I have heard this mentioned a few times recently and I was wondering if it was true.

Another thread was talking about whether pretty much any Japanese person can pass the JLPT1.

Japan and America both are listed as having a 99% literacy rate, but apparently you only need a basic set of words to be considered literate. To quote wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in...ted_States

Quote:This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."

I think it goes without saying that Japan's education system is more rigourous than the US, so I would expect the Japanese figure to be much lower. However when you consider that kanji is more difficult than English spelling then I think it is conceivable that there is a section of Japanese people who have a low level of literacy, even to the degree where they couldn't pass the JLPT1.

I have heard many times that a lot of younger people don't really know kanji and it is getting worse. My friend was also saying that many younger people can't correctly use the politer forms of address.

Anyway, I'm kinda talking (writing?) out loud here... Thoughts?

As for not knowing keigo, that's just a fact, simply because it isn't used outside of formal business situations. Why would a 16 year old Japanese guy know how to talk to a 50 year old business man who he is working for? It makes little sense.

As for kanji, I think it's overstated, the VAST majority of adult Japanese read kanji very well. Writing it is a completely different thing though.

I think the kanji actually helps in understanding better, because it gives you a general idea of what the word means.

That said the average Japanese adult can read as much as 3,500 kanji, I doubt they're having trouble in reading.

The book Language and Society in Japan presents a survey of this subject. Here are a few snippets:

Quote:A survey report published in 1988 looked at children in Tokyo, Akita Prefecture and Nara Prefecture and attempted to determine both the rate at which characters were acquired and the number of characters which children did actually acquire. The results showed that at both elementary and high school levels students were better able to read than to write kanji, and that knowledge of on and kun readings fluctuated, with students able
to read one or the other better than both (National Language Research Institute 1988: 389?391)

Quote:Various other studies which have examined the kinds of errors students make in reading and writing kanji are also discussed in Taylor and Taylor (1995: 349?351). The findings
may best be summarized as follows: reading skills become stronger than writing skills as the number of kanji learned increases; homophone substitutions are common errors; and not as many shape-based errors relate to complexity as might be expected.

The book cited as Taylor and Taylor is "Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese." There are a few samples online. This one is interesting.

On the subject of misused keigo (and on a similar line as to what Tobberoth was saying about younger people not knowing what it):

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/バイト敬語

Many Japanese to which I expressed my difficulty at learning proper keigo said that it's a problem even for native speakers.
Just today I've asked one friend about its proper usage and she answered with nothing very new, but I'll put it up here anyway because I know y'all are looking for some reading exercise

敬語は日本ではとても大切です。まず仕事では、必ず敬語を使い、
年上の人には、余程、仲が良くならない限り、敬語を使います！
上下関係では言葉使いは、必ず敬語！
　とにかく、「です」「ます」を使っておけば、安心です。

そして「お前」は駄目!!!とても厳しい(汚い)呼び方で、不快感を与えると
思います。ただし、地域や家族の中では使う人もいますが、
私は「お前」と呼ばれたら、とても嫌です(~д~)

nac_est Wrote:そして「お前」は駄目!!!とても厳しい(汚い)呼び方で、不快感を与えると
思います。ただし、地域や家族の中では使う人もいますが、
私は「お前」と呼ばれたら、とても嫌です(~д~)

Rofl.

I honestly think Japanese people just tend to overstretch their faults and them saying they're bad at kanji or keigo isn't the same level of "suck" that we think it is.

Erubey:
Actually I think that's just true in general. I've found these surveys and things vaguely interesting when I've seen them in the past, but also considered them misleading because of the perspective we view them from. I'm pretty sure that, in reality, if you did the same survey in any English speaking country and replaced 'kanji' with 'spelling' you'd get the same results. Most people are convinced children are forgetting their own language, and most people aren't very confident in their own spelling either.

Squintox Wrote:I think the kanji actually helps in understanding better, because it gives you a general idea of what the word means.

That said the average Japanese adult can read as much as 3,500 kanji, I doubt they're having trouble in reading.

source??
i call bs

Squintox Wrote:That said the average Japanese adult can read as much as 3,500 kanji, I doubt they're having trouble in reading.

There's no way this is true. An average? 3500?!

Why? It's a fairly reasonable number, at a guess. Finding a specific source would probably be pretty hard, though, because just think about what conducting a survey on which of the thousands of kanji each person being surveyed was able to recognize in a word would be like. But remember that the jouyou are the 'at least' of kanji literacy.

Not exactly reliable source: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...632AA7ITKx

Really, I've already learned about 200 outside of the jouyou and jinmeiyou (don't forget those, that's a lot of extra kanji right there), and I'm still at a low juvenile fiction reading level. You're going to find all kindof additional ones in more adult literature, in older literature, things relating to your hobbies and areas of study/occupation, etc etc...

