Japanese and JLPT book recommendations

April 19th, 2009

I often get questions in comments on this blog and in email from people finding this blog through search engines regarding which books I recommend for studying for the JLPT or learning Japanese, or kanji, vocabulary, grammar, etc.

You might have noticed that my last couple of blog posts are based around the search queries used to find my site, and so is this post, since I decided to write something about the topics that people are searching for while finding my site but that I haven’t explicitly mentioned. I noticed a lot of search queries such as:

  • which book is better for jlpt 2 kanzen or unicom?

  • good vocab book jlpt level 2
  • jlpt1 book recommendation
  • best jlpt books
  • kanzen master vs unicom reading

and sure enough I’ve mentioned these terms a lot in my blog, but never really recommended any books. So again utilizing the convenient Squidoo platform, I wrote up a page containing my Japanese learning book recommendations. So from now on I’ll make additions there and reference it from my blog instead of keeping book recommendations spread out over different blog posts without coherence.

Currently, I have organized the page into these categories:

and I’ve also written some general ideas I have about studying for each of these levels:

Anyway, all the books I recommend there are ones that I own or have owned (and sold) and have found useful. I’ve probably bought way more books than necessary over the years, but I find buying books for myself keeps me motivated to study, so it has probably been worth it in the end, even if some of those books sucked. I’ll add more books to that page over the coming weeks as I find the time to think up what actually made them good and write a review.

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Japanese study methods beyond JLPT 1

April 15th, 2009

There was a time when I considered passing the JLPT’s (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) highest level (level 1) to be the goal. Since passing it, I’ve understood it’s actually more of a beginning than anything else – and it’s a beginning of something good (and it ain’t just a beautiful friendship). There’s still lots more to learn, but with the end of JLPT studies begins the time when mastering the whole Japanese language is the goal, and there are no more silly tests.

Let me tell you three things that I used to think sucked but really enjoy now:

  1. Discovering a kanji I don’t recognize

  2. Reading a word I don’t know
  3. Finding a sentence pattern I don’t understand

Out of which 3 and 1 are fairly uncommon. And I am making an effort!

Every time I find a kanji that I don’t recognize, or a come upon a word I don’t know, or find a sentence pattern (grammar) I don’t understand, I look it up in the dictionary, find words using its different readings, locate sentences using these words, and add them to my Anki card deck.


I am learning 5 new items per day, and I make an effort to catch up by learning more on days after I for some reason didn’t do any new items (such as holidays). Most of these items are words, so that means my Japanese vocabulary is growing by at least 1800 words per year, which seems like a reasonable pace to me – although I’m sure it’s possible to learn much more than that.

Finding 5 new items per days actually takes some effort though. Although some days just seem to bring with them a storm of unseen vocabulary and kanji, in order to keep a decent buffer of them – I aim at always having at least 50 unseen cards in my Anki deck for rainy days – some effort is required. These are my main sources for discovering unknown Japanese:

  1. Japanese Wikipedia

  2. News”papers” – specifically Asahi Shimbun
  3. Books – any book, as long as it’s in Japanese

I find these three to have quite different characteristics; Japanese Wikipedia uses quite formal and long-winded language, decent supply of new words, but not many unknown kanji. The news on the other hand is written in that typically very compact form with lots of kanji compounds, but of course almost no non-joyo kanji, with a decent supply of new words, and also often interesting sentence patterns or vocabulary usage.

Books of course depends on the book… I read essentially anything I find interesting. Quite often that is books about the Japanese language or one of those introspective books about Japaneseness – of which there are plenty in Japan – both ones that go “Japan is the greatest” and those that go “Japan sucks”. The one I’m reading right now is quite basic in its general difficulty level but uses a tremendous amount of obscure kanji – actually I think the author is trying to show off – but that is of course great for my purpose.

Anyway, so, lots of reading, finding new things, and reviewing – every day. I used to listen to the radio a lot but I kind of grew tired of it and it stopped being very effective (although I still think it is for JLPT 1 listening practise), and besides now I’m listening to Chinese while working.

So that’s how I’m studying Japanese now, and I don’t expect it to change much for a while since I’m focusing on Chinese, albeit still mostly on a hobby level. Another thing I’m going to do is write a few more pages like my recently published page on software development-centered technical Japanese. I found writing that more fun than I had thought as well as providing me with a good chance for review, and I have a few more topics in mind!

