• Practice more simple sentences and basic vocabulary. The kind of stuff people usually start off with. I have a tendency to go for more advanced grammar and vocabulary immediately, which isn’t bad in itself but leaves a big hole where elementary expressions and vocabulary should have gone. It’s hard to do conversation when you can’t even introduce yourself…

• Pinyin is essentially bad – so reduce the reliance on pinyin and look at the characters and memorize their pronunciations by itself (by listening to a tape or the teacher, for example). I thought pinyin was a fairly good way of writing Chinese, but I now realize that down to the monkey’s balls it’s essentially the same as romaji is for Japanese – i.e. an unnatural way of expressing the language. Not an incorrect way, but very sub-optimal.
  Kobe Chinatown. Bruce Lee has nothing to do with the content of this post.

• Study hanzi characters and their readings one by one (or short compound words) – starting with simple, frequent characters and moving on from there. Hanzi is how Chinese is written, and as with Japanese, literacy is essential. I have a tendency here too to go for the hard stuff too early, so I need to start over a little and learn from the beginning.

So considering that, the following constitutes my current Chinese study method:

• Using Anki (a spaced repetition system application), I study elementary characters, short words, and simple phrases. With Anki you can download “decks” (sets of “flash cards”) made by other people and provided for free. I found one called Chinese Characters (Level 1 and Level 2) apparently based on the book New Practical Chinese Reader. I don’t use that book but the deck is very useful in itself. The quality is a bit variable though, but I’m adding and changing things as I go along. Considering it’s free and doing it all yourself would take significant time, it’s really good value for time.

• Practice writing hanzi, using some Chinese character writing sheets I found online provided by the University of Vermont (the ones called Practical Chinese Readers Book I and Book II). These are very useful. Again, the quality could be better (readings and stroke orders would be nice, for instance) but for a price of zero, they’re extremely good value. I just write and write the character all over many times, and do the same sheets multiple times. It’s not the most fun activity nor the most fancy kind of study method out there – but actually when I come home from work and I’m tired, that kind of activity is just about what I am able to manage. And I am certainly seeing good progress!
  
  As an aside: I can read about 2,500 Japanese kanji, so most of the elementary/intermediate Chinese is readable for me already, but I never learned to write kanji by hand… I can only write maybe 100-200 characters. Which isn’t a big deal but it’s not very good either. So I’ve decided to use this as an opportunity to learn how to write the simplified Chinese characters, since that will be useful for writing Japanese too (with some exceptions). Since I’m lazy I really prefer the simplified characters. I mean compare 认识 with 認識… I know which one I want to write 100 times on the blackboard.

• Using the books I bought before, keep studying grammar using the grammar book and vocabulary and pronunciation primarily using the other book. Fairly standard. I study grammar before going to sleep (well it makes me go to sleep), and pronunciation/vocabulary some times in the evenings. I am also hoping to use the vocabulary book at the Chinese conversation lessons, since that book has nice, big illustrations accompanying simple words, it should be suitable for learning the correct Mandarin pronunciation.

It’s going well, and it’s fun. It’s great to be able to apply my experience and knowledge of learning from 5+ years of Japanese studies to Chinese. My study methods are incredibly much more efficient now. I will soon have to set some intermediate goal (the current final goal is to be able to read a book in Chinese within two years), such as passing a particular HSK level next year. I’ll have to discuss that with the Chinese school teacher.

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:

• Recommended beginner level Japanese books

• Kanji study book recommendations

• Advanced beginner, intermediate Japanese, and JLPT 3 level book recommendations

• Advanced Japanese and JLPT 2/1 book recommendations

• Business Japanese book recommendations

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

• Just started studying Japanese?

• Learning kanji

• Progressing from beginner to intermediate Japanese

• Taking the step towards Japanese fluency

• Ready to work in Japan?

