In my previous post I sorted out what’s on the Eiken Grade Pre-1 exam. This time I want to get more personal. I actually failed Eiken Grade Pre-1 (the second-highest level of Eiken, Japan’s best-known English test) five times, and finally passed on the sixth try.
Studying for Eiken while holding down a job can be hard at times. I’m writing this in the hope that it helps others in the same boat.
I’ll write out my whole Pre-1 study method, including what I did between each attempt.
I passed on November 10, 2024, on S-CBT, the computer-based version. For me, it was the first time I took the test after the renewal that added the summary question.
While writing the previous post I found myself wondering, “Come to think of it, how did I actually pass?” So for anyone preparing to take it, I’ll go into what my preparation really looked like.
It’s a long post, but I’ve included my scores from every attempt.

From Grade 3 to Grade 2, it was just DUO 3.0 and Anki
Before getting to Pre-1, let me go back a little.
I took Grade 3, Pre-2 and Grade 2 back to back, and passed each one on the first try.

I think I first took Grade 3 about a year and a half after I started working through DUO 3.0, a well-known Japanese vocabulary book built around example sentences.
Back then, DUO 3.0 was pretty much my only study material.
Thanks to Anki, I learned almost all of DUO’s example sentences and words, memorizing them sentence by sentence.
I definitely couldn’t recite them all now, though.
I wrote about how I came across DUO 3.0 and Anki here (the article is in Japanese for now).
I did only a few Eiken past papers, and I ignored writing entirely.
For listening, I had bought DUO’s CDs (both the basic one and the review one) and listened every day, and for the Eiken listening section I only did some past papers.
After finishing DUO, a second round on derived words
Near the beginning of DUO 3.0, there’s a section on how to use the book. It says something like: “First learn the example sentences and the main words, then use the second round to learn the derived words. That will bring you up to the Pre-1 vocabulary level.”
So I made my own Anki deck for DUO’s derived words and kept adding to it by typing them in by hand.
According to my Anki data, I added the first word to the derived-words deck in June 2019.
That’s when I finished learning DUO’s main words.
I guess you could say that was my first full lap through the deck.
The first DUO words I learned stuck much better than the derived words, since I had flipped through those cards over and over again.
I scraped through Grade 2
I passed Grade 2 in the second round of fiscal 2019 (Eiken’s school year runs April to March, with three rounds a year). Looking at the results, my vocabulary was strong, and I got a perfect score on reading comprehension.


On past papers I averaged about 60 to 70 percent on the reading passages, but on the real test I somehow managed to concentrate, and got all 18 reading questions right.
I still remember the last question, the one with the “whale” construction (the famous “A whale is no more a fish than a horse is” pattern). I was torn between two choices, just went for one, and it turned out to be right.
It was such a tricky question that even the quick answer key a cram school posted that night got it wrong.
I also got 16 of 20 vocabulary questions.
But I had pretty much neglected studying for listening and writing, so I got 19 out of 30 in listening and 9 out of 16 points in writing.
The passing score was 1520 and I got 1593, so I barely made it.
By the time I took Grade 2, I had typed 1,141 words into Anki by hand (399 derived words from DUO and 742 words I didn’t know).
My busiest month was September 2019, right before Grade 2, with 297 words.
Aiming for Pre-1: every unknown word goes into Anki
Riding that momentum, I decided to aim for Pre-1, and the first thing I did was buy past papers.
It was Obunsha’s “2019 Edition Eiken Pre-1: All Questions from the Past 6 Tests.”
For listening, early on I also bought The Japan Times’ listening workbook for Pre-1 (the one with the purple cover).
It came out in September 2019, right around when I took Grade 2.
I kept adding DUO’s derived words, and I also made sure to register every unknown word from the Eiken past papers in Anki.
I also bought the “red book” (Kyogakusha’s Eiken Pre-1 past paper collection, covering 9 tests), and worked through the words I didn’t know there as well, one after another.
For a while, I took only the vocabulary sections of the Pre-1 past papers and registered every word I didn’t know in Anki.
That was the hardest part.
I sometimes entered words in bursts during the year-end holidays, and I think it easily took about a year.
My Anki “memo” deck held not just words from those past papers but also every unknown word from the news and from conversations with friends, all typed in by hand.
