Yeah. JLPT tests don't accurately rate your Japanese level. I've passed JLPT1 offered at the school with the exact test style as the real thing, just haven't passed it officially yet.
I've known people who suck at Japanese pass JLPT1, and I've known people miles ahead and struggle. Some people are also naturally good at tests. Don't get me wrong though, you have to be really good to pass the test, but you can't solely judge by it.

As many others stated, a middle-schooler probably knows waay more than a guy studying for JLPT1, but may not be able to pass it. The only difference is, the people taking the JLPT1 are studying for JLPT1, and they already understand more complicated words thanks to their main language.

A student of Japanese could be good just like those middle-schoolers and still fail the test because maybe they stick with Japanese material rather than JLPT material. Let's face it, JLPT1 is filled with impractical words that even Japanese people rarely see which isn't so helpful in real life Japanese

A Japanese college student could take this test and he probably would get 90-95% I'd imagine

Edit: My girlfriend passed JLPT1 more than a year ago, but whenever we watch a movie I end up explaining tons of the content to her. When she reads something, she always asks me what the words mean or how to read them. It's obvious who is better at Japanese but she could destroy me at JLPT1 any day of the week

yudantaiteki Wrote:nest0r: I have never used RTK (although I am familiar with it; I've read the prefatory material and the first few lessons, and looked through the rest). I joined this forum because I enjoy helping people out with Japanese, but I have no personal attachment to RTK.

Oh yeah, I must've lumped you in with Tobbs. I'm interested in the various reasons people have for coming to RTK *after* developing some moderate/high level of proficiency through other means.

nest0r Wrote:@Tobbs and @yudantaiteki if you two are reading this, I know you've mentioned it before, but why'd you start RTK?

Because I came home from my year in Japan and noticed very quickly that the first thing that left your head was any knowledge of kanji. In just a month or two, I went from knowing around 1000 kanji to knowing maybe 200. Traditional methods don't stick and we didn't even study the kanji, we just kept learning new ones while hoping that exposure would fix the rest.

Therefore, while I knew enough kanji to pass JLPT2, I knew it wouldn't last when I left Japan. Fortunately, I found this site after about 6 months after coming back and now that whole problem is fixed

nest0r Wrote:I'm interested in the various reasons people have for coming to RTK *after* developing some moderate/high level of proficiency through other means.

I was hoping to be able to remember how to write more kanji, basically (I've never really had a problem with the reading side). Unfortunately it didn't work...

That is very true. For me personally i want to achieve a high level of every skill if possible. Near to a native. But i remember that when you're comparing yourself to a native it takes a lot of time. As natives do very. Some study at university level and know around 3000-4000 kanji, while others know 2500 kanji and work full-time and go on with their daily lives and such. I want to aim for 3000 kanji.

I won't ever want to write a novel by hand but I would like to be able to pick one up in my hands and read it. The astronomical amount of time it would take to train your writing skill that high and I'm not talking about just doing rtk3 and saying you could doo it but rather SRS a productcion deck of maybe 30,000 - 40,000 words. If you just started reading from the get go and skipped writing entirely then you could get to a very high level of reading much faster than taking the time to learn to write which you'll use less than 1% of the time. Only reason I'm still doing it is because I'm going for the challenge of kanken, else I'd focus purely on reading, a skill I need 100x more than writing. I'd make a production deck for writing as the very last skill I absolutely perfect.

@mezbup
I hear yea. I don't want to write a novel by hand, especially in japanese lol. None the less english. I understand that reading+understanding is the two most important skills in any language. Then comes speaking then writing. (Yes writing is last). But there's no reason for me not to start improving it. I do focus on reading alot+decoding sentences+understanding majority of the time. But i;m working on a production deck for common kanji+context of kanji.

nest0r Wrote:I'm interested in the various reasons people have for coming to RTK *after* developing some moderate/high level of proficiency through other means.

After I reached about 1,200 kanji through rote memorization things started getting really blurry and I was having a hard time advancing. RTK is helping me clear things up.

You guys really overestimate native Japanese's kanji ability. They do not know 4000 kanji. They probably can't even write over 2000 kanji either. Nearly all the people raised in the computer/cellphone age have lost the ability to write any hard kanji. If you see them handwrite scripts and other things like that, it usually has lots of errors and completely wrong kanji

If you did RTK1 and still remember it, you are practically as good as a Japanese (except you don't know Japanese so you can't write the words without knowing them first)

I constantly noticed bad stroke order and wrong kanji being wrote down in my kanji class in Japan. They teach kanji and they still make basic mistakes

raseru Wrote:You guys really overestimate native Japanese's kanji ability. They do not know 4000 kanji. They probably can't even write over 2000 kanji either. Nearly all the people raised in the computer/cellphone age have lost the ability to write any hard kanji. If you see them handwrite scripts and other things like that, it usually has lots of errors and completely wrong kanji

yeah, on any given day of the week they feel the hardest kanken level they could pass is 3級 at max. That's only 1600. 3000 - 4000 is some SERIOUS ability (even for reading).

raseru Wrote:If you did RTK1 and still remember it, you are practically as good as a Japanese (except you don't know Japanese so you can't write the words without knowing them first)

I constantly noticed bad stroke order and wrong kanji being wrote down in my kanji class in Japan. They teach kanji and they still make basic mistakes

I had to write an essay on the spot in English for a job interview last month. Did you know ink pens don't come with spell check? >_<

Have you ever had to write an essay in Japanese for a job interview?

