You can always try the Business Japanese Test after N1, it's significantly more difficult than the JLPT...

Tzadeck Wrote:

erlog Wrote:After you finish N1....you can begin to learn Japanese.

This is bad phrasing. You're trying to emphasize the fact that there is still a lot to learn after you reach N1 level, but why choose to do it by demeaning the years of study it takes to get to N1?

There's gotta be a better way to say this.

After N1 you stop trying to quantify your knowledge of Japanese and can begin to stop studying and start enjoying the language for what it is? Maybe?

callmedodge Wrote:After N1 you stop trying to quantify your knowledge of Japanese and can begin to stop studying and start enjoying the language for what it is?

I agree with this.

erlog Wrote:

callmedodge Wrote:After N1 you stop trying to quantify your knowledge of Japanese and can begin to stop studying and start enjoying the language for what it is?

I agree with this.

Agreed, though I've met a few foreigners who didn't bother with N1 and are functionally fluent in Japanese and are living in Japan. One guy just didn't think it was worth the effort to learn things that he would never use.

I passed 3級 in Fukuoka in Dec of 2008 after about 3 months of study, then N2 in Australia in Dec 2010 after living in Japan from Aug 2008 - Dec 2009 and studying while on working holiday in Australia for all of 2010. N2 was a close thing- I thought I failed it- the reading sections were tough for me as I've always been much better at speaking/listening.

I moved to Singapore in May 2011 and haven't seriously studied since. I still speak Japanese frequently, but I am certain I couldn't pass N2 right now. N1 is the only thing left for me to aim for, but I know it'd be a huge struggle to get to that level. Realistically, I could consider taking it in Dec 2013, but I'd have to figure out how to consistently study again, which I'm having trouble with.

captal Wrote:

erlog Wrote:

callmedodge Wrote:After N1 you stop trying to quantify your knowledge of Japanese and can begin to stop studying and start enjoying the language for what it is?

I agree with this.

Agreed, though I've met a few foreigners who didn't bother with N1 and are functionally fluent in Japanese and are living in Japan. One guy just didn't think it was worth the effort to learn things that he would never use.

It's hard for me to believe someone is functionally fluent without being able to pass N1. (Although I guess it depends on what your definition of "functionally fluent" is.)

I'm going to have to agree with erlog about this. I've passed N1 and there is still so much I don't know. I know erlogs statement was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it really does feel like I can start studying Japanese now that I've passed N1.

I never said can't pass N1, I said didn't bother. One example is a guy who lives his entire life in Japanese in Kobe- when I visited him a few years back he had difficulty changing gears back to English. He looked at what was required for N1 and said he didn't want to bother studying things that he would never use.

I know this is anecdotal- he likely could pass the N1 easily if he studied for it- he just didn't see it as worth the effort. When my wife looked at the N1 material she said it wasn't hard, it just wasn't stuff she used or saw often, so I understand his point of view.

No native speaker of Japanese over the age of 13 would need to study JLPT stuff in order to pass N1.

I feel like there's so much I still need to learn, but I also feel like I was functionally fluent before I knew JLPT N1 grammar points like "atte no" and "gatera."

If I may make a video game analogy, I think that before around N1 level you're (ideally) increasing all of your stats pretty much at the same rate. But once you get to around N1 level, what's left to learn is a matter of picking your own skill trees. You can get the newspaper skill tree, the Classical Japanese skill tree, the Osaka-ben skill tree, and so forth.

I think once someone has reached a level where they can pass JLPT 1 then they are very much functional in the language, though not necessarily fluently. This means that they then have the freedom to go out and function in Japanese rather than just studying it. By this I mean you can do things like go into a book shop, just pick out a book at random and probably be able to read it (though much more slowly and with less complete comprehension than a native speaker), or you can go into a video store and pick out a Japanese movie to watch knowing that you're going to be able to understand enough to enjoy it.

You no longer need to use your native language as a support to help you study Japanese, you can just go out and use it!

(I'm not saying passing JLPT 1 is a magical point in time when you can start doing these things.)

Just to give you an idea, here are some of the things I've done since passing JLPT a couple of years ago:
Studied for the 漢字検定 levels 3 and 4 (never bothered to take the test in the end)
Learnt new kanji I've encountered while reading
Read a pretty decent number of Japanese novels
Brushed up on my keigo and business Japanese
Studied for the BJT (didn't bother to take it as I managed to find a job without it on my resume)
Watched plenty of Japanese T.V. (when I could find anything worth watching)
Learnt a bit about Japanese history
Read numerous scientific books and magazines
Spoken a lot of Japanese

The common trend with all of the things above is that they were almost exclusively done in Japanese. I can imagine things would be different though if you're not living in Japan and don't have easy access to a Japanese environment in which you can now just go out and function.