Between passing Grade 2 and taking Pre-1 for the first time, about 2 years and 3 months, I added 3,918 words (1,956 derived words from DUO and 1,962 words I didn’t know).
Entering them was seriously, seriously hard work.
I feel like I spent as much time registering words as I did studying them.
But I think that was the biggest reason vocabulary later became my strong point.
After all that patient, steady registering, all that was left was to flip through the cards, because Anki automatically shows you the ones you’re about to forget.
What an efficient way to study vocabulary!
The story of failing again and again
I took the test five times and failed every time. It was a pretty rough stretch.

Attempt 1: fiscal 2021, round 3




I had drilled vocabulary hard, but for listening I had only done a few past papers.
For writing, I figured I’d just give it a go and see.
This was the first round I signed up for, mainly to find out where I stood.
I failed.
Still, I only missed 6 of the 25 vocabulary questions.
I’m not especially good at reading comprehension, but I got more right than wrong (10 of 16).
For listening, all I remember is that I had no idea what was going on.
As you can see, there are a lot of wrong answers in every part.
My listening accuracy was 34%. This was the first sign of the weak spot that would drag me down again and again.
Strangely, though, my writing score was high that time.
I got 10 of 16 points, and my CSE score (Eiken’s score scale) was 525, higher than the 517 I got in listening.
I feel like my writing scores varied quite a bit from round to round.
People online often say that Eiken writing is graded leniently.
So the idea was, if you just get a high score in writing, you can make it!
But writing is my weak spot.
By the way, I heard that the Eiken Foundation announced it would start using automatic AI scoring alongside human graders for writing, beginning with round 1 of fiscal 2019.
Attempt 2: fiscal 2022, round 2
For the next Pre-1, I decided not to take it right away. I skipped one round and used the time to study.
I got fired up to focus on my weak points, listening and writing!
Vocabulary was still the core of my studying
Of course, I couldn’t manage writing or reading without fixing my vocabulary first, so I kept the plan of making words the core of my studying.
I didn’t register words in Anki every day, but on weekends I just clicked away, entering them one after another.
Between attempt 1 and attempt 2, I added 783 new words to Anki.
According to my Anki data, 70 percent of them were entered on weekends, and more than half on Sundays alone.
On Cambly (an online English conversation service), I also entered words I hadn’t understood in conversations with my teachers while reviewing the lesson later.
I tackled the unknown words I came across, in all kinds of places, one by one.
So for the vocabulary questions, I did nothing special beyond my everyday Anki registering and flipping through Anki cards over and over.
Once you know the words, long passages start to make sense
As your vocabulary gets stronger, you start to be able to read.
You don’t fully get the meaning, and some of it drops out here and there, but you can manage to read it.
Here’s an example of what that feels like, in English.
Yesterday I went to ____, and even when I ____ the mic into the equipment my voice didn’t get any louder, so I checked whether the ____ was on.
Even with parts missing here and there, you can sort of tell what it means.
“Oh, they went to karaoke, but the equipment wasn’t powered on.”
For writing, I picked a template from a book and just kept writing
I’m not sure exactly what books I had at that point, but I think they were Obunsha’s 6-test past paper book, the red book with 9 tests, and the listening workbook.
On top of those, I bought The Japan Times’ Pre-1 essay-writing workbook to build up my writing expressions.
I don’t think I was using AI or anything like that yet.
That book was a bit difficult, though.
For a while I worked hard on several of them, writing on paper over and over until I could imitate the model answers.
By the way, it looks like there’s now a book from the same series, covering both summary and essay writing, that also handles the summary question added in 2024.
Looking at the book, I stocked up on expressions worth memorizing, settled on my own writing template, and practiced writing it again and again.
Also, by then I had a native-speaker friend abroad who I talked with on weekends, and we’d become close enough to chat on Discord every day.
I had naturally become able to type out conversational sentences, so looking back, I think that was writing practice too.
That was around when I started thinking that all I needed was more phrasings for saying what I wanted to say in English.
Listening was mostly Cambly and conversations with my friend
For listening, I spent most of my time on Cambly and weekend conversations with my friend.
For the time left after Anki, on a weekend, for example, I’d set aside 3 hours to talk with my friend and about 2 hours for reading and writing.
Once in a while I’d also do a listening past paper.
Those conversations took care of Part 1 and Part 3, or rather, that’s around when I felt I was gradually starting to understand them.
