Every question on JFT-Basic is multiple choice with four options. You never write anything, you never speak, and you never construct a sentence. That is the whole answer format.
What varies is what each section asks you to do with it.
Script and Vocabulary (文字と語彙)
Roughly twelve questions. The recurring shapes:
- Kanji to reading. A word in kanji; pick the correct reading.
- Reading to kanji. A word in kana; pick the correct kanji.
- Gap fill. A sentence with a blank and four candidate words.
- Opposites and near-synonyms. Pick the word that means the opposite of a given one.
The wrong answers are built from specific confusions — same component, similar shape, similar sound, irregular reading. More in the Script and Vocabulary section.
Conversation and Expression (会話と表現)
Roughly twelve questions. A one-line situation, then four things you might say:
You have finished work and are leaving before your section head. What do you say?
All four options are usually grammatical. Only one is appropriate. The distinction is almost always politeness level or direction — offering versus instructing, apologising versus greeting. See Conversation and Expression.
Listening Comprehension (聴解)
Roughly twelve questions. A short clip plays through headphones — a single speaker giving information, or a short exchange — followed by a question about a specific detail.
Assume each clip plays once. The question and options are on screen, and reading them before the audio starts is the single most valuable technique in this section. What is being asked for is usually a time, a place, a price, an object or an instruction.
Full treatment in the listening section.
Reading Comprehension (読解)
Roughly twelve questions. A short practical text and a question about it. The text types repeat:
- Notices — opening hours, closures, rubbish collection
- Messages between colleagues — a room change, a deadline
- Instructions — what to do when a machine is broken
- Advertisements — job postings with conditions
Not essays. The things you actually read at work in Japan. See the reading section.
What is the same across all four
Four options, one answer, no negative marking. A guess costs nothing and a blank scores zero, so never leave one.
No section is separately timed. Sixty minutes for the whole test, managed by you. This causes more lost points than any single grammar gap — see time management.
Only the total counts. No section has a minimum, so a weak section can be carried by a strong one.
Where to see real ones
The Japan Foundation publishes official sample questions on its own site, free. Those are the only definitively representative examples in existence, because the people who publish them write the exam. Start there.
Then practise under conditions. Our free practice test uses all four formats above, original questions written in the exam’s style, with an explanation for every answer in six languages and a per-section breakdown.
One warning worth repeating: material circulating online as reproduced official past papers is both legally dubious and frequently wrong, having been rewritten from memory with errors baked in. Practising against a faulty answer key is worse than not practising at all.