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Japanese for programmers (and software developers)

April 13th, 2009

After literally years of gathering materials and many full days of writing work, I’ve finally published my page on technical and business Japanese for software professionals (code monkeys) looking for a job in Japan or already working in Japanese companies or with Japanese clients who want to improve their programming Japanese.

The page consists of basically three main parts: Essential Japanese programming vocabulary, Expressions for communicating technical issues in Japanese (with a Part II), and A look at a Japanese software specification. They’re based on material I’ve gathered during my years working in Japan, mostly in completely disorganized, scattered text files, so collecting and choosing the useful bits of it for this page was more work than it should have been…

Actually, I first got the idea of writing a “Japanese for Programmers” book some time ago when talking with a former colleague. The idea was that there are so many especially Indian software developers working in Japan, but there are as yet no books aimed specifically at this segment, and there should be a huge market.

Anyway, I’m an avid reader of Seth Godin’s blog, and Seth is the guy behind Squidoo as well, so I naturally stumbled upon it. I gave it a go, and it’s actually a really fun and easy way to create modern, stylish, SEO’d web pages without having to bother with the technical issues.

And then in last month’s search queries used to find my site I saw “japanese speaking programming“, and that finally got me going to do something with my Japanese for Programmers idea – I mean people are searching for it, and they’re already finding my site from it (there’s no “Japanese for Programmers” site on the net anyhow!), despite me not specifically covering that topic, so it seems everything falls into place. And thus the Japanese for Programmers Squidoo “lens” was born!

So I hope it’ll get lots of readers and comments. I still have loads more material, so if it gets popular I might do a follow up. :-) Here’s the URL again:

http://www.squidoo.com/japanese-for-programmers

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Learning Chinese through Japanese

April 2nd, 2009

It has been said, perhaps by Mark Twain, that confusing sinology and Zionism would be a little bit like confusing astrology and astronomy. Anyway, about three weeks ago I finally gave in to the craving and starting studying Chinese.


As I’ve written before, Chinese was among the alternatives when I decided to start studying Japanese. But Japanese seemed even more weird and hard, and the selection of courses at my university was better, so I chose Japanese instead. But I promised myself years ago that once I passed JLPT 1, I could start studying Chinese. And I did pass JLPT 1.

So I went to the huge Kinokuniya book store in south Shinjuku – you know the one located next to the NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building, the tallest clock tower in the world. The supply of language-learning books in Japan is just overwhelming! Especially, of course, for English, but the supply of books on other popular languages is tremendous as well. I can only surmise that this is because foreign things are superficially fashionable in Japan, combined with a school system that teaches kids that foreign language acquisition is impossible. So everyone buys the same kind of miracle cure beginner-level language books every year, and every year the miracle breakthrough doesn’t happen, so the cycle repeats itself.


Anyhow, my philosophy on language learning is the antithesis of that kind of books so I bought the most boring-sounding ones I could find: one called 文法から学べる中国語 (“Chinese that can be learnt from grammar”) and one called 中国語の教科書 (“Chinese textbook”). Still quite fancy books, but the content seemed serious, and they follow different approaches: the grammar one obviously focuses on grammar, and the textbook one is more focused on listening, pronounciation, and conversation, so they should complement each other, I think.

As you notice, the Chinese language study books I bought are in Japanese. This is an important point, since that allows me to keep learning Japanese while enjoying studying Chinese (it is rather enjoyable as a change from years of Japanese studies). In fact, out of the first approximatly 100 words I harvested from the “textbook” book, 5 were new to me in Japanese as well. Double-win! Once you pass JLPT 1, there aren’t really any language study books available for your level, so this I think is a good method to ensure there aren’t any holes in my basic Japanese vocabulary.

I believe in setting goals, just as I did both when I decided to pass JLPT 1 in 2008 and JLPT 2 in 2006. So I have set my overall goal of my Chinese language studies: to be able to read a book in Chinese by the time I turn 30 (i.e. in about 2.5 years from now).

That seems challenging, yet doable. I don’t have any specific type of book in mind, but I imagine it would be some normal top-selling book. Actually come to think of it, the only book I’ve read in both English and Japanese is Haruki Murakami’s after the quake (神の子どもたちはみな踊る) so maybe that would be a good one to use as a reference standard.

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Why am I speaking in and about Japanese all the time?