Part 1 is a conversation between two people. It has some tricky bits, but I started to get the hang of it.
Part 2, though, I really couldn’t understand at all.
It’s a test of short-term memory, in a way. A fairly long passage is played, and it’s super hard.
The first time I heard it, I honestly understood nothing.
I even thought, isn’t this just too long?
And without managing to prepare for that part, here are my results for attempt 2.




My total went from 1633 to 1754, up 121 points.
I was 38 points short of the passing score of 1792.
In vocabulary I got 17 of 25, a bit below the 19 from attempt 1, but still decent.
In the long passages I got 12 of 16, up from 10 in attempt 1.
But in reading overall I got 29 of 41, exactly the same number as attempt 1.
In listening I went from 10 of 29 to 16.
Looking inside, Part 1 jumped from 4 of 12 to 9, so my weekend conversations were paying off directly.
Part 2 went from 4 of 12 to 6.
Part 3 went from 2 of 5 to 1, which actually went down.
In writing I went from 10 of 16 points to 12.
Looking closer, content went from 2 to 4, full marks. Structure and vocabulary stayed at 3, and grammar stayed at 2.
I think practicing with a fixed template helped me solidly answer what the prompt actually asked.
My band also rose from GP1-7 to GP1-2 (Eiken’s “band” shows how far you are from the pass line, so GP1-2 means two steps below it), and I started to feel, hey, I might be close to passing!
My writing wasn’t bad either, so all I had to do was work on listening Parts 2 and 3 and I could make it!
Fired up to strengthen Parts 2 and 3, I headed into attempt 3.
Attempt 3: fiscal 2023, round 1
From here on, I felt fairly confident about the vocabulary questions, and my reading comprehension had settled at around 60 to 70 percent, so this was the period when I got fired up to work on Part 2.
Not necessarily starting from this point, but around then I had started digging through online articles about Eiken prep and how people who actually took it prepared.
From what I read, some people pass with an accuracy of about 75 percent.
In other words, I wanted to hit at least 75 percent to be safe.
So from then on, I started paying attention to percentages.
For example, 23 out of 41 in reading is 56 percent.
To reach 75 percent, I’d need to get 31 right for sure! That’s the kind of standard I set.
For Part 2, just get your ears used to English
What I did to build up Part 2 between attempts 2 and 3 was simple: I just tried to get my ears used to English.
First, I listened closely to the audio of the listening past papers, as a basic step.
I also did shadowing, which everyone recommends.
I dislike dictation, so I didn’t do it, but writing down the English you hear in a notebook shows you where you weren’t catching things, so it seems worth doing.
In other words, you eliminate the parts you can’t hear, one by one.
By the way, these days I’m also building a system that automatically makes shadowing material with n8n (the article is in Japanese for now).
For daily listening, news material
With the past-paper audio as my base, I searched around online for material to listen to every day.
And I settled on news material.
Unlike Parts 1 and 3, which use everyday conversation, business and situations (like at an amusement park or an airport), Part 2 has academic content.
It feels like someone reading a long reading passage aloud, with topics like medicine or history.
So I figured I’d get my ears used to it with news material.
Here’s a summary of the news material I tried.
| Material | Type | Compared with Pre-1 | Suitman’s take |
|---|---|---|---|
| BBC | News site | Much harder | Didn’t stick with it |
| CNN | News site | Much harder, and they speak fast | Didn’t stick with it |
| NHK “Learning Modern English through the News” | Program site with audio and explanations (in Japanese) | A good fit for Part 2 | Listened to it a lot for a while |
| “5-Minute Business English, Explained” (Japanese-language) | Podcast | Just the right length | Listened every day on my commute |
| Nippon TV News 24 Japan | YouTube | A little harder | Still listening |
| Linguamarina | YouTube | Not listening material | Shadowed it for a long time |
Here are the ones I tried but didn’t stick with.
BBC
News site covering the whole world
I had the impression that there was a lot of political content, but you also learn what’s going on in the world, and if you make a habit of forming your own opinions, it seems like it would help with writing too.
But some articles had no audio, and the text was a bit high-level and long, so I couldn’t keep it up.
The pop-ups asking me to register an account were also annoying, which was another reason I stopped using it.
CNN
American news site
This is also a news site.