Notice how he worded it he didn't say that an adult can read an average of 3,500, he said that an average adult can read up to 3,500.

I don't believe the average of 3,500.
However I can believe that your regular Joe (Sato?) can recognize (defined as knowing at least a single reading OR the general meaning) as much as 3,500.

I put the OR in there because just yesterday I was talking to a woman about kanji. I happened to point at a kanji in her name that I didn't recognize and asked her if she knew the meaning of it. She obviously knew how to pronounce it (it was in her name after all), but she had to grab a dictionary to look up what it actually meant.

Interesting. I get the feeling that kanji production skills are really declining but reading is not so much. I feel there are many people who rarely need to read or write in their jobs and their recreational activities and hobbies do not involve reading and writing. These people can read enough to get by but don't know difficult words and can't write many words they do know.

One stereotype that fits this well is the ガル girls. I would love to see what percentage of them can pass the JLPT1.

Still, I think to any moderately educated person the JLPT1 would be very easy.

The are some tests that are difficult even for native speakers though. There is an English test called IELTS in Australia and some of the problems are very hard. I briefly looked at a problem from one and the answer was not apparent to me.

spoonsman Wrote:I put the OR in there because just yesterday I was talking to a woman about kanji. I happened to point at a kanji in her name that I didn't recognize and asked her if she knew the meaning of it. She obviously knew how to pronounce it (it was in her name after all), but she had to grab a dictionary to look up what it actually meant.

I would argue that one can be considered to know a kanji if they know all the modern day typical usage and meanings. Or more accurately can they use and read the kanji in the forms it appears in modern day. The meaning of many individual kanji (and various readings) are irrelevant nowadays so this doesn't mean they don't or only half know the kanji.

I think it is the equivilant of not knowing the latin meaning of a part of a word in English.

thermal Wrote:I think it goes without saying that Japan's education system is more rigourous than the US, so I would expect the Japanese figure to be much lower. However when you consider that kanji is more difficult than English spelling then I think it is conceivable that there is a section of Japanese people who have a low level of literacy, even to the degree where they couldn't pass the JLPT1.

Nope. No way in hell that "goes without saying." As someone who's worked in both the American and Japanese school systems, and is currently writing this from a computer lab in a Japanese jr high school, I can tell you that this stereotype is flat out wrong. If you consider that juku is pretty much mandatory for anyone who wants to get into a college here, you really start to get a new light shed on the education system. I'd say that they're definitely more focused on studying for tests and not so much on basic comprehension (as is the case, I've found, in American schools), but beyond that I don't really notice very many differences. The notion that Japanese students perform better on standardized tests is an old yarn that's long since been shot down anyway.
Another thing that I would disagree with you on is the notion that kanji is more difficult than spelling. Try telling that to someone studying ESL. Kanji has a significant advantage in that it is a very very logical system, and exceptions are few and far between. Spelling though? Just in your head try to think of all the different ways to spell the sounds in the word "fish." Spelling is not so much an indicator of pronunciation, so much as an indicator of meaning. It is wrong to think that it's too terribly different from kanji in this respect; I would certainly hope that you can deduce the meaning of "homophone" if you know the meanings of words like phonetic and homosexual.
I would assert that kanji and spelling are basically the same, they just look different. Just as people in Japan are beginning to lose their ability to write kanji, so too are people in America losing the ability to spell properly (thanks spellcheck!). Just a quick anecdote: I was talking to someone (someone I strongly suspected of being of severely substandard intellect) and decided to see if I could write better kanji than they could. The answer was a resounding yes, and they couldn't even write such basic words as "north pole" or "equator," the prior being a word that I know for a fact can be written by most sixth grade children in elementary school. I would caution against drawing out trends any time you feel tempted to do so, and instead remember that things like this will probably depend mostly on the intelligence and motivation of any individual that you look at.

To be honest I can't quite speak on the American system as I am Australian, but I do believe that the Australian system is pretty similiar. I am not saying that Japanese education is necessarily better, just that it is involves more study/homework which contributes towards literacy. There is also I think greater competition between students, more pressure from parents and more students trying to get into university. Ultimately this means students and doing more reading and more writing.

The major difference between spelling and kanji is that the spelling of a word is linked to it's pronunciation. Most words (especially easy words) spell how they sound or follow set rules. Yes there are many exceptions, but the rules give the brain something to hook into to learn and make remembering exceptions not such a chore. Even to this day when I write "Wednesday" I say "Wed-nes-day" in my head rather than "Wenzday". Doing this to remember the exceptions is much easier in my opinion than remembering a kanji's composition, which are as far as Japanese school students are concerned is meaningless.

Then on top of this is stroke order (and thus stroke count) which is important if you want to write the characters and have them look good. Granted combining kanji to make words is not hard.

