Tools for testing reading/listening comprehension

Japanese
#1

I want to establish weekly habit of testing my ability to understand input, to be able to see if I am making reasonable improvements. I don’t mind it to be in form of mock tests for JLPT even if I am not huge fun of it (they are testing input only though so it should do the job).

At the moment I am planning on doing uninterrupted Harry Potter reading session of 30 minutes to reasonable level of understanding and measure 5 things: (1) how many pages I could read with help of Yomichan, (2) how many new words per page I added to Anki, (3) total of new words, (4) time needed to kick start those words in Anki, and (5) that time divided by number of pages.

That should give me some reasonably objective data, but two aspects are missing:

  1. Measurement of how much I could understand (“to reasonable understanding” is very subjective).
  2. How my understanding of grammar is improving over time.

Do you have any recommendation how to solve those problems?

I think testing myself against jlpt test should not hurt too much, so if you know some good websites with lots of those tests then it should do (I want to do it weekly so there have to be quite a few of tests, otherwise I will runout). But I would prefer tests for N2 and N1 since lower level don’t use enough kanji… I don’t mind starting with score 0% if that is what it is. I should get at least 3-5% though :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Thank you in advance for any suggestions and recommendations. :hugs:

3 Likes
#2

Do you know https://japanesetest4you.com/ ?

I haven’t tried it yet though.

3 Likes
#3

I will have a look. Thank you :hugs:

#4

Hmm… It will be painful for first few weeks xD My Harry Potter vocab seems to be not very useful for those tests.

I will probably have invest some time to bury that gap. Maybe I will give like 25% of time just to learn some of that vocab then? Doing those test with Yomichan assist looks pointless, and getting 0% for 2 months will be not very motivating xD

1 Like
#5

There is also the 総まとめ book series that has tests inside.

And although it is not a test by itself maybe you can try and test yourself with podcast that have transcript and english translation. You can either listen, write what you understood then compare to the transcript or read the transcript, translate and compare your translation to the proposed one. On Android i know the Voiky app that could be used as such. But i rarely see articles about Harry Potter :wink:

2 Likes
#6

xD

I am just motivated to make this book my first book I read in any language. It was true for Polish and English. Only Japanese translator happened to forget it was meant to be a book for 9-13 years old kids… But I am too stubborn to give them that win. As Oliver Wood once said: “catch the Snitch or die trying” :joy:

But there is some hope: at todays rate it will take only about a year or two…

1 Like
#7

I think I will forget about testing kanji for now, and use N5-3 test to start with. It should be good enough indicator of improvement in understanding grammar. It will be not so easy to quantify so no fancy graphs but I guess you can’t have everything xD

Any nice lists of vocab with sample sentence for JLPT you guys recommend?

I want to use those tests as source of motivation as well so I will make so directed effort to make sure my learning routing translate at least a bit into JLPT tests. Seeing no improvements over few weeks would for sure give my brain some stupid ideas…

1 Like
#8

understanding nhk easy is probably the way to go. (its difficulty is between n3 and n2)
crosscheck then with deepl. there is also a reddit group somewhere that translates those
articels if i remember correctly but deepl does it for me.

as always real content is king.

2 Likes
#9

:smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

If you can drop a few useful links that would be great. I noticed it is easier for me to focus if material is about Japanese in Japanese, so if you can recommend a few articles or podcasts to start with then it would be great. :hugs:

I am starting to use this for listening comprehension:

And @NickavGnaro gave me this:

3 Likes
#10

Probably getting Kanzen Master N3 Grammar or Sou Satoume N3 Grammar or full N3 drill books (which have grammar, kanji, audio + reading tests) would be close. That way you can check and have vocab + sample sentences / grammar + more sample sentences.

Its not Harry Potter… But: Another way to test your comprehension could be to read a light novel series which has a very good anime adaptation. That way you can read the volume and see if you understood everything by watching the anime :slight_smile: I am reading the Jobless Reincarnation / Mushoku Tensei / 無職転生

2 Likes
#11

I already have picked my web novel xD Re:Zero is going to be the first one. I am going to actually translate it to polish for a friend of mine in the future.

