The Japan Foundation Japanese Language Proficiency Examination in every December

Note that this exam will have a new format in 2010. For more dettail, refer to this page.
For a sample exam, see this.


Grade 1

Writing - vocabulary (45 mins)
Listening (45 mins)
Grammar and reading comprehension(90 mins)

Students should be able to recognize around 2000 kanji and have a vocabulary of 10,000 words. They should also have an advanced level of grammatical knowledge, enabling them to deal comfortably with various social situations and providing them with the essential linguistic skills to attend university in Japan.

Grade 2

Writing - vocabulary (35 mins)
Listening (40 mins)
Grammar and reading comprehension (70 mins)

Students should know around 1,000 kanji and have a vocabulary of about 6000 words. They should also have a fairly advanced level of grammatical knowledge, enabling them to deal with a wide range of daily situations.

Grade 3

Writing - vocabulary(35 mins)
Listening (35 mins)
Grammar and reading (70 mins)

Students should know about 300 kanji, have a vocabulary of about 1,500 words, and be able to understand normal daily conversation.

Grade 4

Writing - vocabulary(25 mins)
Listening (25 mins)
Grammar and reading comprehension(50 mins)

Students should know about 100 chance and have a vocabulary of about 800 words. They should also have an elementary level of grammatical knowledge and be able to conduct simple conversations.

Are you ready for the exam?

You can assess your level in the following two ways:

(1) One of the best ways to see if you are ready for the exam is to do one of the Paper 1 exam papers from the past years in September because this is usually the easiest for most of the students.
You must do it in the exam conditions - in 25 minutes for Grade 4, 35 minutes for Grades 3 and 2 and 45 minutes for Grade 1.
If your score is less than 40, you had better forget taking the exam this year and plan for the future.
Unless you have a grip on the Paper 1 whose main component is vocabulary, the building block of each exam paper, there is no chance that you will do well in Paper 3 (grammar and reading) - the most difficult one.

(2) Alternatively, to measure your skills more accurately try one of each of the three papers from past years around September. Stick to the time allocated for each paper - in Grade 3 you can have 35 minutes for both Papers 1 and 2, and 70 minutes for Paper 3. Then work out the average score of the three papers.
If it is around 55, then you are likely to pass as long as you study very hard and keep the momentum up to the exam day - usually the first Sunday in December. If the score is anywhere between 55 and 45, you are more likely to fail than to pass unless you are ready to study every weekend from September to December.

Any score less than 40 means that you are not ready to do the exam yet.