They speak fast, and once you get used to that speed, the audio in the exam feels really slow.
But it was difficult, and a lot of the content didn’t match my interests, so it never really sank in and I stopped using it.
To Suitman’s ear, BBC and CNN sound much harder than Pre-1, in both vocabulary and speed.
From here on are the listening materials that actually helped.
NHK “Learning Modern English through the News”
NHK program site with audio and explanations (in Japanese)
From the list of past episodes, click a title and you get the audio along with a Japanese text, grammar notes, meanings and more, so you can learn a lot.
I think it’s a good fit for Part 2 listening.
For a while I studied by listening to a lot of this audio.
“5-Minute Business English, Explained” (Japanese-language)
A podcast you can listen to on your commute
At the time it was called “Matt Takeuchi’s 5-Minute Business English.” The host, Matt Takeuchi, explains business English articles in this podcast.
Personally, this one really helped me improve.
I listened to it every day on my commute, through the Podcasts app on my iPhone. If you have an iPhone, you can start listening for free right away. On a computer, you can listen from the link.
He explains things in great detail, and the length is just right. Plus, the host has a good voice.
It’s a calm, easy-to-listen-to voice, and it helped me a lot back then.
The episodes are nicely on the long side. He breaks down and explains each sentence, and then the full audio plays at the end, so it was great practice for picturing the meaning. I recommend it.
You often hear that you should understand English in the order it comes, from the start of the sentence, right?
It’s great practice for that, too.
Nippon TV News 24 Japan
A YouTube channel reporting Japanese news in English
YouTube has become an extremely strong learning resource these days, hasn’t it?
Suitman is still subscribed to this channel and still listens to it.
It’s a little harder than Pre-1, but since it covers things that happened in Japan, it’s easy to follow.
For example, you can watch a story once in Japanese, then watch it again in English.
The vocabulary is also full of Pre-1 words, and I’d often think, “Oh, so that’s how you use that word.”
Once you get used to this narrator’s speed and can follow the meaning, I think you can easily get 50 to 60 percent of the listening section.
Linguamarina
A YouTube channel I used as a shadowing model
It isn’t listening material as such, but this person’s channel helped me a lot back then.
I used this person’s speaking speed as my role model at the time, and I remember shadowing them all the time.
I played the part, even copying their gestures.
They have a natural accent and are easy to listen to. It’s English that goes right into your head.
I think picking someone to imitate and just imitating them is a good strategy too.
So that was my Part 2 preparation: a period when I worked hard to build it up, mainly with Matt Takeuchi’s podcast.
Between attempts 2 and 3, I added 980 words to Anki.
On May 4, 2023, during Golden Week (a string of national holidays in Japan), I entered 139 words between 7:30 in the morning and just before 2 in the afternoon.




My total was 1755. That’s just 1 point up from attempt 2, and my band stayed at GP1-2.
Measured against my 75 percent target, it looked like this.
- Reading: 23 of 41 (56%) → 8 more questions to reach 75%
- Listening: 18 of 29 (62%) → 4 more questions to reach 75%
- Writing: 11 of 16 points (69%) → 1 more point to reach 75%
If I remember right, the vocabulary questions in this round were incredibly hard.
It was the first time I missed as many as 11 of 25, and vocabulary was the part I had always felt confident about.
I almost lost heart.
I never skipped Anki a single day, so that I wouldn’t forget what I’d learned, and I kept adding new words, so Suitman’s brain should have been updated.
Still, the vocabulary questions that round were hard.
The difficulty changes from round to round.
Thinking back, the round where I got a perfect score on Grade 2 reading may also have been a slightly easier one.
Part 3 went from 1 of 5 to 4.
I only missed one, and I was able to listen properly and answer, so I take it as proof that my everyday conversations with friends and on Cambly were paying off.
Part 3 is tricky too, but before it starts, you get about 10 seconds to read a sentence describing the situation and figure out where you are, and then the question begins right away.
For example, it says something like, “You’re about to fly to the United States. Your gate is 34A. You have to catch the first flight after noon or you won’t make it.”
Then the question starts, and it has a bit of a twist.
But if you listen carefully and build a picture in your mind as you go, it’s the kind of question that gets easier to follow.
Like Part 1, you can get through it with imagery.
Part 2, though, stayed at 6 of 12.
When I looked at my answers, the pattern was right, wrong, right, wrong…
That can’t be a coincidence.