March 2nd, 2009

Following on the brief history of my Japanese language studies, I’d like to conclude this retrospection with some background, for the sake of completeness…

I started learning Japanese in my second year at the university, where I was studying engineering. I had somewhat liked studying languages before, except French, and felt studying only engineering was tedious. So I figured I should study a language on the side, as long as it didn’t harm my engineering studies.


It was either Chinese, Japanese, or Latin. I wasn’t then, and am not now either, very interested in learning yet another normal European language. Japanese had a good selection of classes at my university, and seemed to be the most difficult, so I ultimately went for that. I was lucky to get in, on a reserve spot, on that over-crowded class. That really did change my life, much for the better, I think.

So in the beginning I wasn’t interested in Japan at all. I wasn’t particularly interested in Japanese either except it seemed like a good challenge. That came to change later, of course. I think choosing to study Japanese because it’s hard was a very good starting point – you can’t really give up with the ever so often heard “it’s too hard (for Westerners)” then can you?

And Japanese is tough to learn. I’m not convinced “hard” is the right word though. It just takes time and effort and determination and method. I very much believe it when I hear people saying it’s the hardest language to learn for Westerners – although there might not be any real scientific proof of that.


Actually, I wonder how I would have done in the first place had I known how much time it would take. When I signed up to transfer to the Tokyo office it was initially for one year, and I thought that spending one year in Japan should leave me decently fluent in Japanese, as you’d imagine it would with a European language for instance, but that was of course not the case. (Even now, three and a half years later I still would definitely not call my self “fluent” in any way, although I do have an advanced understanding and decently good conversation level to use Japanese in daily life and business.)

I might actually had abandoned the idea of studying Japanese had I known only this at that time. But if I had also known the pleasure of being able to read a book in Japanese, or listen to and understand advanced topics discussed on tv, or everyday conversations between the neighbors, not to mention it has lead me to living a more fulfilling life than I probably would have otherwise, then beyond any doubt I would have taken up learning Japanese when I did. The thousands of hours I’ve put into it has started to pay off now, and I’m sure the return on this investment will multiply in the future.

Anyway, shortly after I started studying Japanese, I realized it was a lot more fun than engineering, so in a way, I did let the engineering classes suffer some (not much though – I passed them all with pretty good grades). On the other hand, if I hadn’t had the Japanese studies to keep me motivated, maybe I would have failed completely and stopped studying altogether. It’s been pretty much the same way since I started working as well – work has never been challenging enough, so if I hadn’t had the Japanese language studies on the side I might have become too understimulated to do anything. (Yeah, someone should give me a more challenging job, or I’ll have to take up Chinese soon…)

Now I’m gonna stop babbling about the past.

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A brief history of my Japanese language studies

February 26th, 2009

It’s been almost three months now since I passed the JLPT level 1 back in December. Passing the JLPT1 is not a major goal in my eyes, but nevertheless it serves as a very important milestone (not to mention its value as certification, but that’s a separate issue). It’s a milestone marking that from now on there are no specific text books, nor any kanji or vocabulary lists with content that needs to be studied any more. From now on the target is the whole darn Japanese language.

For the record, here’s a breakdown of my studies up until this point:

  • Fall 2002-Summer 2003: Half-time basic course in Japanese at the university. (During this time I also studied engineering at around 150%, adding up to around 200% of full speed academic credits.)

  • Fall 2003-Summer 2004: Japanese conversation and Technical Japanese at about one quarter speed. Also studied Japanese history, culture, society, and politics at one quarter speed, while keeping up with my regular engineering studies.
  • Fall 2004-Fall 2005: Didn’t study much in particular. In October 2004 I went to Japan for the first time as part of the post-graduate program on East Asian business culture that I was enrolled with. In January 2005 I started working, and that summer I went to Japan again for work for almost 2 months in total. Still didn’t study much though.
  • Fall 2005-Winter 2006: I transfered to the Tokyo office in early October 2005. After getting settled I took up my Japanese studies again. In early 2006 I resolved that I should pass JLPT level 2 that year, which I did – thanks to diligent studies and frequent opportinities for conversation practice.
  • 2007: While the passive vocabulary and expressions I had picked up for JLPT2 soaked in and strengthened my active Japanese skills, I didn’t study much at all actually. I spent my spare time this year learning web technology stuff and doing web-based projects such as Unreal Soccer.
  • 2008: In February, I resolved that I should pass the JLPT1 that year, with a good margin, thus essentially repeating what I had done in 2006. Started reading books in Japanese and listening to the radio every day, which improved my passive understanding of the language dramatically. By early fall I started digging into the JLPT1 textbooks for real, then slacked off, but got back with a vengeance a month or so before the test. Started using Anki for tracking and reviewing vocabulary and expressions.

