I’m taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test level 2 on Sunday, and the deadline is really starting to hit home. I think I’ll do mostly okay on the listening and vocabulary sections, but the grammar and reading sections will be harder for me. I have books to study, but I haven’t even been getting the time to actually look at them. I keep finding myself with other things to do, but hopefully tonight and tomorrow night (maybe Friday) shouldn’t be too bad. I like studying Japanese, and I like seeing that I make progress, and this test is a kind of progress indicator and goal for me. Some people think that the test is rather worthless, and in some ways the test itself is kind of silly (how much can you get from a multiple choice test?), but I think it is useful in providing me with a goal and a deadline, as well as a rubric towards reaching that goal. I’m not studying towards the test specificially as I am using it as a framework for learning Japanese in my current setting where I don’t get much in terms of guidance. And it has helped, and I have been making good progress that I can see, even if I still struggle with the reading and the grammar. I have confidence that I can pass and be awesome. I need to incorporate more reading into my study, and I think I’ll work on that starting next week, after the test is over.

I currently use Anki as a study device, and have a big set of words and sentences in it for studying. More words than sentences right now, but I think after the test I’ll likely also try to taper off the words and work on adding more sentences. Sentences have the great plus of context, which I think really helps with both remembering and understanding, especially in getting the nuances of different words and grammatical structures. I really would like to eventually become more or less comfortably fluent in Japanese, as I’ve always wanted to be able to speak and read more than one language. I think it’s a good skill to have, and gives me a different way of defining the world and things around me.