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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