JLPT questions: knowing the format is half the battle

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One thing I wish I had realised earlier is that school and exams are not really that great a measure of your ability in a subject. In the end, tests and exams are an imperfect way to test people. You can be amazing at a subject or area but do poorly in an exam. Conversely, you can just so happen to know one tiny area of a subject really well and that ends up being a large chunk of an exam. In the former you look like an idiot, and the latter you look like a genius but it doesn’t really say much about what your actual ability is.

I like to use the analogy of a game: the exam or test is like a competition in which you can score points. Points are only awarded for certain actions and not awarded for other actions. So it is important to consider the most effective way to get the most points possible and the best way to avoid making mistakes so you lose as little points as possible (if the exam is such a test that allows minus points).

So the important thing is to be prepared and ready. As the old saying goes, if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail. So let’s look at some specific JLPT questions that can cause some issues for those unfamiliar with the format.

You can take practice JLPT tests on the official website to get a feel of the different types of questions. We’re going to look at two types of questions, one I called the star questions, and the other I don’t have a name for…

Star Questions

These questions really throw people. I’ll show you the example from the JLPT website.

The explanation (in green/yellow) is below the actual question (and you will only get the explanation above the first question in the actual exam). In effect, you are given a sentence with 4 blanks. The star will always be in the same position, the 3rd spot. Your task is to choose what will go in the star position, numbered 1 through 4 in blue.

As always, these questions follow the JLPT philosophy which is, pick the the most appropriate answer. There are some hints to look out for when considering what words go where. One thing is that grammatical rules still have to be followed, so look for obvious particle pairing with verbs, nouns etc.

In this example, you have a の at the beginning which probably means you have a noun coming after it. As this is a N1 question, this doesn’t help much as all the 4 choices can go here. But you may recognise the pairing of やすみのたびに as a possible phrase whereas 休みの片付けようと and 休みの思いながらも don’t really make sense.

The next thing to look at is that we have a と particle at the end of one of the choices and then 思いながらも as one of the other choices. These are very common pairings, especially when you consider you have the plain form volitional before it.

Now that we have the two pairings of 休みのたびに + 片付けようと思いながらも, you just have to consider where 今日こそ will go. I used to like to draw lines placing the words in the empty spots to help visualise these types of problems. In the end, 今日こそ will go between the two pairings and so the correct answer is 1 片付けよう

Picking the appropriate word

I never really liked this section of the exam, it was definitely one of my weak points. The idea is that you are presented with a word and then 4 sentences. Each sentence is using the word but one of the sentences will be the best usage of this word. This section of the exam tests whether you know your definitions and synonyms really well.

労わる is a hard word, and notice that the kanji is not used. This is by design, as if you don’t specifically know the word いたわる but have the kanji, you can have a guess at the word’s meaning just by the kanji. So the JLPT wants to test your vocabulary separately from your kanji ability.

I wasn’t particularly sure on what this word meant myself, but I thought it had the meaning of to exchange something or to hand something over (I was actually thinking of the word 至る). The dictionary definition of いたわる is as follows:

Reading through all 4 sentences, I felt that 2 and 3 were weird. I was left choosing between 1 and 4. Four’s sentence in particular made me think that いたわる must mean protect or maintain and so I chose it. In the end I was wrong, but like I said I hate this part of the exam. I think studying for these types of questions is very difficult as it means you have to do in-depth study of words, rather than just going down a JLPT list and learning as many words as possible.

Use these tips to better your JLPT exam technique and get that N1!

If you found these tips useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.

If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via this website’s contact form. You can checkout my YouTube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.

Get your katakana as good as your hiragana

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One of the most common questions that you’ll see about learning Japanese is about what scripts to learn. Do you learn all three at the same time? Should you ignore kanji because we have smartphones? Why bother learning katakana if you can already speak English?

As with most questions about what to study in Japanese, often there is an underlying tinge of laziness. Most people don’t like to hear this, but if you understand that there is only a certain amount of time in the day and only so many things to accomplish, it is completely rational to try and look for shortcuts, more effective strategies or skipping certain things. At the same time, if you want to actually get good at Japanese even at the most basic level, you cannot be lazy about katakana.

Indeed, skipping katakana is not one of those options that you can skip. It is such an important part of Japanese that you have to spend time getting good at it. Without it, you’re going to have an extremely hard time understanding almost anything written in Japanese, as so many words (particularly nouns). Not to mention the large sprinkling of such words in everyday speech.