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

So to reiterate the main point of my previous post on this subject: focus on pronunciation – i.e. mapping the graphical form of a character to its pronunciation. Ok, unfortunately – due to the complexity of kanji – I guess we have to make that pronunciations. But I think it’s best to focus on one main pronunciation. Usually that’s an on pronunciation, but it can sometimes be a kun one as well for some characters. The important thing is that you choose one as the main one, but also try to remember the other ones as well. Now, I’d like to present three simple tricks for learning kanji:

This seems easy when you say it, but it is also easy to do, if you just do it. First of all get some books. Any book with kanji is pretty fine actually, but as I wrote in my previous post, I like “A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters” by Kenneth G. Henshall. Get a Japanese dictionary, and flip through it as much as possible. One of my personal favorites on the toilet. Before going to sleep, during lunch, on the train, when there’s nothing fun on the tv, basically just spend some time with your books that contain kanji, any chance you have.

I’ll leave the topic of how to most efficiently gain knowledge from books for later – the most important thing is that you just open and read your book. If your Japanese skill is good enough to read (even haltingly) real Japanese literature, then that’s so much better, because I for one prefer reading real books over “textbooks” etc. Anyway, as long as it contains real Japanese (i.e. hardcore kanji).

The Japanese Wikipedia is a superb source of reading material! It is very hardcore both when it comes to kanji and formal grammar/vocabulary (relevant for JLPT1!), and since cross-referencing is central to the idea of a wiki, you can just keep reading and looking up concepts that you don’t understand. In fact, I strongly recommend reading the Japanese Wikipedia for improving any aspect of your Japanese – not to mention general knowledge. And you can read it at work while your code is compiling!

There are a few gazillion permutations of the order in which you can study kanji. Like they do in Japanese elementary school, the order they appear on increasing levels of the JLPT tests, any kind of arbitrary order, or – the gods forbid – Remembering the Kanji order. Anyway that doesn’t matter much. What I think does matter is that you study “series” of characters that you think have something in common. The number of characters in a series can be basically whatever is suits you, but for me it’s usually between a quarter of a dozen to one and a half dozen characters.

When I say “series”, I mean something like this: 激撤徹微徴懲 – these characters used to look very similar to me and when I saw one of them I used to go like “oh, one of those characters”. 哀衰衷褒喪畏 would be another example. Or maybe they don’t look similar, but their meanings/usages conceptually overlap, like 悼慨恨悔 vs 愉悦 etc.

Whatever trick you use to remember these is mostly up to you I think. For me they just seem to stick after a while. But the important thing is to make sure you don’t forget them and can still distinguish between them. I print them out (I suppose you can write them by hand too if that’s your thing) and put them on the partitions (walls are equally usable if you are lucky enough to have that) at my office desk, and on my iGoogle sticky note, and in text files on my computer, etc. Anywhere where you’re bound to see them a lot. That way you’ll immediately notice if when you see the note, you can no longer recall the details about a character. That’s when it’s time review.

I’ve seen it recommended on forums, web sites, and even books (do I even need to mention my arch nemesis any more?): learn the kanji then learn Japanese, or learn the meanings of kanji then learn vocabulary, or learn stupid keywords for all the kanji then learn their pronunciations (remember that pronunciation is the very core of each character!).

First of all: that to me that would be really boring. Don’t encourage yourself to give up – have fun! Secondly: as I mentioned in the previous entry: kanji is the character set used to write Japanese. So don’t study kanji without studying Japanese, and vice versa!

When I say “read a lot of kanji” and “practice series of kanji” above I don’t mean just learn the pronunciation and meaning of each kanji and remember that like some damn parrot. What I’m talking about is to learn not only pronunciation(s) and meaning(s), but also words the kanji is used in – at least one, possibly many – the history/evolution of that character (if it’s interesting, and it often is), and try to read texts containing that character (often you’d go from finding a character frequently used in a text to actively studying that character; I don’t mean you have to find texts that match every character you want to study). Associate that character to other similar characters through “series” of characters.

Here again finding good reading material is essential. Besides Wikipedia, newspapers (i.e. news websites) are extremely good. The kanji in newspapers are definitely hardcore. A nice trick is to try and read the same kind of articles every day. Say you’re interested – or just pretend you’re interested – in economy – the stock markets, even. Then read some stock market articles every day. The first few days you’ll find that the kanji and words used are extremely hard. But after a week or two you’ll find that the same kanji and even the same words reoccur all the time. That’s when you know which kanji you have to learn, and you’ve already got a great source of texts for putting them in context. I’d arbitrarily recommend Asahi Shimbun for a dose of daily reading practice.

