zachandhobbes Wrote:Well, think about it this way. I hear that Japanese natives typically get like in the 80s range on it, so if you can get that then I don't see how much better you could possibly do.

Not on the JLPT? That's an unfortuante myth.
A middle school graduate should be able to make 80 - 100. An average adult should ace it.
I made a reasonably high score and don't feel as if I have nowhere left to go- on the contrary, I feel like everything begins from here!

Maybe if we're talking about this test, which is made for Japanese natives. :] Then I could see a Japanese person making less than 90-100 range.

I wouldn't be surprised if an adult missed one or two questions on the JLPT but an average college-educated Japanese person should get near 100% on N1 and even most people who didn't go to college should pass it.

That's one of the long-standing myths of the JLPT, alongside the one that says N1 has obscure or archaic grammar that even Japanese people don't know. (The latter was probably started by people who heard that from Japanese people; I've encountered "Oh, even Japanese people don't know this!" as a polite comment on your Japanese ability that isn't true. I've had people say that even in situations when it was obviously false.)

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Quote:Even acing the N1 simply tells you that you're ready to start acquiring Japanese.

That's a pretty absurd claim. You can always learn more, but acing N1 would be a huge accomplishment that would show you are fairly far along in your Japanese study. (Even 60% on N1 would be something to be proud about.)

drdunlap Wrote:Maybe if we're talking about this test, which is made for Japanese natives. Then I could see a Japanese person making less than 90-100 range

There is also the Japanese Kanji Aptitude Test (日本漢字能力検定試験)

From Wikipedia: "level 1 is so difficult that fewer than two thousand people take it each time it is offered, and fewer than 15% of those examinees pass"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei

A challenge for the true kanji enthusiast... : )

They had a section on a news programme a while back where they showed some N1 questions to Japanese people on the street. Quite a few people got the most obscure questions wrong, but if you consider that's maybe only about 1 or 2 questions per paper then even the people getting those wrong would be getting over 95%+.

So yes, anyone aiming for native level should be aiming for that sort of score 'eventually'. There's nothing wrong with scraping a pass and being pleased with your achievement though, as that's still a level most Japanese learner's never reach. What is stupid though is scraping a pass and then claiming that you are close to native level, or now an expert on Japanese and can stop studying.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I wouldn't be surprised if an adult missed one or two questions on the JLPT but an average college-educated Japanese person should get near 100% on N1 and even most people who didn't go to college should pass it.

Assuming they can stay awake

Tefhel Wrote:In the UK at least, 2 years would equate to about JLPT N2, and 1000 Kanji. That's from about 10 hours of classes a week.

You get 10 hours a week? ... holy crap... I get 2! what the hell.

merlin.codex Wrote:@drdunlap, stuff

I'm sorry you took what I'm saying that way- I'm not here to start a war and I do not mean to brag or degrade. That's not what I'm here for. Am I a little abrasive? Yes. But that's unfortunately just a personality trait. 8)
As everyone on this forum seems to be striving for a degree quite above that of an average Japanese learner, I'm simply here striving to make people strive for more.

There are a ton of myths about Japanese, the JLPT, adult language learning capacity, etc etc. that have people setting the bar too low. Even if their goal isn't native level proficiency, plenty of people simply set the bar too low because of something they've been told. What I'm doing is attempting to get people to say "Hey I should raise that bar." If you don't want to- that's fine. People all have their goals and reasons for having them. But if anyone's thinking "maybe I could set that bar higher" I want them to. I'm an encourager, not a hater. I'm not gloating. I know how far I have to go- I can't possibly come in and tell anyone that I'm amazing at this language look at me and do what I did, etc etc.

Also, I said 2 years of flooding because this thread originally mentions 2 years of university class and what that would do for you. I wanted to repeat the previously stated idea of "not much" and urge a simple continuation of the self study that OP is doing now. :] (Despite even that being a bit of a derail.. 8))

yudantaiteki Wrote:

drdunlap Wrote:Even acing the N1 simply tells you that you're ready to start acquiring Japanese.

That's a pretty absurd claim. You can always learn more, but acing N1 would be a huge accomplishment that would show you are fairly far along in your Japanese study. (Even 60% on N1 would be something to be proud about.)

It's not an entirely absurd claim and that's the point of what I said earlier.Yes, of course passing the N1 at all is a serious claim to Japanese success and I don't want to diminish anyone's accomplishments. But why are my fellow Westerners and I expected to, at top-notch level, make a full 30 points/25% lower on the N1 than our Asian friends? The expectation placed on us is absurd. The bars we set due in part to those expectations are likewise. I'm guilty. We're all guilty. That aside- the N1 is, in the scheme of Japanese as a whole, somewhat of a midpoint, not a peak.

