Part of every JLPT reading section - and the whole of the 情報検索 (information retrieval) task - is not really testing comprehension. It is testing whether you can find something.
Timetables, notices, application conditions, price tables. The text is dense and most of it is irrelevant to the question.
Reading these from top to bottom is the wrong strategy and it is what most candidates do.
The method
- Read the question and the conditions first. Who is the person? What do they want? What constraints do they have - a day, a budget, an age, a deadline?
- Write the conditions down in shorthand in the margin. Three or four items: “Sat only / under 3000 yen / needs no experience”.
- Scan the text for those items, not for meaning. You are looking for a day, a number, a word - a visual target.
- Eliminate each option that fails one condition. Do not verify that the remaining option satisfies every condition until only one is left.
The elimination step is where the marks are. Almost every option fails on exactly one condition, and finding that one failure is faster than confirming a complete match.
What the exam hides in these texts
The traps are consistent:
- An asterisk or a note at the bottom - ※ - which changes one of the conditions. Read it. It is there for a reason.
- An exception introduced by ただし or ～の場合は - “except”, “in the case of”.
- Two similar numbers, one of which answers a different question - a price and a discounted price, a deadline and an event date.
- A condition expressed as a negative - ～なくてもいい, which means the condition does not apply.
Practise on real Japanese
You do not need a textbook for this task, which is one of its advantages. Japanese municipal websites, library notices, job boards and event pages all contain exactly this kind of text, free.
Pick one, invent a person with three constraints, and find their answer. Five minutes, most days.
The same skill is what the JFT-Basic reading section is built on, with shorter texts: how to read a Japanese notice.
When not to scan
Scanning is wrong for the longer passages that ask about the author’s opinion or the main point. Those need actual reading, and the signposts - しかし, つまり, このように - tell you where the answer lives: N3 reading speed.
Knowing which mode a question wants is itself part of the skill. Look at the question first and you will always know.
Budget the time
Information-retrieval questions are the cheapest marks in the section if you scan, and the most expensive if you read. Work out your per-question budget in advance: time per question.