And that leaves us where we are today. So, adding up years spent studying and counting the half-time basic Japanese classes I took as one year’s worth of studies (that’s how the university counts it, anyway), it adds up to three full years – two of which I spent in Japan. Seems pretty reasonable to me, for passing the JLPT1.

Next up, I’ll be writing about what I’ve learned about learning, how this could have been done more efficiently, and how I’m going to study from now on.

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JLPT: The Results Are In!

February 16th, 2009

Almost exactly one year has passed since I declared my intention to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test’s highest level with a good margin, in February 24, 2008. I defined good margin as a score of over 80%.

I then took the test back in December. It felt like a pass, but I was unsure about my goal of getting a score over 80%. Anyway, today the result came:


So yeah, it’s a pass! And with a score of 84%, I consider it a success. It’s surely a relief to know that I won’t have to do another JLPT ever again.

Speaking of which, if I did a JLPT1 now, I’m sure I’d get a 90% score. Because I really got up to speed with my study routines before the test, and guess what – I never stopped! Yes, start at 100% and then increase, is the philosophy I follow. Since, in my opinion, I’ve now proved that I know how to study efficiently, I’ll keep writing about study methods and efficiently learning Japanese more from now on. I’ve got some good things going now, so I’m hoping that sharing my techniques can be of use to someone.


The score, as you can see, breaks down to 86% on writing/vocabulary, 80% on listening, and 85.5% on reading/grammar. So compared to the mock test I did before the real one, that’s much better on writing/vocab (up from 70%), slightly worse on listening (down from 82% – must have been that damned clown demon!), and a little better on reading/grammar (up from 81.5%). I’d speculate that the writing/vocab score was unreasonably low on my mock test for some unknown reason, and that reading/grammar went better on the real thing because I concentrate better when I know it’s for real, and 90 minutes is much longer than my usual attention span.

Low score on listening, as before, despite me listening to the radio while working, watching tv, and talking to my girlfriend, I cannot really explain. Actually, it might not have to do with Japanese in particular. I’m a good listener in the sense that I let people talk and make an effort to understand what they’re getting at, but I’ve realized I’m very bad at concentrating to someone talking for more than a minute or so… I lose concentration and start thinking of other things quite quickly. I’m the kind of person you want to send an email to rather than call on the phone if the matter requires more than 15 seconds to explain, if you see what I mean. Maybe that’s just it. Or maybe it’s because I had a very annoying, slight kind of ear disorder of my left ear the day of the test caused by a minor cold just before and sleeping without covering myself with the blankets properly. Even compared to my native northern Sweden, winter in Japan is a cold experience (since the houses are built by scammers and crooks).

Anyway, that’s it for today. Back to studying!

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Speed Learning Japanese

January 3rd, 2009

Yesterday on the bus home from Narita Airport (after spending New Year in Shanghai/Hangzhou) I read the (Japanese) half advertisement, half general interest easy reading magazine provided in the seat pocket by the bus company, and there was this one article that I found quite interesting. It was an interview with the company president of a “speed learning” (スピードラーニング) English enterprise, as well as a student of said company, a 50-ish business/research person who was said to have learned English up to the level of being able to hold a presentation at an international conference in just one year.

Apparently this speed learning method has been around in Japan for 19 years. Upon googling it, there seem to be some enterprises offering speed learning sets in Japan, for not only English but also Chinese, Korean, French, etc, although I’ll focus on English as a target language, but the major player – or only player, in case all the rest are just search engine spamming – is this company called Espiritline.


So what is this speed learning? It seems to be based on the following ideas:

  1. Just listening without understanding much, even for only 5 minutes a day, is enough. After a while you will start wanting to hear more, because it becomes a part of your lifestyle, just like listening to music, and the topics are interesting.

