{Lighty Lively}

Cracking the SAT Subject Test in Japanese with Listening

It’s November… The days are getting colder in the northern hemisphere…and it’s the only time of the year when CollegeBoard offers the SAT Subject Test: Japanese with Listening. I took the test last year with limited success (740 out of 800).

So onto cracking the test (is this expression copyrighted by The Princeton Review?).

1. Bring a CD player that doesn’t go CLICK!! whenever you hit a button, especially the ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons. Why? After the CD goes in and the test starts, just hit the ‘Next’ button whenever you already know the instructions and jump to the question. I know that the instructions prohibit listening to the question again and have you use the 16 seconds (more or less) of silence that follows each question to bubble in your answer. However, unless the test proctor is staring at you and your fingers at all times, no one will notice if you hit the ‘Previous’ button to listen to the question again or hit the ‘Next’ button during those 16 seconds when you have already bubbled in your answer and feel too impatient to wait. Think about it… Those 16 seconds. It takes maybe, 5 seconds to bubble in an answer, so the other 11 seconds can be used to listen to the question again for double-checking.

2. Urm… Okay. I lied. I don’t know any special techniques for the reading part of the test. All I have to say is, from my own experience, I couldn’t read either form of romaji provided next to the Japanese text. My Japanese reading skills are far superior to my listening ability, so I didn’t need the romaji anyways. Besides, the short passages later on in the test don’t come with any romaji, so people who don’t understand a single kanji or most of the hiragana and katakana characters shouldn’t even be taking the test in the first place, and those who do should be able to deal with the Japanese head-on without resorting to romaji.

The test recommends that the taker has had “two to four years of Japanese language study in high school, or the equivalent gradual development of competence in Japanese over a period of years” before sitting down for the hour-long ordeal. It’s somewhat like the critical reading and writing sections of the SAT Reasoning Test, though the level of Japanese language is something that a native speaker would giggle at, plus the fact that the topics the sentences and passages involve are among the most mundane possible. However, the Japanese SAT test does come with a Listening part at the beginning that requires the taker to bring and use his or her own CD player, and the test proctor would distribute CDs with what sounds like people suffering from a complete lack of self-confidence talking. Hey, at least the switch to CD players from cassette players last year was a very good idea on CollegeBoard’s part… Barely anyone of the SAT age owns a cassette player nowadays, and I remember one poor girl who didn’t have one on the day of the Korean with Listening test three years ago and had to rush out to buy one…only to be locked out of the room later. I was there to take the Chinese with Listening test.

Good luck to those who are taking the test this month.