Lastly I’ve been recommended and lately seen a lot of recommendations on forums etc on using software/services for studying kanji. Programs such as Anki and Mnemosyne come to mind. I even saw some dude recommend using something called a “kanji box” or something for you Facebook. Now, I don’t have a Facebook account, but I don’t think being logged in to Facebook is going to do any good at all for your kanji studies, even with your fancy kanji box on your profile page. You’re much more likely to spend hours randomly clicking around and not doing much intellectually challenging activities at all.

Color me old-fashioned, but if anything I’d recommend ordinary paper flash cards. But it’s really boring to construct those… so I just keep my kanji and vocabulary in text files on the computer and print them out every once in a while and review those lists a few times. And since I’m surrounding myself with study material – always keeping a book within arm’s reach, a kanji series on the wall, a computer that runs in Japanese, an rss feed with news in Japanese, etc – there’s constant repetition, all the time. If you know you need to learn a certain kanji character, you’ll active take notice every time it pops up. Just make sure to you maximize the chances of it popping up!

First of all: my kanji level is already pretty high. I can read books and (somewhat) newspapers in Japanese. Secondly: I find kanji quite easy to learn. I know a lot of people who think studying kanji is worse than being eaten alive by killer ants (I just saw the movie “The Hive”, so please excuse the analogy), but for me learning kanji has always been very enjoyable. Intelligence tests have shown (as I already suspected) that my intellect is based around spatial/visual understanding of concepts, and perhaps kanji just happen to be my calling in this world… Or maybe I’ve found fun interesting and stumulating ways of studying kanji, which I hope – and actually think – is the case, because that means you can find it just as fun as I do!

Thirdly: I still have a lot of learning to do. I estimate I know about two thirds of the kanji I need to know now. So there’s still a lot “in it” for myself to refine my study methods as well.

Anyway nuf of me jabberin bout myself. Please let me tell you what I think is the poodle’s core of kanji, and the key to the successful learning of which:

It’s true! Kanji, to the Japanese, is just the character set you use to write Japanese. Japanese is a natural language and thus it’s primarily spoken. Kanji might not be the most efficient way of transcribing spoken word into writing, but it is nevertheless how it’s done in Japanese. And efficiency aside – it’s a very charismatic method!

Now, there are people - such as my arch nemesis Dr. Heisig - who want you to believe stories such as: Japanese is very easy for Chinese people to learn because they already “know” the characters, so the best way for a Western fatass such as myself to learn kanji must be to first remember their shapes and compositions and associate them to some stupid keyword. Then I’ll be on a par with the Chinese and can start learning the Japanese readings and the words they’re used in – not to mention trying to forget all the erroneous and stupid keywords I was made to believe to be actually useful.

Well people, I don’t want to go through the process of becoming Chinese in order to become Japanese, nor do I want to spend substantial time memorizing misinformation, as the keywords are often not very related to the actual usage of the kanji. I want to learn Japanese kanji; their meanings, writings, usages, and – most of all – pronunciations.

Kanji are the characters used to write words, and thus it is essential to learn their phonetic values as well as practical usages in writing vocabulary words. Concepts such as “meanings” or “keywords” for kanji are constructed and construed.

I do believe kanji have meanings though, and I’d like to recommend a good book for learning them. It’s the book called “A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters” by Kenneth G. Henshall. First of all I’d like to raise my two major complaints about that book, that are essentially the same: the title and the “mnemonics” thing. I will go ahead and blame that -again! – mainly on my arch nemesis Dr. Heisig. It’s all Heisig’s fault! Everyone seems to think you need some magic mnemonic formula to magically “remember” the kanji… It makes me sick!

But Henshall’s book – besides the name and the stupid “mnemonics” thing attached to each entry – is actually nothing more and nothing less than a simple etymological kanji dictionary! There are many of these in Japanese, and I strongly recommend you to upgrade to a Japanese one as soon as you’re fairly comfortable with it, but until then Henshall’s book is superb.

