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.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2008 December 07, 10:31 am)

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

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)

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.

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~)

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.

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. :s

source??
i call bs

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.