GCSE Japanese - Alistor Logan (October 2006)

I studied Japanese with Kazuo for only 9 months and managed to receive an A* grade.

I have managed to think up a few tips for anyone else wishing to take the GCSE exam.

The main thing that helps is learning vocabulary, the more words you know the more likely it is that you will be able to read a passage or understand a question. If you know a lot of vocabulary you can work out the meaning of a sentence without understanding the grammatical function or the particles.

The second thing I did was try and understand a few complicated grammatical structures such as the adjective clause, so I could impress the examiner with them in the writing test. I also tried to learn as many Kanji as possible so I could understand them in the reading test and impress the examiner with them in the writing test.

Finally I think anyone sitting the exam should do as many practice papers as possible as similar questions always come up. The more papers you do the more likely it is that you will have done a similar question to the one in the exam. To sum up:
Alister has been studying Japanese with me since September 2005 once a week mostly for 1.5 hours.