These are the tips from the students who passed Grade 4 exam.

Valerie Michele in December 1997



I made hundreds of cards for kanji, vocabulary and grammatical functions. Each vocabulary card carried just one entry, the meaning of which was clearly illustrated by one or two examples.


The example cited were both from both the past exam papers and the workbooks chosen by Kazuo.



The grammar cards had just one function on each card, and carried brief and clear definition of each function in English, plus some examples to illustrate this function.


The tari,tari form, for example, was defined as doing several things with the example being 'Wabash wa resutoran ni ittari sampo o shitari shimashita'.



My kanji cards had the on-yomi and kun-yomi, some phrases from relevant materials to illustrate the meaning, and a brief definition of its meaning in English.


I chose not to cite any kanji or its example from cards commercially available from Japanese bookstores in London because some cards had the irrelevant kanji and examples.


Everyday I went over these cards to learn new things or refresh, and revise what I had learned in the previous months in the run-up to September.


Card making was a very time-consuming process but I knew I could only remember well what I had written myself.


I worked very hard from September to early December by taking two two-hour private lessons.


I did listening practice only in the class with Kazuo because I believed that I could not do it properly on my own.



In the exam, the time allocated to was very tight, so I did not have enough time to ponder. I really had to jump from one question to another. I did not remember so much of what I had answered after the exam.