Anyway, no book is the solution to learning the kanji. I believe everyday practical tricks are the key to that. More about that in the next post…

I seem to see the question Do I really need to learn all the joyo kanji? It’s like two thousands of them and that seems a bit too much…

You know, that list was created by a bunch of bureaucrats who have nothing better to do than invent stupid lists and laws all days. Especially the order of the kanji in the list is completely insane – in many cases complex, compounded characters come before the compounds they’re made up from, for instance.

Also, the word 常用(jouyou) means “daily use”, right? Go out any exit of any train station in Tokyo and look around, and tell me if you don’t see the kanji 丼(don). That kanji is not on the list. I guess the bureaucrats don’t eat domburi, but that’s their loss. On the other hand, they put 匁(monme) on the list – and that kanji is so stupid and useless I can’t help but remember it, but I’ve never, ever, seen it used.

So, no, you don’t have to learn all the joyo kanji! There are maybe 20, maybe even 50 or more on the list that you actually don’t need to know. But here’s the catch: you have to learn a lot more than that!

Unlike the last question, where I held on to the answer until the very last paragraph, I’m gonna answer this one right away: maybe about 3,000. Now, granted, I pulled that number out of my arse, but I think it’s a decent estimate. That’s in order to be considered literate in Japanese… If you don’t need to be able to read all male given names (yeah I understand it’s cool to give your kid some uncommon character, but come on…).

You see, even though school teaches the roughly 2,000 joyo kanji until high school graduation, most Japanese people can read more than that, even by the time they finish high school. That’s what happens if you spend 19 years surrounded by kanji. Non-joyo kanji are not uncommon – I’m speaking from experience here – and in fact most Japanese people don’t really know nor care about that stupid list – kanji are just characters you use to write stuff.

When I started learning Japanese, and in fact some times since then as well, I’ve seen statistics saying that 1,000 characters are the 90% most frequent, and 2,000 characters constitutes 98% of the kanji used. That might very well be true – I believe those numbers are more or less correct.

So then a seemingly valid, and common, argument would go something like “I don’t need to be able to read specialized texts - or even the newspapers – manga/technical specs/email/whatever is enough for me, so being able to read 80/90/95/98% of the kanji is all I need”.

I used to think a little bit that way too, to be honest. But there’s a fundamental fault in that reasoning: Yes, no one needs, or can ever hope to be able to, understand 100% or even 99% of everything – I mean a lot of stuff in this world is meant for specialists in a particular field – but that’s not the same as not being able to read the characters it’s written in – that is called illiteracy! And kids: say Yes to mild stimulants, and No to illiteracy – its the bad.

Let me make up an example. This isn’t gonna be the best example ever but bear with me as I’m just making this up. Let’s take a word like 国立造幣局. Now, three of those kanji (国・立・局) are very easy – I’m sure they were among the first one or two hundred I learned. 造 is also pretty easy, it’s at least below JLPT level 2, and very common. But 幣 is not very common, and has a somewhat specialized meaning (but it’s on the joyo list and not knowing it constitutes illiteracy). So in that five-kanji word 60% of the kanji are trivial, and 80% are easy.

But then there’s one that – while definitely not complicated – is at least JLPT level 1 worthy of difficult. Yet that’s the one kanji that conveys most of the meaning, not to mention you can’t pronounce the word without knowing its reading, so those who settled for 90% of the kanji will be 0% literate in this example.

Look at it this way: say that pronouns, prepositions, articles, and conjunctions made up 50% of the words used in an average English sentence. Then, would someone who decides to learn only the pronouns, prepositions, articles, and conjunctions of English be able to get the meaning of an ordinary English sentence? Of course not! Even though that person would understand at least 50% of the words used. Now, kanji are characters used to write words and not words in themselves, but anyway… if you want to get down to the monkey’s balls with the Japanese language, you have to learn kanji thoroughly. And you might as well do it right away.

Now I hope we have established a shared understanding that almost perfect kanji literacy is indispensable for the Japanese language learner. Next, I will be writing about how that literacy is best achieved.

I’ve now done a mock test, using the Unicom book that contains two mock tests, to get a grasp of where I’m at and what I need to focus on. I can highly recommend that book, by the way. I used it for level 2 as well. Besides the tests, it assists in analyzing your weaknesses and tips on what you need to study.

