Wow, I didn’t think I would see another person who wanted to know about this kind of stuff.

I am becoming turning into a sophomore into this coming semester but I completed Japanese 202 my spring semester as a freshman. But wait how do you get into 202 already if you’re a freshman you ask? Before my spring semester, I went to the head of the Japanese department and he gave me an test on the spot which involved everything you described: reading passages, listen to questions asked in Japanese about the passages by the professor, and then answer back in Japanese.

When I did the test, I went as far as the 300 level (cause he used the textbook for that class) but decided that my writing and speaking weren’t good enough so he put me into the 202 class. I will assume that when you mean the profiency test, you mean the JLPT. So after destroying completing the class I can say that it would fit between N5 and N4 in which case you should aim for N4 to N3.

When I took the class, I pretty much knew everything for the entire semester already except for maybe a few things here and there and practicing speaking and hearing it spoken helped fill some gaps (though they are still my weak points). Anyway, I can’t tell you specifically how much vocab and kanji you need to know because I don’t even know how much I know myself. In that area, I’m sure someone else would be able to tell you. But the for the meantime, look up the requirements for N4 and N3.

One more thing, to give you and idea of what my test was like with the professor, I told you about how I made it to 300 level right? If you take a look at the picture below, I had to read up to the first paragraph at least and then the professor asked me an extremely general question – “What is this article about?” which completely stopped me. If you can read this entire passage and answer that question in Japanese, I think you’ll be more than ready for your Japanese II level test.

I have completed a level 2 Japanese college course in the US, about 10 years ago or so.

It really does depend on what book you are using.

For Japanese 1 and 2 we used Japanese for Busy People. For Japanese 3 I had a different teacher and he used Youkoso, and we were working on completely different things.

For our Japanese 2 final, it was mostly conversation based. She had only showed us a very basic number of kanji like: day, rice, person, water, mountain, etc and we weren’t really even expected to use them, but we needed to recognize them. We did of course know Hiragana and Katakana at that point, and we had a paper where we had to read a bunch of questions and answer in Japanese, and I think there was also a bit at the end where we read a little story and answered questions about it.

I do remember that the majority of our grade was based on the conversation part though.

The following are the different types of conversations we had during Japanese 1 and 2:

Basic Introduction

Day and Time

Buying something in a shop and talking about items, their positions, prices, and counting their numbers.

Talking about taking a trip

Buying a ticket for a trip

Giving directions to a taxi

Talking on a telephone

Going out to see a show

Ordering something from a restaurant

Being invited to a party

Exchanging gifts

She then started up a conversation with a random subject selected from above and you had to keep going for the alloted amount of time, probably 5-10 mins, can’t remember the exact time. She also blended the subjects together, but I kinda cheated on mine and kept steering her back to the subject I wanted to talk about. :D

I’ve recently taken the first 3 levels of Japanese at a TAFE institute (think cross between a community college and trade school) in Australia, and it covered much the same things, but she was using the same book (Japanese for Busy People, much to my surprise).

So it’s hard to say if that’s what you would be covering if they were using a different book. Might behoove you to go the college’s book store and look up what books they use for their Japanese courses and browse through the topics of each chapter.

Another idea is to use one of their bulletin boards and make a little posting offering $10 (or a case of ramen :P) to a recent Japanese student who can answer a few questions. Then they can tell you exactly what they studied and what the test was like. ^_^

If you don’t want to post something, check and see if there’s an anime club at your school. If there is, show up to one of the meetings and I can guarantee you there will be multiple people there that have taken the class. You may want to bring pepper-spray though, just in case… :P