My analysis is that Part 2 requires you to remember the content of a long passage just by hearing it.
The question paper doesn’t show what you’ll be asked, only the answer choices.
So after the passage you hear “Question thirteen,” and after a 10-second answer time it moves on with “Number fourteen” and so on.
And after those 10 seconds, the next long passage starts playing.
Part 2 is hell with no breathing room.
I read online that a lot of people stumble here, and Suitman was one of them.
Looking at my answers, each passage has two questions, and I got every first one right.
So I wondered whether it meant the beginning of the passage stayed in my head, but by the second question I only vaguely remembered it.
Of course, it could also be pure coincidence.
Either way, my trouble with Part 2 was still not overcome, and it was a frustrating result.
Attempt 4: fiscal 2023, round 2
In attempt 3, I got 9 of 16 on the long reading passages.
As usual, there were many parts I only vaguely understood, so I decided to read more long texts.
Reading more long passages
The material I started reading was The Japan Times Alpha.
And news articles on Engoo.
Engoo Daily News
News articles with a level you can choose
I still use this site for practice today. You can switch it to your own level and pull up topics you’re interested in, which is very handy.
For Pre-1 prep, narrow the level down to about 6 to 7 and read the articles that come up.
One article a day is fine, or five a week.
Look up the words and expressions you don’t know and put them into Anki.
Then I read until I understood the meaning, and read again with a translation. That’s how I used it for long-passage practice.
I wrote about lessons where I read and discuss Engoo articles with a Cambly teacher in another post (it’s in Japanese for now).
The Japan Times Alpha
A weekly English-language newspaper
It’s the same with Alpha. Reading every article takes forever, so just read the ones that look readable or interesting.
And keep reading, steadily.
That said, I think Alpha is aimed at around the Pre-1 level too, but my impression is that it has quite a few difficult expressions.
It’s a subscription, available in print or digital, and I recommend digital.
You can listen to the audio, and you can show the Japanese translation on half the screen and check it as you read.
Part 2: “listen and summarize” practice on Cambly
Now, for listening Part 2: my overwhelming problem was short-term memory, I guess you’d call it. I was bad at holding the content of a long English passage, one to two minutes of it, in my head.
I wondered how to overcome that, and this is the practice I asked my Cambly teacher to do with me.
- Choose an Engoo news article together with the teacher
- Turn screen sharing off so that I can only hear the teacher’s voice reading
- After listening to the article read with natural native pronunciation, I retell it from the beginning
- Get feedback from the teacher, then move on to the next article
I can’t really summarize it properly, so I just retell whatever I remember, from the start.
I also say every number I can remember, like the percentages and fractions used in the statistics.
A 30-minute lesson gives me just enough time to have two articles read and to summarize them, so in my English conversation lessons I did this and only this, over and over.
Personally, I feel this is what improved my listening the most.
The more I did it, the more I could hold the content of a long passage the way I pictured it, like a story moving along from the start.
Then, little by little, the mental picture started to stay in my head even for the English passages in Part 2.
I recommend it.
I also wrote about what one of these lessons was like in this diary entry (it’s in Japanese for now).
These days there’s AI, so depending on how you use it, you could probably do this without paying for online lessons like Cambly. But maybe the tension of having a real person listen to you was part of what made it work.
Also, Engoo today can read every article aloud with an AI voice, which it couldn’t back then, so you can practice summarizing on your own!
Start with an easy level and something you’re interested in.
For example, if you like art, type “Art” in the search box, and articles about it will come up for you to practice listening with.
If you ask your Cambly teacher, you can do this “listen and summarize” practice right away in a 30-minute lesson.
For vocabulary, I also used the Pass-Tan app
For vocabulary, I also used Obunsha’s “Deru-jun Pass-Tan” (5th edition), a Pre-1 vocabulary book, as a smartphone app.
Words I didn’t know in the app went into Anki, of course.
According to my Anki tags, I added 306 Pass-Tan words between June and September 2023, after attempt 3.
Online I also saw people say the previous 4th edition was harder and better.
By the way, the 6th edition is out now.
Between attempts 3 and 4, I added 589 words to Anki.




My total was 1763, a personal best.
But my band stayed at GP1-2, and I was still 29 points short of the passing score of 1792.
