2021
N3 - Dungmori - GĆC TRAO Äį»I ÄĆP ĆN KĆ THI TIįŗ¾NG NHįŗ¬T JLPT N3 THĆNG 7/2021
Thatās awful. I would be asking for a refund. Although if it were me I would probably refuse to let them start the test until they had got a better speaker
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Haha honestly I really wish I was more like that. I was too afraid to even tell them to turn the volume up in a big room full of people where everyone is silent and they are already running late with the test, yet alone trying to complain about the speaker quality in Japanese, but I wish I did.
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Honestly, thatās one of the biggest reasons Iāve put off doing JLPT. I have hearing issues (as in, fully deaf in one ear, not 100% in the other) and there is 100% no way that an audio setup like the one in JLPT will be feasible for me. Not with other people making background noise, not with bad acousticsā¦ itās kind of a bummer to hear that my worst fears could happen should I decide to take it in the future.
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This gives me nightmare flashbacks of the Swedish C1 exam. At the time I took that test I was fully functional in the language but it was still unbelievably difficult. The quality was soā¦ so bad. I could see a few of the people in my exam room looked absolutely mortified when it started playing.
This puts me off taking the exam lol. Itās not a test of skill, itās a test of hearing. Like Sev, I have pretty shocking hearing in one ear (not deaf, but far from good).
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I took N1 but my studying fell off pretty hard about a month ago. Just had so much other stuff to do it was impossible to dedicate the two or three hours a day I needed. Definitely a fail, but Iāll just try again in December. Can barely remember what was on the test except for maybe the most complicated ticket system for a musical performance ever conceived.
Itās funny how you can feel like the biggest dumbass in the room, and how it feels like everyone around you is some N1 god blazing through the test, but then you realise 70% of the people in the room fail the test too. I also remember feeling like such an idiot when I took the N2 exam, but then it turned out later that I passed.
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Believe it or not, N3 is the most failed test out of all of them!