JFT-Basic reading is the section where people who know enough Japanese still drop marks. The texts are short. The vocabulary is ordinary. And the wrong answers are chosen by candidates who understood every word.
That is because these questions do not really test whether you can read a notice. They test whether you can apply it: check a time against a range, find the right row of a table, notice that an exception covers your case. The Japanese is the easy part. The checking is the question.
Once you see that, the section becomes predictable.
The five conditions
Nearly every JFT-Basic reading question hides its answer behind one of five kinds of condition. Learn to spot which one you are looking at.
1. A time inside or outside a range
A notice gives a window — cleaning from 1:00 to 3:00, water off from 10:00 to 15:00 — and the question gives a time. Your job is to check whether the time is inside the window.
午前10時から 午後3時まで、水が 出ません。 What can you not do at 12 noon?
Watch for the notice using one format and the question another: 13:00 in the text, 午後 in the question.
2. An exception
The headline says one thing; a later line changes it for some cases.
全品 20%引き！ ただし、食品は 10%引きです。
The words that introduce exceptions are few, and you should react to them on sight:
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ただし | however — an exception follows |
| ※ | note — often overrides the main text |
| 〜だけ | only |
| 〜以外 | except, other than |
| 〜は〜です (contrastive は) | this one, by contrast, is… |
If the question mentions something specific — bread, Saturday, a red lamp — assume it was chosen because the exception applies to it.
3. The right row of a table
Shift rotas, timetables and collection schedules. The trap is reading the first row or the first table you see.
A bus timetable has a weekday table and a weekend table; the question says 日曜日. A rubbish schedule has plastics on the 1st and 3rd Friday and cans on the 2nd and 4th; the question says 第2金曜日. The answer is always in the text — in the row next to the one you looked at first.
Find the row before you find the answer.
4. Something you have to convert
The notice and the question describe the same thing in different words, and you have to do the conversion.
- 前の日 (the day before) → if the event is on the 15th, this is the 14th
- 1時間早く → subtract an hour from the usual time
- 週3日から → three days or more; から sets a minimum
- 30日まで → the 30th is included; the 1st of next month is not
These questions feel like arithmetic because they are. Do the conversion in the margin of your scratch paper rather than in your head.
5. Who does what
Messages between colleagues usually contain several actions by several people, and the question asks about one person.
あしたの 朝、わたしは 病院へ 行きますから……。10時に お客様が 来ますから、会議室に 案内して ください。
The writer goes to the hospital. The reader shows the visitor in. Wrong options give the reader the writer’s actions.
Two reliable signals: the 〜てください sentence is the reader’s job, and 〜なくて大丈夫です cancels a job the reader might have expected.
The vocabulary of notices
Notices use a small, repetitive vocabulary. Knowing these on sight is worth more than a hundred general words.
| Word | Reading | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| お知らせ | おしらせ | notice |
| 変更 | へんこう | change |
| 中止 | ちゅうし | cancelled |
| 休み | やすみ | closed; day off |
| 営業時間 | えいぎょうじかん | opening hours |
| 受付 | うけつけ | reception |
| 無料 / 有料 | むりょう / ゆうりょう | free / charged |
| 禁止 | きんし | prohibited |
| 注意 | ちゅうい | caution |
| 故障 | こしょう | out of order |
| 全員 | ぜんいん | everyone |
| 平日 | へいじつ | weekdays |
| 祝日 | しゅくじつ | public holiday |
| 当日 | とうじつ | on the day itself |
| 以上 / 以下 | いじょう / いか | or more / or less |
And two particles that change deadlines:
- 〜まで — until: an action or state continues up to that point. 5時まで働きます.
- 〜までに — by: a deadline. 朝8時までに出してください — any time before 8, not at 8.
A 90-second method
- Read the question first. Underline, mentally, what it gives you: a day, a time, an item, a person.
- Glance at the title of the text. お知らせ, シフト, ルール — it tells you what kind of document this is and therefore what kind of condition to expect.
- Go to the line that matches the question, not to the top.
- Then read to the bottom. Every time. This is where ※ and ただし live.
- Check the condition explicitly — is 2 p.m. inside 1:00–3:00? Is bread 食品? — and only then look at the options.
- Confirm the option says what you found. The correct answer is often a rephrasing, not a copy.
Step 4 is the one that gets skipped under time pressure, and it is the one the questions are built around.
Where the time goes
The real paper has no per-section time limits — sixty minutes covers all four sections. That is a freedom and a risk. Reading items take longer than any others, and a single stubborn notice can spend the minutes that three other questions needed.
So:
- Set a ceiling. If a reading question has taken two minutes, pick the best remaining option and move on. There is no negative marking.
- Buy time elsewhere. Script and conversation questions should take well under a minute once the vocabulary and phrases are secure. That saving is what funds the reading section.
- Do not reread the whole text when you are unsure. Reread the one line your answer depends on.
Practise on real-shaped material
General reading practice helps less than you would expect here. What helps is reading the actual genres: notices, rotas, timetables, signs.
If you are in Japan, they are all around you — the rubbish schedule in your building, the hours on the clinic door, the notice in the break room. Read them as if a question were attached: what could I not do on Saturday afternoon?
If you are not, our mock tests use these formats throughout, and the explanation for each item names the condition it was built on:
- JFT-Basic Mock Test 1 — a sale notice, a rubbish schedule, an instruction card
- JFT-Basic Mock Test 2 — a shift rota, hospital hours, a lunch menu
- JFT-Basic Mock Test 3 — a job advert, a bus timetable, a delivery slip
- JFT-Basic Mock Test 4 — apartment rules, a coupon, a monthly schedule
After each one, do not just count the score. For every reading question you missed, name the condition — range, exception, row, conversion or person. Most people find that one of the five accounts for most of their mistakes, and that is a much smaller thing to fix than “reading”.
Next steps
- JFT-Basic test format — all four sections, with examples
- JFT-Basic study plan — eight weeks, section by section
- How to review a mock test
Exam Sensei is an independent study resource. The content of the test is set by the Japan Foundation, which publishes official sample questions on the JFT-Basic site.