Timing of when to start?

Basically you should be starting katakana as soon as possible. You should prioritise learning hiragana first. I’ve done previous posts on how to study hiragana as well as providing good resources to do so. Once you get to a point where you can write a word in hiragana, for example think of what the word for ‘car’ is, then write it out by hand, くるま, you are at about the point to start looking at katakana.

Then you want to do basically the same process with katakana as you did for hiragana. Spend time looking at a hiragana chart, write each out by hand and then start doing flashcards. Flashcards which have audio files or by using NHK Easy to listen to the correct pronunciation while trying to read the characters is a great way to speed up your learning.

Alright, so just study hiragana like I did katakana…

No! Katakana has an extra element to it which means it is slightly more involved than just rote learning the individual characters. First of all, there are some additional sounds in katakana like smaller versions of ァィェォ as well as ヴ and several others you should look through the above links to find out more about.

Finally, there is a way that katakana is used in Japanese that goes against some basic instincts that certain speakers of other languages, such as English speakers, that need to be understood to properly understand and use katakana in Japanese. You can see the below video for a whole explanation on some of these aspects with myself and my Japanese friend Mio.

Use these tips to better your handle on katakana and therefore be better at Japanese!

If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.

Struggling with High School Japanese? Learn the Plain Form

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About half of the students I tutor are doing Japanese in school, generally high school. Despite them learning Japanese for many years, due to how Japanese language programs are structured they have not learnt the basics and therefore struggle with everything to do with Japanese. If they better understood the plain form, pretty much the whole of the rest of beginner’s Japanese (up to and including JLPT N4) becomes much more logical.

I am going to introduce some tips to you on how to best understand Japanese and learn it in a better way. This all starts with learning about the plain form or dictionary form and how it interacts with the ます・です form.

What’s so important about the plain form in Japanese?

Tae Kim, one of the best Japanese teachers out there (yes I know he’s not perfect nor is he Japanese, but he has lots of great ideas) is one of the first people to introduce this idea to me in a clear way. I would highly recommend you read his introduction to his Japanese course regarding issues with Japanese textbooks and Japanese language programs. It is not a long passage to read and if you truly are serious about getting better at Japanese, you should read it.

His basic point is that Japanese has some features that are quite different from many languages, particularly for our purposes, English. I will focus mainly on the concept of ‘politeness’ and how it makes learning Japanese really hard if you do not understand this concept.

Why does Japanese teaching in school set students up for failure?

I don’t particularly blame anyone for the current state of Japanese learning in schools. Teachers have quite a hard task. Language learning takes many hundreds of hours of study and you’d be lucky to get more than a few contact hours a week at school. There is also an issue of selection bias and ignorance of successful Japanese teaching strategies. Then of course there is class size and all the issues that brings with it.

There are also some hard decisions that have to be made with Japanese teaching. When designing a Japanese program, you have to decide whether you will teach people the basics of grammar or you will teach them how to speak polite Japanese. School Japanese programs around the world have chosen the latter, they want their students to be able to speak politely to people in Japan as a priority. Although this may sound like a good idea, in reality it is setting students up for failure.

The main reason for this is that what you are taught as being “Japanese”, for example たべます, おいしいです and other such examples, is only one facet of Japanese which is in fact building on the plain form of Japanese. So if you do not understand the plain form, you have to do lots of crazy workarounds. One of the worst I see year after year in school, is teaching students to make the てform from the ますform instead of from the plain form. I’d recommend my video on learning 13 words to conquer the てform for verbs. While you’re at it, you should go through my Beginner Playlist on Youtube particularly the ます video to get an idea of what the plain form is.

But teachers or the people that set the syllabus aren’t out to get me, are they?

No, they are not out to get you. A choice was made regarding the order to teach Japanese and my argument (well, the argument I agree with) is that this choice, to focus on ます form first, is not good.

Fundamentally, the goal of a Japanese program should be to teach Japanese so that students can understand and use Japanese properly. Starting from the ます form is like teaching English by making students read academic articles from a peer-reviewed journal (OK not my best analogy but hopefully you get the gist).