In vocabulary, I did almost nothing other than Anki and missed only 2 of 25 questions.
By this point I felt vocabulary was fine, and it gave me the confidence to keep going with my current method.
Against the 75 percent target, it looks like this.
- Reading: 32 of 41 (78%) → over 75% for the first time
- Listening: 16 of 29 (55%) → 6 more questions to reach 75%
- Writing: 9 of 16 points (56%) → 3 more points to reach 75%
In listening, Part 1 dropped from 8 of 12 to 6, but Part 2 was 7 of 12, the best so far.
The right-wrong-right-wrong pattern from attempt 3 didn’t show up this time.
In this round’s listening, I had been doing fairly well on Part 1 until then, but I’ll never forget that questions 3 through 8 were all wrong.
Paper-based tests are often held at schools, and mine was at a high school nearby.
In the classroom, the speaker for the listening section was set up at the teacher’s podium.
I figured the seats near it would have the best sound, so I took a seat near the front every time.
Then, when I actually sat down for the test, the student diagonally in front of me was jiggling their leg the whole time.
It was right in my line of sight, and I remember I couldn’t concentrate at all.
During reading, I could get by just by reading, so I tilted my face to keep it out of view, but during listening I got strangely distracted.
After that, when I studied at a cafe, if there was something around that broke my concentration, I started to take it on deliberately as “training!”
In writing, vocabulary dropped from 3 points to 2, and grammar from 3 points to 1.
In the long reading passages I got 9 of 16, the same as attempt 3.
Attempt 5: fiscal 2023, round 3
For attempt 5, I signed up right away, with no gap.
I was doing the same things: studying Part 2 and writing, over and over.
Between attempts 4 and 5, I added 251 words to Anki.




My total was 1708, down 55 points from attempt 4.
My band also fell from GP1-2 to GP1-4. I was now 84 points short of the passing score.
Against the 75 percent target, it was like this.
- Reading: 29 of 41 (71%) → 2 more questions to reach 75%
- Listening: 16 of 29 (55%) → 6 more questions to reach 75%
- Writing: 8 of 16 points (50%) → 4 more points to reach 75%
I was now getting about 70 percent in reading.
But listening Part 2 was still a problem. It was hard.
I got 3 of 12 in Part 2, my lowest across all six attempts.
Part 1 was 10 of 12, the best I had gotten up to that point.
And there was a bit of a mind game here too.
Until then, I had always been able to choose my seat freely when I walked into the classroom.
But this time the proctor said, “Please fill in the seats in order from the back.”
Seriously?! I had come early to grab my favorite spot, the best position!
So I ended up sitting by the wall.
I remember the speaker’s sound echoing a lot around the classroom and being hard to hear.
But that experience taught me something.
At the start of the exam there’s a sound check, where a message in Japanese is played.
Even when the sound is bad, I can hear it if it’s Japanese.
Which means the real issue is that I just don’t have the listening skills yet.
In writing, I got 8 of 16 points. Content and structure dropped from 3 points to 2, and grammar stayed at 1.
I started to lose a little confidence about what would happen if I didn’t pass on attempt 5.
My band was moving away from a pass, too.
That’s because there was also an announcement that the content of the Eiken exam would change.
In July 2023, it was announced that the test would be renewed from fiscal 2024, adding a summary question to the Pre-1 writing section.
I thought the exam would get harder, so I had to pass before that.
But I trusted myself, stuck with the same method, and studied even more deliberately.
Attempt 6: Sunday, November 10, 2024, S-CBT (passed)
There was a 10-month gap between attempts 5 and 6.
Part of it was that work was busy and I couldn’t find much time to study.
But a big reason was also that I wasn’t confident about writing and Part 2.
I also needed to practice for the new summary question.
For writing, I had AI grade it
I was working on Part 2, and I also wanted to prepare seriously for writing.
I started to want someone to look at my writing instead of just writing in a notebook.
By then, AI had arrived.
A service called UGUIS.AI was in beta at the time and was free, probably to collect usage data.
I think it’s paid now, with a wider range of features.
I used it to practice writing over and over.
UGUIS.AI
A writing study service for Eiken and university entrance exams
It has features specialized for Eiken, and AI grades your writing.
It’s made by the Japan Institute for Educational Measurement (JIEM), a company specializing in testing. I recommend it.
