Why the JLPT is Hard

I know I've been lazy about updating this blog, but I have a good excuse. At the end of September, Stef's brother Ryan and his wife Erin came to Japan to visit us. Knowing that I'd never study while they were here, I pushed extra hard in my preparation for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which I am going to take in a little over a month. I wouldn't even have taken the time to blog, were it not for a recent revelation I had: I'm going to absolutely bomb the JLPT.

This isn't such a bad thing. While my grammar and listening abilities are pretty strong, my reading and writing are still coming along slowly.

In order to understand my struggles in learning how to read and write, I need to explain a few things first. Japanese is made up of three different types of writing systems: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. The three systems are used together, and it's extremely common to see sentences that use all three. Kanji is the group of characters originally borrowed from Chinese, which usually represent abstract ideas like "movement" and "feeling", or more concrete things like "tree" and "wheel". When you see a complex group of chicken scratch and squiggles, you're likely looking at Kanji. The following characters are kanji:



Hiragana is a syllabary, which is like an alphabet except that it represents sounds. In English, the letter g, for example, can be pronounced a few different ways, as evidence by these words:

• Dog


• Gerbil


• Tough


• Drought

In Japanese, like Spanish, the letters you write are always pronounced the same. The Hiragana syllabary is made up of vowel sounds and consonant-vowel combinations (with one exception, n, which is its own syllable). The vowel sounds, pronounced very similar to those in Spanish, are a, i, u, e, and o. The other "letters" in the hiragana alphabet are made up of a consonant with those same vowels, as in ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ma/mi/mu/me/mo, na/ni/nu/ne/no, and so on. The symbols in hiragana are much more simple than most kanji, and they're typically very curvy and loopy:



Hiragana is used for grammatical function words like the Japanese equivalents of to, from, and, and is. Many normal words (like verbs) are written partly in kanji, with the last bit in hiragana. In English, a verb like shuffle can be turned into a past tense verb by adding the letter d to the end, making shuffled. Many other tenses are possible in English, like shuffling, shuffles, and shuffler. In Japanese, the functional pieces of words are written in hiragana. Sometimes kanji characters are uncommon or extremely difficult to write, in which case they can be written out in hiragana. Understanding hiragana is essential.

Katakana is the other syllabary in Japanese, used for words borrowed from other languages and foreign names. It's basically the same as hiragana, in that it is made up of consonant-vowel groupings (ma/mi/mu/me/mo) and the vowels. Katakana characters are typically more angular than their hiragana counterparts:



Like I said before, it's common for a sentence to use all three writing systems, as in this example:



The blue characters spell the name "Mark", so they're written in katakana. The pinkish words are hiragana, and mainly serve grammatical purposes. The black characters are kanji. The sentence reads: Mark is a naughty boy.

Now, on to what I really want to say. Hiragana and Katakana are pretty easy to remember once you've learned them. The main difficulty in learning how to read Japanese is the massive amount of readings that have to be learned. For example, the character "行" means both to go and to do, among other things. The Japanese romanization can either be i or okona (among many other readings, actually), depending on which of the meanings you're using.

For example, if it appears as "行く", it's iku. "行う" is pronounced okonau. The second characters in the two sets are hiragana characters, pronounced ku and u, respectively. However, when paired with another kanji character, "行" is pronounced kou. Kou is the reading originally associated with the Chinese character. There are often multiple ways to say the same thing, with differing levels of formal-ness. Erabu, which uses the Japanese reading, means to choose, and uses only one kanji. Sentaku suru, which is a compound of two kanji characters, also means to choose or make a choice, and even uses the same kanji as erabu for its first character. The second one, however, sounds a bit more stiff, and would be used in more formal settings. In order to pass JLPT, I'll need to study thousands of words that I already know how to say in a simpler way.

See, the JLPT has four levels, the easiest being level 4. Level 1 is nearly impossible to pass if you aren't Chinese or Korean, since it requires knowledge of multiple readings of at least 2000 kanji characters. I'd need a bit more time than what I have to pass level 1. Level 2 is a beast in its own right, but you only need to know the readings of around 1000 kanji. I've been studying like mad, to the point where I remember the meanings of about 900 kanji characters. Unfortunately, most of those characters have two or more different readings, and I've only studied one of them.

In preparation for the test, I've looked at some practice tests online, as well as example sentences. I can generally read the reading comprehension paragraphs just fine, and can even answer the questions with a passing score. The listening portion shouldn't be impossible, either, since I have a pretty good ear and a solid grasp of Japanese grammar. The portion of the test that will absolutely kill me is the part where I have to identify the hiragana spellings of kanji compound words. It's basically impossible for me at this point to keep all the sounds sorted in my mind. I just need more time to study and learn the readings.

Even though I'm positive that I'm going to be completely destroyed by this test (which I've already paid for), I'm not discouraged. I took the practice tests for the Level 3 test, which itself requires a pretty deep understanding of Japanese--and they were a piece of cake. I could've signed up for the level 3 test, but that ultimately would've been a waste of money, since my goal is to reach level 2 by the time I leave. Also, I wouldn't have needed to push myself so hard to study for the test. Instead, I'll continue to prepare myself for the level 2 test, knowing I'll be better off when I take it again next year, since I got off to a good head start.

I'll continue to study hard, but now that I know I'm going to fail, I can take a few moments here and there to keep everybody informed through this blog. Next time, I'll write a bit about Ryan and Erin's visit.