I was reluctant to mention my accomplishments because I don't want them to get in the way of my point and make me seem like more of an ass than I am. Apparently they did, though, and I'm once again sorry for that. However, I do want to point out simply the fact that we already know- that passing N1 doesn't mean you're "there." Far from it, it actually means you're at a level high enough to (assuming you were doing so) stop studying and begin acquiring (maybe that rewording helps my point? 8)). I took that one step further to question, as I did above, why the expectations for us are so low. Yeah, we're all here doing a decently beefy amount of native material- so far as I can see. But we're also all studying grammar and etc etc like it's something to be studied and thus understood. Certainly that can help to a point- but we're all aware that we'll only truly understand these things when they sink in through use. Passing N1 with flying colors is a flag to say- "Ok. Stop any of that studying stuff you might still be doing and get to full-time acclimating." Which, as far as I can speak from experience, should have begun long before that point anyway but we all work differently.

I want to keep the collective Japanese-learner community moving forward and setting the bar higher- thus having the expectations placed on us set higher and making those bars easier to raise. I can't do much as a single, abrasive voice of reason but I can push and prod here and there.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, merlin.codex. I'm sure even with this explanation I still seem reasonably abrasive and I won't deny it- but please don't view me as a "kid with a toy." 8) That's not even what I'm saying.

I've been reading this forum for some time, and I have never (in this thread or any other) seen anyone claim that passing N1 is the end of your Japanese study. You seem to be railing against some straw man that you saw elsewhere, and assuming that people here believe it too.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I've been reading this forum for some time, and I have never (in this thread or any other) seen anyone claim that passing N1 is the end of your Japanese study. You seem to be railing against some straw man that you saw elsewhere, and assuming that people here believe it too.

I'm only "railing against" the expectations. Sorry I ramble and am no good at expression.
60% of midway = ?
Myths exist.
Raise the bar.

Edit: If you're talking about earlier when I responded to zachandhobbes- please reread that post. I don't assume anyone here thinks that N1 is the end. I don't believe I said that. I have no reason to say that because I don't think most people think that way here. I do ramble a lot, though.

The short answer is Genki books 1 & 2, from experience: half a book per semester. I remember several other schools did it the same way, and Nanzan did too, I think. If you want to be more prepared, they usually went to An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese next.

semperanimus Wrote:I'm trying to plan to go to Japan as a foreign exchange student next fall
demo many of the foreign exchange programs require 2 years of highschool or university level Japanese or the equivalent to go with their program. since I am self studying I have no idea how much vocab/kanji/grammar I need to know in order to equate myself with that level of Japanese.

Quote:since I'm homeschooled it's kinda difficult to find a program that will accept me, especially in japan for some reason.

Try to offer them some objective way to measure your level. Taking the JLPT is probably the most straightforward solution. Alternatively, you might find out exactly what a university Japanese program covers and learn that material (same texts, etc). Will you be enrolling in university? Sometimes you can ask to challenge a course (either for credit or to satisfy prerequisites) by sitting for an exam or interviewing with a professor. A third option might be to arrange to sit for some kind of exam at a reputable private language school, Japan Foundation, Japan Society, etc. Given your home schooled situation, maybe they'd be willing to work with you to create a solution?

yudanteiteki Wrote:[all comments]

That.

drdunlap- surely one of the main differences between asian and western learners of Japanese is just the gap in numbers of people learning the language. This ratio is pretty obvious if you ever take a JLPT exam in Japan (I was the only non-asian person in my N1 exam). This means that if a scholarship was open only to people scoring 90% then probably an equally high % of applicants would be of asian-origin. Setting the bar lower for non-asian applicants is just a way of getting more of them to apply (I assume they have some sort of aim to get students from a wide range of countries not just those with the highest scores). They are not saying that students from non-asian countries aren't capable of learning Japanese to that level, just that by the laws of probability there will be fewer at that level.

Sorry, once again the thread seems to have been sidetracked into a JLPT discussion. To reply to the original question, I would agree with what most other people have said i.e. roughly around JLPT N3 level, being ready to move onto intermediate textbooks and maybe knowing roughly 500-1000 kanji (this is just from people I've met who have done exchanges before)

mutley Wrote:drdunlap- surely one of the main differences between asian and western learners of Japanese is just the gap in numbers of people learning the language. This ratio is pretty obvious if you ever take a JLPT exam in Japan (I was the only non-asian person in my N1 exam). This means that if a scholarship was open only to people scoring 90% then probably an equally high % of applicants would be of asian-origin. Setting the bar lower for non-asian applicants is just a way of getting more of them to apply (I assume they have some sort of aim to get students from a wide range of countries not just those with the highest scores). They are not saying that students from non-asian countries aren't capable of learning Japanese to that level, just that by the laws of probability there will be fewer at that level.