The vast majority of N1 grammar--and ALL the vocabulary--is everyday stuff, so if your friend is saying that it's obscure and useless I question his Japanese ability.

kitakitsune Wrote:No native speaker of Japanese over the age of 13 would need to study JLPT stuff in order to pass N1.

After teaching in rural Japan, I think 13 is stretching it. I'd say on average, anyone who has graduated middle school should be able to pass N1*

I'm sure there are 13 year old kids who could pass it, however.

Tzadeck Wrote:The vast majority of N1 grammar--and ALL the vocabulary--is everyday stuff, so if your friend is saying that it's obscure and useless I question his Japanese ability.

Has that changed since 1kyuu? That's actually when I talked to him about it. And yes, grammar, not vocab.

*I know people fight over the difficulty of N1 all the time. I know it is easy for a Japanese adult.

captal Wrote:Has that changed since 1kyuu? That's actually when I talked to him about it. And yes, grammar, not vocab.

Its mostly the same, nothing has really changed. The thing is that most people that blow the N1 off as not useful to them or "stuff thats never used." Are also probably the people that think they only need to know how to speak. A lot of the N1/N2 grammar/vocab is stuff you'd expect to see in writing. A lot of the grammar in the N1, if I ask Japanese about it, they will usually say either a) "No one ever uses that..." or b) "Only in writing." Which (a) is basically stating (b). Of course if no one ever actually used it, they wouldn't know about it....now would they? So clearly its getting used somewhere.

Once you get close to N2/N1, asking Japanese about the usefulness of grammar and vocab becomes futile. The only sign that something might be useless to you is if they have to grab a dictionary themselves to look it up.

I don't think N1 grammar is necessarily *rare*. The degree that it's being used on the test is a bit over the top, though, but that's because it's the point of the test.

I thought it was useless too, but that was before I studied it.

That gripe about grammar is also why the new test has so few grammar questions. Pretty much everything in the N1 test specification is completely reasonable, and I run into it on a daily basis in native sources.

I agree that the old 1級 was a little over the top with the technical aspects of different grammar, but not really difficult if you studied for it.

It's very possible to be functionally fine in tons of Japanese situations without being able to pass N1. I was that way when I came to Japan last year. I set up internet service for my apartment on my own, negotiated my own cell phone contract, was playing all my video games in Japanese, watching lots of Japanese TV, and then I failed N1 hard that December because my reading was garbage.

The JLPT is primarily about literacy. There's a lot of people who are very okay and very happy being functionally illiterate in Japan. Speaking/Listening and Reading/Writing are two separate sets of skills.

Tzadeck Wrote:The vast majority of N1 grammar--and ALL the vocabulary--is everyday stuff, so if your friend is saying that it's obscure and useless I question his Japanese ability.

Of course there's plenty of grammar that's totally normal on the N1, but honestly, i open 総まとめN1 and right there on the 1st page is こそすれ and こそあれ, neither of which i have come accross in real life in 3 years now. So it's really not difficult to see how people end up at that conclusion, lol...

There are 59mil results and 88mil respectively for each, on Google.

The question is really more about what level material are you reading? If you are reading manga mainly, you'll never run into something like こそすれ. However, if you are reading newspapers and novels, you are far more likely to start running into this stuff. I started running into bizarre structures after I started reading novels and when I looked them up I found that they were N2/N1 level grammar structures. I also see stuff all the time in newspapers that I see listed on the N2/N1.

yeah, i do read plenty of real stuff So i don't think it has a lot to do with that.

maybe it's more of a classical japanese thing? i haven't read much of that.

btw, this is one of the example sentences for it on Tanaka: 現代にも「-こそすれ」「-こそあれ」の形が化石的に残っている。
apart from that, こそあれ appears to be used mainly as part of the phrase 程度の差こそあれ.
It does seem fairly obscure. I'm guessing you got so many results on a google search because you didn't use quotation marks...

I read plenty of novels and I can't remember the last time I saw 「こそすれ」. 「こそあれ」I can remember seeing, certainly, but not enough that I could pass it on a quiz.

Ah, ya I forgot the quotes. Now I don't get so many results haha, and most are about "How do you use this? what does it mean?"