Anyway, here’s a breakdown of my scores:

• Kanji: 82%
• Vocabulary: 64%
• Listening: 72%
• Reading: 68%
• Grammar: 78%

Interestingly, that means the average score for each of the three sections (kanji/vocabulary, listening, and reading/grammar) is 72% – quite a coincidence.

So what to make of this? First: it’s a pass, with a 288 p/72% score. That also means I’m on track for my goal to pass with more than 80%. When I do the mock test at home I’m more strict than at the real thing in that I don’t choose randomly when I don’t have a clue, and I try to finish it as fast as possible – I don’t stop to think and I don’t use spare time for reviewing.

I do that because I want data on how much time I actually need so that I can plan how much time to spend on the different parts during the real test – potential points vs time. For the reading section I had more than 15 min to spare, so I think this affects the end result by a few percentage points. Also, when I did the same thing for 2-kyu two years ago at this time, my score was barely above 60%, but on the real thing I scored 81%, so I think my score on the mock test is lower because I don’t concentrate as much as on the real test as well.

Second, the surprises: grammar score is high, reading is a bit low, and listening is lower than expected. I haven’t studied grammar really, but my studies consist mostly of reading, so I would have expected reading to be higher and grammar much lower. I felt very uncertain when answering many of the grammar problems even though I passed them. The only reason I can think of is that my book reading and radio listening have made me grasp grammar intuitively, much like a native speaker would.

The low reading score might be caused by me doing that section after coming home from work. I felt very tired by the end… And as I mentioned above I didn’t do any reviewing using spare time. After all, I read normal (actually, some of them are probably more academic than most people prefer to read) books written for native readers pretty much every day, and I don’t feel I’m missing out on the content of those books, so I don’t think my reading skill is bad. And time is definitely not a problem – my Japanese reading speed is good.

Low score on listening, despite listening to the radio for a few hours every day, I think was mostly caused by me not being up to date on the vocabulary used. Describing how people look and asking strangers for directions might be very common textbook examples, but it’s not something you do very often in real life… I am going to go through the Unicom listening comprehension book for 1-kyu as well, which contains the equivalent of about 4 tests’ worth of exercises, and that should be enough to easily get me above 80%.

Third, as expected: kanji is my strongest point and vocabulary is my weakest. Kanji are natural for me now, although recently I’ve been working on improving my kanji skills even more (I’ll write about my study methods some other day). But acquiring vocabulary is tough! I don’t really like repeating words or sentences or anything like that – I’m lazy – but I just hope to pick things up after seeing them enough times in books and news articles, and from hearing. The vocabulary used in JLPT is somewhat specific and specialized, albeit limited, and I have not been reading material specifically targeted at the test. Here as well, I am going to rely on the Unicom, namely reading comprehension book. But I’ll probably hold off on that until right before the test and keep reading normal literature that I enjoy reading for now.

Lastly for this post, I’d like to mention one more ingenious scheme I’ve come up with to extract more data from doing mock tests: marking certainty of the answers. I mark them essentially in 4 degrees, although I only make physical marks for 2: feel quite certain (no mark), feel a bit hesitant (one dot), feel like I’m mostly guessing (two dots), and don’t have a clue (no answer). Afterwards, I compile the percentage of correct answers for each certainty level (last level is obviously 0%). A stimulating paper exercise if there ever was one! But this time it also told me one thing: if I feel certain or hesitant doesn’t impact the score. But for the two-dot level the probability of a correct answer is halved. In other words I can go ahead and use my intuition even if I feel a bit hesitant, which saves time, and focus my reviewing (using time left after answering all questions) on a few questions that I felt very uncertain about.

Anyhow I’m interested in hearing about other’s progress on the JLPT and if you’re blogging about it, please post a link in a comment. Please also post comments on your own findings regarding the test. I’m quite exited about the test itself, besides becoming fluent in Japanese!

In the near future I also intent to write something about what I’ve learned about learning – because I feel I’m really getting into that now, and I’m already looking forward to the next language learning adventure – and also about my own study methods targeting JLPT1, and something about learning Japanese vs passing the JLPT.

Don’t forget to apply!