  2. Get used to the sound of the language. The rhythm and sound frequencies used in English are different from Japanese. If you are not used to the sound of English, it’ll sound like noise to you, and you won’t be able to understand it.
  3. The natural order of learning a language is listen→ speak→ read→ write. That’s why speed learning focuses on listening comprehension first.
  4. After each English sentence, the corresponding Japanese follows. The stories are made up of 4-5 second English sentences, after which the corresponding Japanese sentence is read out. This means you don’t have to stop and look things up in a dictionary, and you’ll understand the meaning of the English sentences just by listening, with no need for a textbook. It also means that you will develop an understanding of English as a whole instead of word-for-word, and develop an understanding of English in English instead of in Japanese, and once you have that you will be able to speak English without intermediary Japanese.
  5. Classical music to keep you relaxed. The best study results are achieved when relaxed, so classical music flows in the background, which keeps you relaxed. There are also no great intonations in the narration, so that you can listen repeatedly to the same story in a relaxed state.

On top of this, there’s also a bunch of new age voodoo behind it, it seems. The article I was reading talked a lot about how speed learning stimulates the right brain (I guess it assumes the reader believes in some over-simplified view of the workings of the brain), and on this site selling some speed learning English package, there’s talk about how the background music stimulates the brain’s alpha waves, in addition to talk about left and right brain stuff.

So what to make of this? Does it make sense, and can it be applied to learning Japanese as well?

At first it looked mostly like a scam to me, with the “this guy learned perfect English in one year by studying 5 minutes per day” and the above-mentioned new age stuff, and not to mention the classical background music (I like almost all kinds of music except classical music – I can hardly stand it – so for me personally there would have to be some package without the music).


But a lot of it is sensible as well. I too believe that passive understanding is incredibly much more important than active when learning a language, which means speed learning makes more sense than for instance eikaiwa-style English conversation classes. Listening to real, spoken English rather than using a traditional textbook also seems very sensible.

As I’ve mentioned before, I listen to Japanese radio while working, in addition to the usual influx of Japanese, of course. This is basically the same idea; get a lot of input in a natural, spoken form of the target language, then the meaning comes naturally to you. Having the meaning of the sentences read out in your primary language afterward might be a good idea in the beginning, but once you achieve a decent listening comprehension level and vocabulary, I think it’s probably more of an obstacle to learning. Or maybe not; I still like having example sentences in Japanese/English for comparison when studying vocabulary, for instance…

In conclusion I’d say that if they just dropped the just 5 minutes per day and brain waves stuff, it makes a lot of sense. More sense than going to eikaiwa or school, at least, judging from most Japanese people’s poor English abilities despite actively studying it for years.

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Revisions to the Joyo Kanji List

December 28th, 2008

I’ve ranted about the joyo kanji list before. There’s an ongoing discussion about a proposal for revisions to the list, which has been going on since 2005 and is tentatively scheduled to go live in 2010. I found this recent, very interesting paper about it published by NHK (or something affiliated with NHK, at least) that I would very much recommend anyone who’s interested in the subject to read. I would like to point out some observations about the proposal here.

Characters removed from the joyo list

Only five kanji are proposed for removal: 銑 錘 勺 匁 脹. Notice that 匁 (monme) that I specifically ranted about before is among them. Good! 脹 (as in for instance fukuramu, but I guess we can write that using 膨 anyway) and 錘 (tsumu, although I associate it more with omori, which is usually written 重り anyway) are a little surprising though, I would say.

Characters added to the joyo list

The following characters are highly likely to be added to the list: 藤 誰 俺 岡 頃 奈 阪 韓 弥 那 鹿 斬 虎 狙 脇 熊 尻 旦 闇 籠 呂 亀 頰 膝 鶴 匂 沙 須 椅 股 眉 挨 拶 鎌 凄 謎 稽 曾 喉 拭 貌 塞 蹴 鍵 膳 袖 潰 駒 剝 鍋 湧 葛 梨 貼 拉 枕 顎 苛 蓋 裾 腫 爪 嵐 鬱 妖 藍 捉 宛 崖 叱 瓦 拳 乞 呪 汰 勃 昧 唾 艶 痕 諦 餅 瞳 唄 隙 淫 錦 箸 戚 蒙 妬 蔑 嗅 蜜 戴 瘦 怨 醒 詣 窟 巾 蜂 骸 弄 嫉 罵 璧 阜 埼 伎 曖 餌 爽 詮 芯 綻 肘 麓 憧 頓 牙 咽 嘲 臆 挫 溺 侶 丼 瘍 僅 諜 柵 腎 梗 瑠 羨 酎 畿 畏 瞭 踪 栃 蔽 茨 慄 傲 虹 捻 臼 喩 萎 腺 桁 玩 冶 羞 惧 舷 貪 采 堆 煎 斑 冥 遜 旺 麵 璃 串 塡 箋 脊 緻 辣 摯 汎 憚 哨 氾 諧 媛 彙 恣 聘 沃 憬 捗 訃.