You should be starting with the plain form and then adding on the ます form much later. In effect the exact opposite how Japanese is taught all over the world. If you’re wondering how you can learn the plain form, I would recommend Tae Kim’s guide as I linked above, my beginner playlist videos linked in this article and specifically this section, Polite Form and Verb Stems (as well as being across the totality of Nouns and Adjectives and Verbs) from Tae Kim’s guide/website.

Another great website to read about the barriers to effective Japanese learning can be found on imabi’s mission page.

TL;DR

Learning the ます form first is counterproductive. If your sentences always end with です or ます and たべる makes no sense to you, start learning the plain form. The plain form is the ‘true’ base of Japanese and you can learn about the ます form later.

Managing Your Study

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If you are not doing some type of spaced repetition system (SRS) flashcard system to help you memorise words and kanji, you probably should. Language learning does involve learning many words and unless you have some kind of amazing memory, you will need to go over the same words many times until you have truly remembered them and can recall at any moment.

One of the most satisfying feelings I ever get is when a certain situation comes up which uses a specific word and I know the word. Not knowing the word would’ve meant I would’ve been completely unable to work out what I was hearing. It’s even better when I use the word while speaking and get a visible reaction from others like, “now THAT was an appropriate word for that situation!”. AKA よくしってるな！

SRS is a proven system that repeats information to you over certain spaced periods, with wrong guesses meaning the system will show the word again much sooner and a right answer meaning you won’t be ‘tested’ on that word for some time. Generally the collection of words you pick up overtime to do SRS on will be referred to as a ‘deck’.

However adding in new words as cards to your deck means that your study time goes up because you have more cards to review. When your SRS deck starts to become more of a chore than anything, your issue is likely bad cards.

As language learners, we want to grab every kanji, every vocab that we see in our immersion environment, even if it’s mind-numbingly dull, because we think we ‘should’. However my tip to you is to try and forget the perfectionism. Forget what you ‘should’ learn.  Just grab the items that look fun and try to learn them.

So delete cards that do not spark joy. Even fun cards are not immune from deletion. Some cards start out fun and interesting, but we forget the context or we just don’t care about them anymore. Don’t be shy about deleting those. Just because you liked it at one time doesn’t mean you need to commit yourself to it forever.

Setup of Japan: 都道府県

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都道府県, read as とどうふけん is a word used to represent the various top level administrative areas of Japan. The Wikipedia article has some great maps, diagrams and more than enough information you’ll ever need to know about this topic.

In Japanese the breakdown is as follows: 都：東京都の1、道：北海道の1、府：京都府および大阪府の2、県：それら以外の43. So we see that there is one each of 都 and 道, being Tokyo and Hokkaido. Then we have two 府 being Osaka and Kyoto and the rest being 県. I tend to translate 都 as City or Metropolis and 府 as Metropolitan Prefecture with 県 being Prefecture (it can help to think of these as ‘states’).

I like pictures so here’s a map from Wiki:

This means that learning these 4 suffixes is very useful when trying to recognise certain proper nouns in Japanese. While 道 and 都 are not exactly rare kanji, when you see them as a suffix it is probably generally a good guess to at least consider that you could be dealing with 北海道 and 東京都. 府 and 県 don’t get used much outside their meanings of Metropolitan Prefecture and Prefecture respectively, for example 県警 is the Prefectural Police.

Finally it is worth learning 区市町村, read as くしちょうそん, which is the lower level administrative area designations. The Wikipedia article is again very in-depth so worth a read. These are used as suffixes to show what are referred to as “wards” and then “city of X”, “town of Y” and “village of Z”. So let’s look at my old address in Japan and spot these features. There is a whole other discussion on wards, mainly that Tokyo is a type of SAR being made up of 23 wards but wards do exist throughout Japan as well as will see in the below examples.

日本、〒456-0003 愛知県名古屋市熱田区波寄町12－1プチメゾン金山101号

The first thing to note is that Japanese addresses are written from big to small, that is they start with the largest administrative region and then go down to the smallest. So we start off with Japan, then there is the Japanese postcode symbol followed by the 7 digit postcode. Then we see 愛知県, read as あいちけん, and the 県 should be the main thing that draws your attention. You know at least you are dealing with a prefecture and you have narrowed the address down pretty significantly at this point.