The question here is not whether writing any kanji by hand is useful, it's whether the ability to write over 2000 kanji by hand is useful. Given that the majority of Japanese people can't do that, it seems unlikely that a foreigner applying for a job would have any need to demonstrate that kind of handwriting ability.

I think my point isn't so much about usability but efficiency in learning. I'd love to be able to write everything but investing the time purely into learning to read would bring much faster results. Save the best til last and you'll have a familiarity with the kanji that when you go to write a word you'll most likely remember which kanji are actually used it in. Tbh THAT'S the hard part about writing Japanese, not writing the kanji themselves.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Have you ever had to write an essay in Japanese for a job interview?

The question here is not whether writing any kanji by hand is useful, it's whether the ability to write over 2000 kanji by hand is useful. Given that the majority of Japanese people can't do that, it seems unlikely that a foreigner applying for a job would have any need to demonstrate that kind of handwriting ability.

Written tests with essays are very common in Japanese interviews. One of my friends had to do one for a job and managed to talk them into letting him use his dictionary. He got the job too.

IceCream Wrote:Thora: are you arguing against me for the sake of it?

lol Nah, just wasn't sure what you meant.

Quote:i just think all the knowing kanji = reading, and not knowing kanji = not reading posts are kinda funny.

Does "knowing" mean having done RTK/being able to write?

People not doing RTK learn kanji through a mix of vocab, graded kanji books, kanji reference book, 2001KO, etc. I think you did too, no? In the language programs I'm familiar with, the number of kanji you're expected to be able to read far exceeds the number you're expected to write. To me, this is still "knowing" kanji. Hence, my confusion.

I've also said I think it's a good idea to get some Japanese under your belt before RTK. But I wouldn't say you need to wait until "you already can read." At that point, you wouldn't get the (non-writing) benefits of RTK: the "mental placeholders" that can make learning to read easier. It sounds like you consider the main (or only) purpose of RTK to be writing skills. I think it's both.

But this isn't another RTK pro/con thread. :-)

pm215 Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:I'm interested in the various reasons people have for coming to RTK *after* developing some moderate/high level of proficiency through other means.

I was hoping to be able to remember how to write more kanji, basically (I've never really had a problem with the reading side). Unfortunately it didn't work...

Why not? I can write all the RTK kanji really easily. Wasn't even hard, just scribbled out kanji/words once in a while during reviews. ;p

But yeah, going by what Womack and Tobbs said, that's what I generally assume, that people are looking for a more efficiently sustainable way to internalize the kanji. I won't speak for their experiences, but to me it's because of the various methods for learning kanji, the best of them focus on using a method to familiarize oneself with the radicals from the bottom-up till kanji's processed as a whole, giving the ability for robust reading. I get the impression it takes years of exposure to be able to do more than visually decode the most common kanji otherwise. SRS + system like RTK = Very good.

What are you doing Thora?

ocircle Wrote:I have JLPT level 1 certification, but when I'm talking with Japanese people, I tell them it's at the level of your average 5th or 6th grader.

Thanks. Maybe if we all do this people won't be like "Oh, JLPT1? I heard even Japanese people tremble in fear of this one!" any more.

JLPT tests have been getting harder every year.

If you look at the really old JLPT1 tests, they look like JLPT2 lol

nest0r Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:I was hoping to be able to remember how to write more kanji, basically (I've never really had a problem with the reading side). Unfortunately it didn't work...

Why not? I can write all the RTK kanji really easily. Wasn't even hard, just scribbled out kanji/words once in a while during reviews. ;p

The basic problem is that it was completely disconnected from everything else I was doing with Japanese. So I got to a point where I could write all the kanji given the English keyword, but this doesn't help with writing Japanese (because there's no mapping in my head from Japanese word to English keyword) or even with reading it (because when I look at a kanji I think of the Japanese word (or nothing at all), not the English keyword. Heisig may claim that doing keyword-kanji reviews naturally gives you kanji-keyword but for me at least this just isn't true.) And then when I stopped reviewing RTK cards I basically forgot most of it again.

I think if I were going to try again, I'd (1) use Japanese keywords as described in other threads and (2) include kanji-form to Japanese word cards as well as Japanese word to kanji-form. I think I probably won't bother until/unless I'm back in a situation where I actually need to write things longhand more often, though.

It helps to learn them in a vocab word in the format of せん生のせんって何？a: 先

I find doing this actually helps map things out in my head and helps with remember which kanji go in a word because you're associating concepts and meaning and forming a web in your brain.

mezbup Wrote:yeah, on any given day of the week they feel the hardest kanken level they could pass is 3級 at max.

I doubt most Japanese people who have been away from school for a while could even pass 3-kyuu without any studying. There's a lot of obscure stuff on there that most people don't use in their daily life, like 4 character compounds and picking the exact radical of a kanji. Also, since this is for native speakers, the testmakers deliberately pick unusual and tricky words. I guess you only need 70% to pass so maybe some could, but it wouldn't be a walk in the park.

Yeah, it's a tough test for sure but that seems to be the general consensus. Though there would be those that would fail.

I haven't taken 3, but I showed my 4kyuu book to one of my private students (who is a gyaru and I suspect a kyabajo - not normally known for intelligence), and she knew almost all of the 4jijukugo. The majority of bushu are extremely obvious, and even if you guess you have a 25% chance of getting it right.

Your average university educated adult is not going to have any trouble passing 3kyuu I'm sure, even if they can't get a 100% score.

The damn keigo at the mcdonald's drive thru had me lost today. Minus 50 points on my Japanese.