If you’re a gourmand like me you’ll be pleased to find that fond concepts such as 丼 (don, that I specifically asked for), 串 (kushi, skewer), and 酎 (chuu, as in 焼酎 shochu) are among them.

Early in the list we also find some characters used for place names such as 岡 (oka, as in 福岡 Fukuoka), 奈 (na, as in 奈良 Nara), 韓 (kan, as in 韓国 Korea), 阪, 那, 鹿, etc. As you know, place names have as a principle been excluded from the joyo list before, being included instead in the jinmei-yo kanji list, but these have been deemed so frequent and common that they will now be on the joyo list, according to the paper.

By the way, a kanji has to fulfill one of the following in order to be considered for inclusion:

  1. It appears frequently, and also has a strong ability to form words. Examples: 闇, 溺.

  2. In mixed kanji-kana writing, it increases the reading efficiency.
    → Or even if it doesn’t appear frequently, writing it with kanji makes it more easy to understand. Examples: 遜 in 謙遜 (kenson, humility), 堆 in 堆積 (taiseki, pile).
    → Widely used pronouns. Examples: 誰 (dare, who?), 俺 (ore, I/me).
  3. As an exception to the non-inclusion of proper nouns.
    → It’s used in the name of a prefecture or such. Examples: 畿 (kin of the 近畿 Kinki region), 韓 (kan of 韓国 Korea).
  4. It’s often used in social life and seen as necessary.
    → Although its frequency of use in newspapers and magazines is low, it’s a necessary character. Example: 旦 in 元旦 (gantan, New Year’s Day).

On the list we also find such well-known favorites as 誰 (dare, who?), 尻 (shiri, buttocks), 叱 (shika.ru, scold), 桁 (keta, beam or digits), and 嵐 (arashi, storm), that – I don’t know about you, but I at least learned pretty early on in my Japanese studies, so I would say they are kind of basic. 挨拶 (aisatsu, greeting) is also making its joyo debut. Other more contemporary kanji characters includes 癌 (gan, cancer) and 拉 (ra, as in both 拉致 rachi, abduction (as in by North Korea), and the more pleasant connotations of 拉麺 ramen).

Characters considered for inclusion but dropped

Now this list is more surprising, I think. The following characters were being considered for inclusion in the joyo list, but alas they won’t be included: 叩 噓 噂 濡 笠 嬉 朋 覗 撫 庄 溜 鷹 揃 頷 摑 翔 喋 嚙 洩 禄 栗 馴 駕 鴨 淵 駿 賭 蘭 胡 蘇 狼 蝶 搔 惚 蒼 腿 菩 吊 雀 樽 壺 祀 卿 歪 棲 釜 毅 磯 桶 柿 揆 躇 躊 鷲 憐 狽 萌 媚 寵 秤 撥 遡 謳 套 刹 蔓 醬 疼 賤 顚 捏 糊 饉 倦 屛 毀 恍 斡 膠 誼 疇 謗 乖 截 誹 綬.

As you can see, the list includes the very frequently seen 嘘 (uso, lie), 噂 (uwasa, rumor), 喋 (shabe.ru, talk), among others. The paper lists the following as reasons for not including a certain kanji in the list, but I can’t really figure out which one applies to the above…

  1. Although it appears frequently, it has lost its ability to form words. Examples: 濡, 覗.

  2. Although it appears frequently, it is mostly used as a proper noun. Examples: 鷹, 鴨.
  3. Its ability to form words is weak, and instead it can be handled by writing kana or adding furigana. Examples: 醬, 顚.
  4. It has a weak ability to form words, and is restricted to particular fields such as transcriptions or historic words. Examples: 菩, 揆.

I can see why 栗 (kuri, chestnut), 雀 (suzume, sparrow), 柿 (kaki, persimmon) and the like were dropped – even though they’re quite common characters, they refer to very specific and specialized things and aren’t useful for writing anything else (except 麻雀, mahjong), but I would have thought 釜 (kama, kettle) and 淵 (fuchi, abyss) were common enough concepts, and the kanji used in enough compounds as well, to be included.

