JFT Sensei

The final two weeks before JFT-Basic: what to do and what to stop

The last fortnight is not for learning new grammar. Here is what actually moves a score in fourteen days, and what to leave alone.

· 3 min read

Two weeks out, the shape of your result is largely decided. That is not a reason to coast - it is a reason to stop doing the things that no longer help.

New grammar will not reach you in time. A pattern met for the first time twelve days before the exam is not going to be available under time pressure. Leave it.

Here is what is worth the fortnight.

Days 14-8: consolidate, do not expand

Drill the vocabulary you have already met. The words you half-know are worth more than any new ones, because they are one exposure away from being automatic. Go back through your error list and your textbook’s word lists for chapters you have already covered.

Sit one full mock, timed, on a computer. Early in the fortnight, not late - you want time to act on what it shows. Sit our free exam demo properly and review it the same evening.

Fix your weakest section, not your worst feeling. The section breakdown tells you where the cheap points are. Listening is the slowest to move; vocabulary and reading respond fastest to two weeks of work.

Days 7-3: rehearse the conditions

By now the content work is mostly done. What remains is the exam as a physical event.

  • One more full mock, same conditions, ideally at the same hour of day as your real sitting.
  • Practise on a screen, with headphones, every time. Reading Japanese on a screen is genuinely different from reading it on paper.
  • Rehearse the clock. Two glances: after Script and Vocabulary, and when listening ends. Time management explains the checkpoints.

Check the admin too, because it is free to get right and expensive to get wrong: your test centre, how long it takes to get there, and what to bring. Identification rules are stricter than people expect.

Days 2-1: stop

This is the part candidates refuse to believe.

Do not sit a mock the day before. A bad score the night before the test damages your performance and teaches you nothing you can act on. A good one tells you nothing new either.

Light review only: your error list, a few dozen words, twenty minutes of listening to keep your ear in. Then stop and do something else.

Sleep matters more than the last hour of study. Listening comprehension in a second language degrades sharply when you are tired, and listening is the section where you cannot go back.

The morning of

Eat. Arrive early. Do not revise in the waiting room - it raises your heart rate without adding anything.

Remember the one rule that saves the most points: if you do not know, choose and move on. There is no penalty for a wrong answer and no reward for an empty one.

What happens at the centre itself is covered in JFT-Basic test day. Your provisional score appears on screen the moment you finish, which is abrupt - checking your result explains what follows.

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