But I need something to account for my arrogance and narcissism. It would be to easy for me to say: “Yeah, I understand 100%, easy-peasy”. I need some tests to say “No, you don’t, you moron…” xD

I will have a look at it, thanks :hugs:

2 Likes
#12

Wait. Really? It feels lower-level than that, or maybe I’m lowballing myself :open_mouth:

Speaking of Onomappu, I like his videos a lot too. I’ve also started slowly getting into Twitch, since a friend of mine started streaming and I realised I do actually enjoy them (usually I need subtitles, even for English, so it’s a lesson in just listening and accepting I’m not gonna hear everything). So I’ve been searching around for some Japanese FFXIV streams to listen in on. It’s a trial, but the more exposure the better.

2 Likes
#13

I think you for sure underestimate yourself. I am just a beginner and if find Tobira readings to be too patronising (sure: I need to look up every second word but still… How many times they need to repeat 昔話 in one dialogue? It is not hard to remember word…) and I believe you were worried that it may be too hard for you. I think you may need some testing as well xD I need it to keep my ego in check, you to boost your. Your Japanese is for sure far better than you think it is :hugs:

1 Like
#14

this is from a reddit post found here:


From a paper examining the comprehension difficulty of News Web Easy:

2.1 Features of Japanese in News Web Easy
Target level
We were involved in the production of News Web Easy content. Our aim was to ensure that while the news texts were easy to understand, they were as natural as possible. After many trials conducted by NHK the pre-intermediate level was found to be the lowest level necessary for achieving these aims. This level was consequently set by NHK as the target for Japanese rewriting. It approximately corresponds to the proficiency level ranked between levels 3 and 2 of the old JLPT, and between levels N3 and N2 of the new JLPT.

always ask yourself when reading nhk easy - do i really understand every nuance?

4 Likes
#15

Well… There is this problem here:

image
image.jpg640×786 155 KB

#16

That’s very kind of you to say, though I’m still absolutely a beginner when it comes to speaking and I’m slowly but surely improving on listening. Certainly not gonna get ahead of myself ego-wise though, haha.

I’m sure there’s the occasional thing I miss, but on average I really don’t have any issues reading it and understanding exactly what’s going on. I’ve been thinking it was N5/N4 this entire time, haha. Good to know!

3 Likes
#17

I am taking my statement back… I am for sure not even beginner in terms of speaking xD I did not even start writing yet :sob: (I am following input first methodology. It will take me at least another 2-3 months before I will start writing and 6-9 months to start speaking :sob:)

Btw: aren’t you guys here a little bit too harsh on yourselves? I am ultra proud I can read 3-5 pages of Harry Potter in one day and need to add to my Anki only about 150 new words (some of them I know already since I needed to create a brand new deck ). And I for sure don’t understand even 50% of nuance. Just enough to understand what is said and how given sentence works in given context.

#18

I mean, the difference is I live in Japan and literally need it for every day living, haha. If I didn’t need it, I’d be in the same boat as you! :sweat_smile: It’s the skill I’m looking to improve most at the moment. I can コンビニ日本語 with the best of 'em but actual conversations are a bit trickier…

2 Likes
#19

i did the last winter jlpt before covid hit and was almost sure to be at n3 tier already (was about 80% through bunpro n3). in the last moment i switched from n3 to n4 and barely passed. excelled at vocab and reading but really failed in text comprehension. thats when i noticed how many little nuances i missed with nhk easy and sometimes there is even a big difference in difficulty between articles.

2 Likes
#20

I am firm believer that active vocab is just subset of your passive vocab. When I was in UK and needed to learn to speak asap to get promotion I used this as my text book:

And it was a job at a restaurant, nothing to do with programming. A lot of rather simple sentence about something interesting to me so I could easily read like 50-100 pages a day, and after that harass my coworkers with my broken English until it become not broken enough to get management position, and tell them what to do with poor grammar xD

It was the most impressive jump at English I managed to pull off. 1-2 month from struggling to hold a conversation about anything interesting to me, to be able to speak without any stress over the phone (granted: my most often used sentence is by far “Say it again, please” and I will probably not live long enough to use any sentence more times than I had to use this one).

2 Likes