Also, classics such as 萌 (mo.e), 遡 (sakanobo.ru, go back), and the recently popular and esthetically intriguing 乖 of 乖離 (kairi, separation) are apparently not good enough to make it into the list.

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Anyway, these proposals are tentative, and with the kanji of the year being 変 (chenji, change), who knows how the final list will end up?

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JLPT1 Has Come And Gone

December 15th, 2008

I didn’t really write anything about my progress with studying for this year’s JLPT1 (Japanese Language Proficiency Test, Level 1) since after I took the first mock test in August. As I mentioned before, my goal was to pass with a good score, meaning at least 80% (passing score is 70%).

So how did the studying go? Well, decently good but not as good as I had hoped. For a while during fall I slowed down a bit (but never stopped) due to external issues. I kept reading books and listening to the radio, of course, to get continuous Japanese language input.

The weekend two weeks before the test, which was a three day weekend in Japan, I spent almost all days studying grammar. I was going through the Kanzen Master grammar book, reading every grammar item, the example sentences, and did all the exercises, in order basically.

Then I took the week before the test off, using my precious remaining paid holidays, in order to cram the last bits and pieces. Actually that was mostly vocabulary, but I also reviewed grammar, reading (the Unicom reading comprehension book), and listening (Unicom listening comprehension book).

I also entered the word lists I had gathered over the last year into Anki, and slashed the default intervals by at least a factor of 10 in order to cram the 755 words I knew I should but didn’t know. I had tried Anki before but was too appalled by the UI (I still am, and the fact that it’s slower than Java at starting up even on a dual core 2 gig machine), and a bit sceptical to using a computer for learning (yeah, feel free to not consider me Generation Y), but in the end I overcame this and it turned out pretty well, although I’d really recommend using Anki the way it’s intended to be used – which is as spaced repetition for long periods of time, not cramming. (It’s actually got a “cram mode” but I found that pretty useless – slashing the intervals proved to be better.)


Anyway, about a month before the test I did the writing/vocabulary part of a mock test and got pretty much the same result as before – even slightly lower – with 80% on kanji and 60% on vocabulary compared to 82% and 64% before. I don’t know why it was lower, maybe just random disturbance. However, when I did the rest of the mock test about a week before the real test, I had 82% on the listening (up from 72%), 74% on the reading (up from 68%), and a whopping 89% on the grammar (up from 78%). So the intense grammar studies had clearly paid off. Remember that the grammar section takes 20 minutes – 11% – of the test time, but still account for 25% of the score, and is the easiest section to cram.

So in total I had 78% on the second mock test – even though I did the vocabulary part before cramming vocabulary – so in the end, the forecast is looking good. When I took level 2 I had 65% on the mock test a week before, and ended up getting 81% on the real one, so I think I pull myself together when it’s for real too…

But I also think I was a little bit unlucky with some of the content that the real test covered. There were some topics appearing especially on the first part where my vocabulary is lacking. But even allowing for a 5% lower score due to that, it’s likely to be a pass, but may be closer to 70% than 80%, which I consider to be the lowest acceptable score. If I don’t reach that, I’ll probably do the test again soon.

Anyway, from this peroid of intensive study, I can at least draw these conclusions:

  • Exercise books are good for self study. For some reason I had a lot of books, some of which I even read frequently, that included exercises, but I never did the exercises. The Kanzen Master books for instance are good, and the Unicom listening comprehension book. I guess if you follow their recipe of doing one chapter per day then you’ll be in good shape for the JLPT.

    Maybe it was because I was introduced to them as part of classes that I got off on a bad start. Doing exercises is good for your memory. I’ll definitely finish the kanji part of the Kanzen Master book too – I didn’t do that because my kanji skills are already good enough for the test.

  • Use a computer program for vocabulary training! I have to admit I was being foolish not to do this from the start. After having used Anki for a few weeks now I realize how much simpler studying vocabulary has become. Especially using the synchronization feature I can keep my vocabulary synced between home and work (I often add work-related words). Also the fact that the software keeps track of which items need attention is very convenient.

So now we just have to wait for the score? No, now we keep on studying. All this studying has reminded me of how fun it is both to study and to learn, and not to mention the greatness of being able to communicate and read books in Japanese. Fortunately, there is still more to learn.

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