I think I like that thought process. 8) I don't know for sure what went into the setting for that particular scholarship but I do rather like the idea that they simply wanted to recruit a solid amount of westerners to offset the large number of Korean and Chinese applicants.
I could easily be missing a cause/effect correlation someplace. It's just that, knowing the Japanese view of foreigners learning their language, it's sometimes hard for me to be optimistic. :]

semperanimus Wrote:I'm trying to plan to go to Japan as a foreign exchange student next fall
demo many of the foreign exchange programs require 2 years of highschool or university level Japanese or the equivalent to go with their program. since I am self studying I have no idea how much vocab/kanji/grammar I need to know in order to equate myself with that level of Japanese. any experiences or information any of you can share would be most helpful. arigatou gozaimasu

It's not quite an answer to your question but the Japanese exchange I went on required no prior knowledge of Japanese. It was a language and culture programme and when you arrived you did a language test and they'd put you in the appropriate level Japanese class. If your Japanese is good enough you can attend normal Japanese classes as well or they have another exchange programme entirely in Japanese aimed at N1 level I think. I really enjoyed the programme, we got to go on lots of subsidised field trips as well
Click here!

I read something kind of interesting recently related to this earlier comment.

nadiatims Wrote:So for Merlin and his classmates, Japanese is most likely their third not second language, which would make it easier.

ThomasB Wrote:[...] I don't think that knowing any other language except for Korean (Grammar) or Chinese (Kanji) will make learning Japanese significantly easier. It's just too different from all the European languages.

It's easier to learn a related language. (Interestingly, though, close languages can also cause certain interference if learners fail to discern subtle differences.)

But apparently multilinguals do have some advantages in learning languages - improved linguistic awareness and some different language-related cognitive processing. Some studies looked at results of proficiency testing. Others studies identified different areas of the brain used by bi- and multi-linguals at low/high levels of FL proficiency during various language tasks. I don't understand the fancy jargon, but the general idea is that the use of certain different areas is interpreted as differences in processing. People with low L2/3 proficiency levels are thought to compensate differently depending on whether they're learning an L2 or L3. At high proficiency levels, those differences weren't significant.

I think we have a sense that we benefit from consciously learning how to learn a language and from our increased knowledge about how language works. Well, it seems our brains also have their own secret strategies for dealing with multiple languages! :-)
[Edit: fixed L2/L3 description]

I've scanned though most messages in the topic, and I don't think Dutch Universities are any better either. I've attended only for about 4 weeks now, but I think I get an idea. I've done a year of self-study and I skipped the first year classes, and I'm absolutely amazed how low the level of second year students is. They have serious difficulty reading even low grade kanji, even after being given the chance to study the text beforehand. The total of 3 years only teaches about 1500 kanji, which is only half of what I think you should at least know. The main cause is that teachers seem to hint all the time that Japanese is so extremely hard, and lower the pace, I mean, 20 (whole) new kanji a week during a full time study? Also, 70% of second year students cannot understand even the most simple everyday conversations. It's almost as if they only spend the time that is allocated by teachers (say, 10 hours a week).

I also noticed that it seems to be a big taboo to ask something on a test that hasn't been handled in class. I mean, how can you ever hope to read a newspaper like that?

Kyoshi88 Wrote:It's almost as if they only spend the time that is allocated by teachers (say, 10 hours a week).

Hahaha, welcome to university. Hint: even at that age, not everyone gives a damn. There's a reason class sizes dwindle by final year.

Hint2: don't judge your progress relative to those people or you'll get nowhere slightly faster than they do.

Why would you want to read a newspaper?

For a test in a class, it seems generally fairer to include only things the students have studied. Of course at some point you have to deal with unknown things, but that doesn't have to be on a 1st or 2nd year test.

1500 kanji in 3 years seems pretty good to me. The program I taught in was considerably lower, although kanji counts are not very reliable ways of judging the progress of a class without knowing exactly what the students are expected to be able to do with those kanji. Of course anyone can design a class where you introduce thousands of kanji in a short time but that doesn't mean it's the best way to do things (or that it's automatically better than other programs that contain fewer kanji.) I personally think it's a much better use of class time to improve the student's reading comprehension ability and grammar than to cram a bunch of kanji.

