読解・文法 nightmare

[synewave]

With only a week to go I'm still really struggling with this section. The grammar section seems to be broken into a few different parts but I don't really get it.

What I'm asking really is, do certain forms come up in specific parts of the grammar section?

If that's the case, is there any mark grabbing hints you could give to a scrounger like me?

[Applecart]

Hi synewave, strange as it may seem I've never realy thought about the different types of questions in the grammar section. I'll try to look at a few examples this morning and get back to you.

In the mean time, you were asking in another post about how to approach those tricky vocab questions that give you a word and ask you to to choose which sentence uses that word correctly. Well, I probably can't tell you anything that you don't already know, but I've been able to greatly improve on this section by doing the following. If none of the sentences jump out at me as being correct then I spend a bit of time thinking about what grammatical category the word belongs in: i-adjective, na-adjective, true adverb, if it's a noun is it one that can form a suru-verb etc. That usually nails it.

When it still isn't possible to select the final answer becasue 2 or more could be grammaticaly correct then it seems to be just a matter of knowing which is actually used, for example as a set expression. (決り文句). Sometimes the overall sense of the sentence can help you to guess which is moer likley. I think that these type of questions are among the hardest and really serve to seperate out those candidates scoring in the mid to high 90% range.

[synewave]

Applecart - great advice, cheers! I went and tried that vocab section again and instead of my usual 1/5, I managed 2/5!! Woo hoo. Your advice really does make sense however it is just one of the many ways that highlight my glaring lack of knowledge of the rules governing parts of speech.

Regarding the grammar questions. In the final paper, I see why the reading questions are split up - they are on different texts - but the grammar divisions are still a mystery.

I hope you reach your 90% target...I'm setting my sights a lot lower but will be equally satisfied if I can break the 60% threshold!

[ayame]

Hi synewave,

i don't know how helpful this will be, but here is a description of the kinds of grammar questions asked on the test (from a book called "Find out your weak points! Japanese Proficiency Mock Test Level 2" by Unicom). It doesn't mention how the sections of the test are organized though.

a. basic grammar, parts of speech, honorifics
b. correct forms of functional words
c. functional words similar in meaning and usage
d. relation between words and phrases/first and last halves of a reading
e. relation between first and last halves of a reading/between two sentences

It's a good book to study from, because there's a section at the end of the book with explanations of most of the questions and hints about how to choose answers. Depending on which questions you get wrong, there is also study advice (some of that is pretty obvious stuff though).