Candidates often treat katakana as the easy script, because many words come from English. Then they meet アルバイト or エレベーター under a clock and lose a mark to a word they know perfectly well in their own language.
Katakana is a reading-speed problem, not a vocabulary problem. And it is solvable.
The workplace words
コピー (copy), メモ, パソコン (PC), プリンター, ファイル, メール, エレベーター, ロッカー, シフト, アルバイト (part-time job), パート, ミーティング, チーム, リーダー, マニュアル, ヘルメット, カード.
Notice how many appear in exactly the settings the exam uses. A clip about tomorrow’s shift will contain シフト, not a native word.
Daily life
コンビニ, スーパー, レジ (checkout), ビル (building - not “bill”), アパート, マンション (an apartment block, not a mansion), バス, タクシー, トイレ, シャワー, エアコン, ゴミ (often written ごみ or ゴミ).
The ones that are not what they look like
These are worth deliberate attention, because your English intuition is wrong:
| Katakana | Actual meaning |
|---|---|
| マンション | apartment building |
| アルバイト | part-time job (from German) |
| サービス | can mean “free of charge” |
| クレーム | a complaint, not a claim |
| コンセント | power socket |
| サイン | a signature |
The reading-speed problem
The letters that slow everyone down are the long vowel mark ー and the small ッ and ャュョ.
コーヒー has two long marks. ビール (beer) and ビル (building) differ only by one. ホテル and ホーテル would be different words if the second existed. The mark is not decoration - it is a whole beat of the word.
The fix is drilling for speed, not accuracy: read katakana words aloud against a timer until your recognition is instant rather than pieced together letter by letter. Learning katakana sets out a schedule.
Where it costs marks
Listening. A katakana word in a clip sounds like a Japanese word, not an English one. サービス is four beats, not two.
Script and Vocabulary. Distractors are built from near-identical shapes: シ and ツ, ソ and ン, ク and ワ. If you are slow, they look the same.
Reading. A notice in a factory will use カード, ヘルメット, ロッカー - and if reading them takes a second each, you have lost time you needed for the question.
Test it honestly
Read the katakana words above aloud. If any took more than a beat, that is where the marks are going.
Then sit the free exam demo under time pressure - 48 questions, 60 minutes, no pausing - and see whether katakana appears in the questions you missed. It usually does.