I knew one person who had supposedly learned the entire jouyou list in school but had problems even reading simple stuff, because so much time had been spent on kanji shapes and readings that they didn't practice actual reading all that much. What little reading practice there was involved laboriously going through character by character and deciphering the meaning with a huge vocab list, which barely qualifies as "reading" to me. (What I really wish Japanese had was something like the John DeFrancis readers for Chinese -- the basic volumes spend around 900 pages on 400 characters, and I think the intermediate volumes is over 1000 pages for another 400.)

@drdunlap

Not everyone is a student or unemployed. I actually have a life (with english only friends) involving a full time engineering job (mostly english, although it's a japanese company). You seem to think everyone has "being good at japanese" as their sole goal in life.

You talk about raising the bar without regard to people's goals. I want to learn japanese so i can do my job better, and so i can have some fun over there if i get transferred. I have no particular desire to pass for a native nor get a job intended for a native.

When i pass N1, will i consider it the end? No, of course not. But to claim getting 60% on the N1 isn't a serious accomplishment is just nuts. At work, people think it's nuts that i have an N2 certificate. Again, these are engineers, not language students. None of us intend to be translators/interpreters.

zigmonty Wrote:@drdunlap

Not everyone is a student or unemployed. I actually have a life (with english only friends) involving a full time engineering job (mostly english, although it's a japanese company). You seem to think everyone has "being good at japanese" as their sole goal in life.

You talk about raising the bar without regard to people's goals. I want to learn japanese so i can do my job better, and so i can have some fun over there if i get transferred. I have no particular desire to pass for a native nor get a job intended for a native.

When i pass N1, will i consider it the end? No, of course not. But to claim getting 60% on the N1 isn't a serious accomplishment is just nuts. At work, people think it's nuts that i have an N2 certificate. Again, these are engineers, not language students. None of us intend to be translators/interpreters.

drdunlap Wrote:Even if their goal isn't native level proficiency, plenty of people simply set the bar too low because of something they've been told. What I'm doing is attempting to get people to say "Hey I should raise that bar." If you don't want to- that's fine. People all have their goals and reasons for having them. But if anyone's thinking "maybe I could set that bar higher" I want them to. I'm an encourager, not a hater.

Passive aggressive counter-attacks are, while unsurprising, more saddening than anything. Please don't assume that I'm attacking anyone's goals, way of life, accomplishments, etc. I'm stating my opinions. They are mildly abrasive. Please don't be (too?) offended.

I think what zigmonty said applies very much to university students too. Regardless of their subject, very few students (well among those I've met at least) want to spend all of their time studying as they are too busy making friends, joining club/groups and in most cases generally just enjoying living away from home for the first time.
Accordingly the minimum standard needs to be set quite low or most of the students would just drop out.

1500 kanji in 3 years sounds reasonable if you actually can write and use them all properly.

drdunlap Wrote:I'm stating my opinions. They are mildly abrasive. Please don't be (too?) offended.

You know, in general it is others who judge whether what you are saying is abrasive or not. And given the responses you've got, maybe you need to recalibrate your abrasion sensor. Sure, you say "If you don't want to- that's fine" but then you also claim acing the N1 isn't that big an achievement. Put the two together and your opinion comes off as "hey, you can suck if you want and settle for N1. Not me though, i'm a winner".

Honestly, you come off as someone who's obsessed and demands that everyone else be as obsessed as you are. If that is not the case, then i apologise. Nothing wrong with being obsessed though, many of the world's success stories stem from obsession. To be the best at something, you often have to make painful sacrifices. Just recognise that most people aren't aiming to be the best in your particular interest. That doesn't mean they have no ambition. Japanese is just one skill in life, and far from the important one (unless your ambition is to be a translator).

As to the original question, beware of metrics like how many kanji they study etc. What (good) classes are good at is conversation practice, etc. They'll never compare to focused self-study in terms of number of kanji etc, but they'll likely raise your skill in a more balanced way. Look at it from the perspective of the whole course, not just the first year. As mutley and yudantaiteki said, 1500 kanji is a perfectly reasonable number of kanji for 3 years... assuming you did more than learn kanji in those years. N2 in two years is perfectly acceptable progress. Sure, some people do it in less time than that, but it's by no means slow.

And it's always instructive to remember that native Japanese people don't "officially" reach 1500 kanji until their second year of middle school -- that's about 7.5 years of study, added to the fact that they have constant reinforcement in daily life and their other classes, and they are native speakers so they know most of the vocab.

Quote:As to the original question, beware of metrics like how many kanji they study etc. What (good) classes are good at is conversation practice, etc. They'll never compare to focused self-study in terms of number of kanji etc, but they'll likely raise your skill in a more balanced way

Well said.