This is just the universal "kids today..." rant. Actually, I suspect the average university student has better kanji skills than the average 40-something. As far as keigo goes, AFAIK, it's always been assumed that kids don't know how to use it, and as long as you've learned it by the time you're looking for a job, it's all good.
And I would say an average Japanese adult would not merely pass the JLPT1, but would get very close to 100%. A junior high school kid might find it a bit tricky.

I say you are all wrong.

I say, the JLPT1 is the hardest test known to man for Japanese people. I say Japanese education systems sucks compared to Western systems. I say the average Japanese adult is far less literate than we all assume.

Can anyone offer any "definite" facts to prove me wrong?

nest0r Wrote:Japanese kids are too busy cutting each other up with exacto knives and putting each other into boxes while they use their evolved hands-with-6-thumbs to type out text messages to one another in obscure mutated versions of kanji/kana. The old people, who make up 99% of the population, are all hooked up to robots so they can do all the infrastructural work and communicate with cybertelepathy so none of this matters. That's my take. The JLPT is just an intelligence test, if you take it, you're interested in Japanese, which earns you respect, but you're not Japanese, so you're forever an outsider and will be prevented from visiting the fish markets or using the trains on Halloween.

Truer words have never been spoken.

We're basically all done here now.

kazelee Wrote:I say you are all wrong.

I say, the JLPT1 is the hardest test known to man for Japanese people. I say Japanese education systems sucks compared to Western systems. I say the average Japanese adult is far less literate than we all assume.

Can anyone offer any "definite" facts to prove me wrong?

Depends on what western system you're talking about. Japanese education is relatively bad, but not compared to American education for example (then again, there is still difference between colleges, just talking on average here).

As for the hardest test known to man for Japanese people, I'd put my bucks on TOEIC, so it can't be JLPT1

kazelee Wrote:I say the average Japanese adult is far less literate than we all assume.

Can anyone offer any "definite" facts to prove me wrong?

Did you know that the world's most sold newspapers happen to be Japanese?

thermal Wrote:The are some tests that are difficult even for native speakers though. There is an English test called IELTS in Australia and some of the problems are very hard. I briefly looked at a problem from one and the answer was not apparent to me.

IELTS is from Cambridge University. You can do Academic or General. It's meant to grade English users of all levels, including natives, and to get in the 9s, which is the top grade, you need to be university level literate, and a high-level university graduate in an essay using major such as Arts, English, etc.

The test looks at reading, writing, speaking and listening separately, and is not multiple choice like TOEIC. You have to write essays, describe graphs, read real articles from newspapers and listen to academic lectures with understanding. It's pretty much to see if you have the English to be able to function in university.

TOEIC is only hard because it tests bizarre and useless information, small word nuances instead of overall understanding, and because sometimes it gives two valid and natural answers but only allows one to be correct. I mean, it's multiple choice and it doesn't test speaking, so it's not really effective at all. It's just easy to mark, hence its widespread use in Asian countries.

Isn't JLPT multiple choice as well? It seems like a waste of time to take such a test, except to get a piece of paper.

phauna Wrote:Isn't JLPT multiple choice as well? It seems like a waste of time to take such a test, except to get a piece of paper.

Believe it or not, JLPT is actually a very accurate representation of someones proficiency in Japanese. Sure, some people (very few) pass JLPT1 without being able to speak proper Japanese. The vast majority however get a proper indication.

If I passed JLPT2 and failed JLPT1 but you passed JLPT1, you're better than me at Japanese, there really is no question about it. JLPT tests are extremely broad yet tests the right things. I seriously doubt someone who everyone considers to be a JLPT2 level would fail it. It's not like other tests where you have to study FOR the test to pass it. If you're good at Japanese, you're good at it. And if you're good at it, you can pass the level fitting for your proficiency, whether you studied for it or not.

Aouwra Wrote:

thermal Wrote:.

Another thing that I would disagree with you on is the notion that kanji is more difficult than spelling. Try telling that to someone studying ESL. Kanji has a significant advantage in that it is a very very logical system, and exceptions are few and far between. Spelling though? Just in your head try to think of all the different ways to spell the sounds in the word "fish." Spelling is not so much an indicator of pronunciation, so much as an indicator of meaning. It is wrong to think that it's too terribly different from kanji in this respect; I would certainly hope that you can deduce the meaning of "homophone" if you know the meanings of words like phonetic and homosexual.
I would assert that kanji and spelling are basically the same, they just look different. Just as people in Japan are beginning to lose their ability to write kanji, so too are people in America losing the ability to spell properly (thanks spellcheck!).

Are Americans (or any English speaking people) losing their ability to spell? I wonder if there are any statistics on that. I know that my own spelling ability has improved dramatically over the last ten years since I started using e-mail. Spell-check highlights my mistakes and I learn from them. I think that might be true for most people.

In my few years of studying kanji, I would agree that it is no more challenging than learning to spell correctly in English.