NOV11 Japanese B SL exam

[laryxle]

I don't think many people will have done this exam, but I wanted to post my thoughts on it anyway

Overall: I thought that it was a harder paper than the May 2010, the questions in Paper 1 were a bit harder and more ambiguous and the Paper 2 questions weren't great.

Paper 1:

Section A: Pretty simple, the hardest thing was probably the first sentence which completely threw me off at the start of the exam It was a bit of an obscure text and the picture of the meals looked disgusting

Section B: The history of chopsticks part was great, very easy, but for me the worst part of both exams was the bit about the book on inventions. I hate those multiple choice questions where they ask you what things mean. Firstly, I recognised the kanji but didn't know that it was the word for invention, although I luckily worked it out from the text and the picture. Secondly, the multiple choice question with nakattamono in it confused me, I was like 'thing that don't exist' I think for the multiple choice I put DCD, and I have no idea if they were right. Also, I screwed up the 'find the word in the passage' for when it said chigaumono..., I couldn't find anything that sounded like that so I put something random

Section C: It was quite a wordy and long passage, although not too hard to get the gist of it. I can't remember the questions but I thought they were okay, except for the last fill-in-the-blank. I put yakusoku because all the remaining ones I had din't really make sense and I didn't know what yakusoku meant, but I think it's wrong

Section Surprisingly, the easiest passage in the exam. Lots to write about for the question, although I hadn't really practiced a speech text type, and all tha denoted it was a speech was my saying konnichiwa at the start. I did put in lots of info from the text though, and went over the genkouyoshi a little

paper 2:

Did anyone else laugh at the plug for the IB in question 3? I don't really like that style of 'something happened to you today, write about it' questions, so I didn't do that. I did Question 1 because I know quite a bit of environmental vocab, and practiced mainly letter text types. I used plain form, which was ok I thought. I told my penfriend that I was picking up rubbish on a beach and then invited them to come, but when I was looking back over it at the end I had spent most of the letter talking about how important it was to protect the environment, and giving my friend reasons why he should come, and I hadn't really explicitly talked about the activity, so i crammed in some random thing about the picking up process and the times of the day we would do it and what else we would do, but I thought it was pretty bad. I'm really unsure of how I did in this one, but I think my grammar and kanji might help me.

I think that there's no way I would have gotten a 7 overall, I needed to really ace P1 which is my strongest paper and I don't feel confident that I did. I think I should definitely still be able to get a 6 though.

Wow, I realise I just went on for ages. For some reason I like analysing my exams and realising how much worse I did in them that I thought

[faith]

I also feel that in general it was a harder exam than the papers I looked at before.

I didn't like section A in paper 1- there were so many food names so I had to guess them. I'm not very sure whether my guesses were correct. The rest of the passages I felt were alright. For chigaumono I think I guessed kaeta- simply because I couldn't find any other words that could have meant that. Yakusoku means to promise. I'm pretty sure I didn't put that one down but I don't quite remember what I had put down. I've always been a little confused over how to write section D. How did you manage to only go over the genkoyoshi a little? I finished the whole genkoyoshi on top of half a page of question paper. I'm not exactly sure how I went but I felt that I crammed the facts in and the speech would have been very boring to hear.

Don't laugh at me but I actually wrote paper 2 on question 3! =P I don't have a lot of environment vocabulary and I didn't really feel like writing about sports/music so I had to choose qn3. I also feel I went a bit off topic. Instead of detailing on the events of the day, I talked a lot about what I have gained from IB, how it has changed the way I approach learning and so on. I don't think my content was that good and since I tend to make a lot of careless grammar mistakes, I probably scored pretty low in this paper.

Overall I don't think it is likely that I'll get a 7. I'm predicting a mid to high 6 for myself.

Good luck to you for the rest of your exams! I'll have to cram maths now.

[laryxle]

I was really lucky for section A; as a joke the night before the exam my brother got my Japanese dictionary and just randomly started testing me on words, and one of them was purin, so that was how I knew that one of the categories was dessert.

I planned my section D before I wrote it, so I picked like 7 or 8 things from the text to talk about, as well as a little introduction and ending. Then when I was writing it I just ticked it off, with like one or two sentences for each thing from the text, and so it didn't go that far off the genkoyoshi and I still had like 15 minutes left to check my answers.

I won't laugh at you It's just that I find those types of questions so weird, I did one of those for my mocks (it was N09) and it was like writing about something bad that happened and I just found it very weird.

Edit: BTW good luck with maths! I don't think I can do anymore study for that, so i'm now procrastinating/worrying about psych/trying to memorise quotes

Edited November 3, 2010 by laryxle

[faith]

That is very lucky.=)I'm pretty sure I didn't put down anything about desserts...=( I think I put down something about fish and meat (I think I recognized the word for Tuna?), fast food as two of the answers.

Maths didn't go that well today.=（ Oh well... 6 down, 9 more to go now.=)

[a380]

Hey,

Just thought I'll add my thoughts as well,overall I felt that this years exam was harder than all of the previous years May and November exams (2005 - 2010).

Also I really disliked the fact that they changed the format slightly by asking questions which were usually asked in a specific Mondai in other Mondais and having different text types then normal. The Essay questions were also quite difficult as there weren't any typical japanese exchange topics. What topics did everyone else do?