I have moved back to Thailand after almost 7 years in Japan. During that time, I have passed the JLPT N1 examination.
Before I moved to Japan in October 2017, I only know survival Japanese. It was quite a painful experience having to sign many documents such as opening bank accounts, moving in, etc. without being able to fully read everything.
I joined a 4-month intensive Japanese course at my university. It got me to be more comfortable with Japanese, and I also got my basics corrected. This was the only formal Japanese course I took.
I did try to use Japanese a lot in my daily life and I did feel that my Japanese is getting better and better, but it’s not advancing very fast. It wasn’t until 2020, during COVID-19 period, my friend and I started Lobby48. It was a Thai website for AKB48-related information. It forced me to use Japanese a lot more, and even my professors commented that my Japanese started to improve by leap and bound during this period.
I still wasn’t sure about my Japanese level, so I planned to take the JLPT N3 exam in 2022. My friend, however, forced me to instead take an N2 level instead. Their reason being that I was already using Japanese when talking to my university staff, so I should be reasonably good.
JLPT, or Japanese Language Proficiency Test, is a language test designed to measure the Japanese knowledge of non-Japanese users. It has 5 levels with N5 being the lowest and N1 being the highest. N3 would be about the level of daily usage. N1 would be about the language level of Japanese middle schoolers.
I know that while my grammar and listening is pretty good, I was pretty weak when it came to vocab and Kanji.
So, about half a year before taking N2, I loaded a Core 2000 deck into Anki and started to review daily. This helped quite a bit to expand my vocab knowledge.
I passed N1 with quite a high score. My friend said that I should be able to pass N1 as it is. So I registered for N1 for July 2023 exam. I didn’t have time to revise at all for this test, and was fully expect to fail.
But I passed.
It has been about half a year since I returned to Thailand. I am already finding that my Japanese writing skill is deteriorating, but I really have no idea on how to continue using Japanese in writing.
I still consume content and books in Japanese so I don’t think those skills will deteriorate a lot, but times will tell.