TOPIK 1 Exam

April 13, 2024

Overview

Today I took the TOPIK 1 exam in Denver. I found the exam surprisingly difficult (I even had to Christmas-tree the last few questions). I think widening my vocabulary and working on transitions and prepositions will have an outsized effect on my performance in future Korean exams. One thing of note about the TOPIK exam is that in each section (Listening (듣기) and Reading (읽기)) the questions are in increasing difficulty. All of the instructions were given in Korean, although one of the proctors would occasionally translate the important pre-test instructions to English.

듣기 (Listening) Section

The beginning questions are mostly testing if you understand basic question workds (어디, 언제, 뭘, 누구, etc.). After that, they test your knowledge of some basic location vocabulary (백궈점, 학교, etc.)

읽기 (Reading) Section

The beginning questions test basic vocab and are a bit more varied than the listening section. They have some contextual passages (a text message, a business advertisement, etc.), as well as some normal paragraphs. Towards the end, they ask you to insert some prepositions into the sentences, then they ask you where to insert whole sentences, and in the last section they ask you to order sentences.