Red outline is 愛知県

Next we have 名古屋市, なごやし, or Nagoya City. This is the main city in Aichi (basically where the symbol for 名古屋城 is in the above picture) and next we have 熱田区, あつたく, or Atsuta Ward. These could be thought of roughly as “suburbs” but they’re generally a lot larger than Australian suburbs (my only frame of reference). As can be seen, we have again zoomed in a quite a bit and we are now down to a 8.20km2 area with approximately 66,000 people in it.

getting closer to my old place, I was basically in between 金山駅 and イオンモール熱田 near the northern border of 熱田区.

Then we have 波寄町12-1 which is Namiyose Town (this is a slightly strange reading of this kanji and very few Japanese people used to read it correctly, they would generally say Namiyoru or Namiyori) with the numbers referring to the 丁目 system or basically the block numbering system. A much closer look and you can see the number 12 is designating the block, with 1 showing it is the first in that block. Finding your way around the 丁目 system is tough sometimes as these numbers are not written anywhere on the street/buildings, so you generally want to remember the name of the building, プチメゾン金山 and ask around or go to a 交番. The last numbers, 101号 is room/apartment #101. That wasn’t my actual room number but I’ve forgotten what it was so that will do for now.

Let’s look at a Tokyo address to see the difference. We’ll go with the iconic 交差点前スタバ in 渋谷 (しぶや). The address is 日本、〒150-0042 東京都渋谷区宇田川町21-6 1F. Starts off pretty much the same, we’re in Japan with a Tokyo postcode, 東京都 (Metropolis of Tokyo) in the Shibuya Ward, 宇田川町 (うだがわちょう) Utagawa Town, block 21, building 6, Ground Floor (be careful that Japan uses 1F for the ground floor).

I hope this post has helped you understand how Japanese addresses work and also taught you some useful kanji along the way. Check out my other posts for all other sorts of Japanese learning.

If you found this article useful and would like to contribute to further writings on the subject, please consider a donation using the below service.

If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.

Song Review – レミオロメン – 3月9日

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Music is an excellent way to learn Japanese. If you find a song you like, you can listen to it endlessly and the constant rehearing of the same words and grammar structures will help you learn them very effectively. In my personal experience, people who are better than your average JSL guys are the ones who just consume Japanese in their everyday life and don’t see it as ‘study’. You’ll also be exposed to a more poetic/figurative usage of Japanese (in particularly interesting kanji choices) that can really help you think about Japanese in a deeper way.
I used to find Japanese music I liked just generally from theme songs from anime, dramas etc that I would watch. The one we’ll go through today is the song from 1リットルの涙 (テレビドラマ), 3月9日.

流れる季節の真ん中で
ふと日の長さを感じます
せわしく過ぎる日々の中に
私とあなたで夢を描く

The lyrics start off with 流れる季節, a type of grammar that is very common in Japanese in which you use a verb to describe a noun, ‘flowing season’ and then a very common JLPT trick of 真ん中 which is read is まんなか, with 真 often used as a suffix to describe the ‘true’ or ‘pure’ version of something, definition 2:
真 ま (pref) (1) just; right; due (east); (2) pure; genuine; true; (n) (3) truth

ふと means suddenly, 長さ is a grammar point where you take i-adjectives and replace the い with さ to change ‘long’ to ‘length’.

Next we have せわしく過ぎる which is in a way an inverse of 流れる季節, with せわしい being changed to せわしく to act as an adverb. We have a kanji iteration mark which is technically called 同の字点 but generally referred to as a のま and results in this being read as ひび.

3月の風に想いをのせて
桜のつぼみは春へとつづきます
溢れ出す光の粒が
少しずつ朝を暖めます
大きなあくびをした後に
少し照れてるあなたの横で
新たな世界の入口に立ち
気づいたことは 1人じゃないってこと

Nothing too much here, but I will point out the use of transitive verbs in the sentence 少しずつ朝を暖めます, notice the pairing of あたためる with を. I’ve done a video on this grammar topic if you want to check it out here.
There is also the interesting case of おおきなあくび which may confuse some of you as you always thought of 大きい as an i-adjective. Both ちいさい and おおきい can be used in this way, either as an i-adj or na-adj. There are some caveats and generally the な versions are only used with abstract concepts, whereas the other tends to be with concrete concepts. However, in this song ‘a big yawn’ is not exactly abstract although as the above linked article points out, その歌を歌う人それぞれが自分でイメージできる木、時計（つまり、抽象的な存在）となり、余韻のある表現になります。

瞳を閉じればあなたが
まぶたのうらにいることで
どれほど強くなれたでしょう
あなたにとって私もそうでありたい

First line here has a handy construction, とじれば, which helps remember the ば conditional. There are few other handy grammar constructions in here including X ほど Y でしょう, ありたい.