For attempt 6, I also did quite a bit of writing and summary practice with Gemini and similar tools.
For summaries, there weren’t any helpful books yet, so I read what the summary question was going to look like on the official Eiken site and practiced by writing summaries over and over with AI.
By the way, these days I have Claude (an AI) correct my English and turn the corrections straight into Anki cards (the article is in Japanese for now).
Switching to S-CBT
Then, in the run-up to attempt 6, I was researching all kinds of things.
I already knew S-CBT existed, but when I looked at it again, this is what I found.
- For writing, you can copy and cut, and type your answers
- Listening comes before the written part, believe it or not. Unlike the paper test, you don’t listen after your head is fried from reading. You first take the speaking test (it’s recorded), and then move on to the listening questions
- You wear headphones, and there are partitions between you and the people around you, so you won’t see anyone jiggling a leg!
With handwriting, if I wanted to fix something after finishing, it was a hassle. With typing, I can retype right away.
That gave me more room in my time management and made it easier to set aside time to review what I’d written.
For listening, too, with the traditional test the audio comes from a speaker in the venue and you hear it in the same space as the other test-takers, but with S-CBT it plays through headphones just for you.
The audio is so much easier to hear!
Being able to take the test with the same tools I use for everyday studying, headphones and a PC, made a big difference.

I’d actually felt this “hearing it differently makes such a difference” effect in another situation too. I wrote an article about how my pronunciation sounded clearer when I took Cambly lessons with a different mic and earphones (it’s in Japanese for now).
Between attempts 5 and 6, I added 537 words to Anki.





And finally, on the sixth try, I passed.
My first-stage total was 1832, 40 points above the passing score of 1792.
I also passed the second stage (speaking) with 565 points. My four-skill total was 2397 out of 3000, and my CEFR level was B2.
Against the 75 percent target, it came out like this.
- Reading: 24 of 31 (77%) → over 75%
- Listening: 24 of 29 (83%) → over 75% for the first time
- Writing: 20 of 32 points (63%)
In listening, I got 11 of 12 in Part 1 and a perfect 5 of 5 in Part 3.
Even Part 2, which I had struggled with so much, was 8 of 12, the best of my six attempts.
In writing, the newly added summary was 9 of 16 points and the essay was 11 of 16 points.
For me, this was my first time taking the test after the renewal.
I had thought I needed to pass before the summary question was added, and yet I ended up passing on the new format that includes it, which is a bit funny when I think about it now.
Also, unlike the paper test, S-CBT doesn’t show right and wrong marks for each question on the results screen.
That’s why there’s no answer-sheet table like the ones for attempts 1 to 5. Instead, it shows what each section was aiming to test, along with study advice.
Summary: what worked in my Eiken Pre-1 study method
As someone who failed five times in a row, the first thing I want to say is that failing many times is completely normal.
What I struggled with overwhelmingly was listening Part 2. Next was writing, and reading was also hard for me depending on the content.
On the other hand, I wasn’t really worried about vocabulary.
I think it helped a lot that, by the time I passed, I had typed a total of 8,199 words into Anki by hand: DUO 3.0 and its derived words, and unknown words from past papers, the news and conversations.
Put the other way around, even if you can get vocabulary under control, getting used to the real test format in listening and writing is a separate problem.
For me, these were the things that worked.
- Vocabulary: put DUO 3.0 and its derived words, plus every unknown word from past papers, the news and conversations, into Anki (8,199 words typed by hand by the time I passed)
- Long passages: keep reading Engoo Daily News (levels 6 to 7) and The Japan Times Alpha, only the articles that interest you
- Listening Parts 1 and 3: listen while picturing the scene, using conversations on Cambly and with a friend
- Listening Part 2: past-paper audio, shadowing, news material, and “listen and summarize” practice on Cambly
- Writing: stock up on expressions from the essay-writing workbook and settle on a template, then have UGUIS.AI grade it
- The final deciding factor: switching to S-CBT (typing for writing, headphones for listening)
If you’ve failed many times, changing not just how you study but how you take the test (traditional or S-CBT) is one option.
By the way, with S-CBT you can take the same grade several times within one test period.
I hear that from fiscal 2025, you can apply up to three times.
I’ve summarized the exam content in my previous post, so check that out too.
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I'm a Japanese blogger who spent 8 years relearning English from scratch.
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