I think most of the N1 stuff is pretty common especially if you read material aimed at adults or listen to news reports. Usually when N1 stuff is brought up in conversation as being really obscure people just give one question from a paper as an example (obviously the most obscure one), while conveniently forgetting to mention the other 95%+ of the paper which isn't so obscure.

I do feel though that the focus just on formal/difficult grammar structures is a bit of a disadvantage to the test. It would be better to also test very common grammar structures, but with the need to understand them more thoroughly than at the lower levels (e.g. being able pick up on differences between very similar words or grammar structures, or actually being able to use them effectively yourself). However, maybe this would be quite difficult to do without adding some kind of written section into the exam.

IceCream Wrote:

Tzadeck Wrote:The vast majority of N1 grammar--and ALL the vocabulary--is everyday stuff, so if your friend is saying that it's obscure and useless I question his Japanese ability.

Of course there's plenty of grammar that's totally normal on the N1, but honestly, i open 総まとめN1 and right there on the 1st page is こそすれ and こそあれ, neither of which i have come accross in real life in 3 years now. So it's really not difficult to see how people end up at that conclusion, lol...

Yeah, that's a pretty obscure one (actually, it's not in Kanzen Master, haha). But there are plenty of N1 grammar points that I hear or see a few times a week or even every day while living in Japan. Then there are a lot that I see fairly regularly. And then just a few that I almost never see.

For example, I hear ところを, ならでは, きらいがある, と思いきや, くらいなら, なしには, ではあるまいし, てはいられない, ときたら, にもまして, ともなく, っぱなし, たりとも(number)ない, とは a lot just living everyday in Japan, and they're all N1 grammar points in Kanzen Master. Some of them, like ところを, I hear absolutely every day (since I work in Japan--a very common phrase at any job).

Other ones, like 余儀なくされる, I see constantly in the news.

And in novels you will see most of the rest.

Oh, another thing about the grammar in N1 is that it actually tests grammar beyond just those lists of grammar points, especially in the fill-in-the-blanks-of-the-essay and the order-of-four style questions. It tests things like how K-S-A-D series are used (such as how この　その　あの　どの are used in essay writing), and some of the more interesting ways that basic grammar is used (for example, using くれる or もらう in negative situations--sort of the ironic use of those words. Or, how くる and いく are used in more metaphorical ways).

People have a tendency to forget about this part of N1 grammar, since you can't make a list out of that type of grammar so easily, and exposure is a lot more important to get a feel for it. Also, the listening section actually tests grammar used in Keigo, especially in the choose-the-correct-response questions. Again, this is pretty everyday stuff if you are anywhere near the business world.

The Kanzen Master book has like four chapters about how subjects are maintained across sentences, and how subjects are chosen (for example, favoring in-group subjects to out-group subjects).

All this stuff is pretty integral to using Japanese correctly, and goes beyond specific phrases.

A test like JLPT will only ever realistically be able test a subset of the japanese language (unless they implemented some kind of japanese interview).

That means that there will be people who can study that subset and pass the exam but be poor (even potentially sub-fluent but this is unlikely) overall. And the reverse is also true. Someone can be very good generally, but have some holes in their formal grammar (or at least the type appearing in the exam) and they won't be able to pass N1.

nadiatims Wrote:...have some holes in their formal grammar (or at least the type appearing in the exam) and they won't be able to pass N1.

This isn't true. The new test has so few grammar questions that it's basically not worth studying grammar for the test. You also only need around 55% overall to pass. So someone with real Japanese proficiency should have no trouble with the vocab, reading, and listening required to pass. They could bomb the entire grammar section, and still pass very very comfortably.

This criticism is why they re-configured the test, and they pretty much fixed it.

Tzadeck Wrote:For example, I hear ところを, ならでは, きらいがある, と思いきや, くらいなら, なしには, ではあるまいし, てはいられない, ときたら, にもまして, ともなく, っぱなし, たりとも(number)ない, とは a lot just living everyday in Japan, and they're all N1 grammar points in Kanzen Master. Some of them, like ところを, I hear absolutely every day (since I work in Japan--a very common phrase at any job).

Other ones, like 余儀なくされる, I see constantly in the news.

And in novels you will see most of the rest.

Yeah, the vast majority of the grammar on N1 is totally normal. In fact, many are so normal that i don't remember learning them or even thinking of them as a seperate grammar point. i can just imagine a ton of people wandering into a bookshop and picking up 総まとめ, having a look at the first page and concluding that JLPT1 is obscure lol.