@Mike Cash I'm probably reading it wrong, but level 4 is middle school? I'm guessing that's probably well above the equivalent of N1 based on my reading on the JLPT site of what people with N1 feel competent to do.
Level 4 is aimed at native speakers who have graduated junior high school.
One of the other nice things about this test as compared to the JLPT is that you may take the examination booklet home with you. About a week after the test the correct answers are posted online, so if you mark your answers in the exam it is easy to see how well you did well before the official results come out. I'm not sure how they weight the points, but going just by simple math I got about 94% on the level 5 (elementary school graduate) and somewhere in the low 80s on the level 4....as best I can figure it, anyway. I'm positive I passed 5, probably passed 4 but won't know until about the 15th.
I was quite surprised by how many questions there were. I didn't really notice until I went to count up the number of answers so I count guess at my score. I believe there were something like 82 answers on the level 5 and 89 answers on the level 4. As you can imagine, on an all-reading test intended for native speakers with extensive experience and facility with reading Japanese, that means the foreign student is going to have to boogie along at a very good pace to finish up in 50 minutes. You have to at least match the pace of whatever level of native
dullard they have deemed as having the bare minimum brains to make it.
I looked over the level 7 and although I could understand quite a bit, I certainly couldn't pass the test.
Best of luck! Look forward to hearing the results and a review of how it went in comparison to the N1.
Thank you.
You never know how you might do until you try. Why not give it a go next summer? Other good things about the test are that it is very inexpensive compared to the JLPT and that you can sit two different levels in the same day if you want (they do even numbers in the morning and odd numbers in the afternoon). Also, as it comes about a month before the JLPT it isn't a bad little practice test.
At my center, for the morning session there were I think three people sitting level 2, two of us sitting level 4, and no one sitting level 6. The other level 4 was a young lady of perhaps 14 or 15. She finished early. I slid in just under the wire. There was one no-show for the level 4. In the afternoon there were three people sitting level 1 (which has a pass rate under 10%), seven people sitting level 3, two of us for level 5, and one eight year old girl sitting level 7. The same person who was a no-show for level 4 also didn't show up for level 5. I
think the other person taking level 5 was a fellow foreigner, but I'm not sure. It was a lady in her forties who seemed not to finish the test in the allotted time. I finished up with about ten minutes to spare. I wish I had been able to take 5 first and then 4 afterwards, as it would have been a good warm-up and would have saved me the time of reading the instructions for each section of the test in level 4, where time was a much more valuable commodity.
Sadly, this test seems to be very little known in the foreign learner community. A google search on "Nihongo Kentei" turns up astonishingly little mention of it...and what little there is is both several years old and misinformed (people confusing it for the JLPT mostly). I'd like to see it become more widely known and more foreign learners challenging it instead of just the JLPT, which lately I begin to wonder if it hasn't done more to stifle Japanese learning than to promote it.[/QUOTE]