砂ぼこり運ぶつむじ風
洗濯物に絡まりますが
昼前の空の白い月は
なんだかきれいで見とれました
上手くはいかぬこともあるけれど
天を仰げば それさえ小さくて

I can almost be 100% certain I learnt this word 砂ぼこり from this song, and if I didn’t, I certainly remember it because of this song. Ditto for つむじ風 and also for the pairing of 洗濯物 with the particle に and 絡まります.
There is also a smattering of N1, N2 grammar in there with いかぬ (which I can’t seem to find any source on but it’s just classical Japanese version of ない, if someone has a source please let me know!).

青い空は凛と澄んで
羊雲は静かに揺れる
花咲くを待つ喜びを
分かち合えるのであればそれは幸せ
この先も隣でそっと微笑んで

More JLPT N2, N1 vocab and usage, including the incredibly useful 羊雲 ひつじぐも (n) altocumulus cloud, as well as another adverbial usage in 静かに揺れる.

If you would like to go through your favourite Japanese music with me and have them translated, contact me through my website’s contact page, through email or via CafeTalk.


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Knowing and not knowing: 知る vs 分かる

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Link to the paper.

One issue with Japanese is that because it differs so much from English, you find yourself unable to express even basic phrases correctly. This can lead to reluctance to speak unless you are sure you know what you are saying is right. It stops people attending classes, even freeform conversation classes, as they are terrified or nervous about misspeaking.

This is a bad idea and what I tell anyone who mentions such sentiments, is to tell them that if they are waiting until they are better, they will NEVER reach that standard in their own mind and in the meantime have wasted so many good opportunities to actually improve. Good Japanese starts with mindlessly imitating good Japanese. When I was in Japan, I used to spend a lot of time rereading the same book, the first 2 or 3 readthroughs I probably understood absolutely nothing.

still have it 18 years later, it also taught me the word for ‘sheriff’.

I also used to watch TV for hours on end. I couldn’t point to one thing that particularly helped me improve my Japanese, but it certainly didn’t hurt to spend all of my time consuming Japanese in some form, and then trying to use the bits I’d learned in everyday life. I learnt how to say, “can I take a bath?” during my first week in Japan, and it ended up being a very important sentence that I could use to ask about other things:

お風呂入ってもいい？

お風呂 = learn about the honourific お and 音読み
入って = learn about verb tenses, おくりがな, 訓読み, te form
も = learn about usages of particles
いい = learn that putting てもいい on certain things is a grammatical phrase about permissions.

Wait weren’t we going to talk about 知る vs 分かる?

Sure. 知る and 分かる cause issues for people if you spend your time learning Japanese by looking up words in the dictionary. You’ll find the dictionary entries for them as follows

知る【しる】
(v5r,vt) (1) to be aware of; to know; to be conscious of; to cognize; to cognise;
(v5r,vt) (2) to notice; to feel;
(v5r,vt) (3) to understand; to comprehend; to grasp;
(v5r,vt) (4) to remember; to be acquainted with (a procedure);
(v5r,vt) (5) to experience; to go through; to learn;
(v5r,vt) (6) to be acquainted with (a person); to get to know;
(v5r,vt) (7) to concern

分かる【わかる】
(v5r,vi) (1) (uk) to understand; to comprehend; to grasp; to see; to get; to follow;
(v5r,vi) (2) (uk) to become clear; to be known; to be discovered; to be realized; to be realised; to be found out;
(int) (3) I know!; I think so too!; (P)

A cursory glance of these definitions, and a lot of people will probably just shorthand these to both mean “I know”. But their actual usage in Japanese means that they are not direct synonyms, and they are very rarely used in the plain form but much more likely in the ‘progressive tense’, that is the ている form. This is particulary … interesting once you get to the negatives.

わかっていない would be used in the context of “someone doesn’t get it” like
「あいつ、親の苦労わかっていない」
“That guy, he doesn’t understand the difficulties of a parent”

知っていない is a bit weird because 知る is a stative verb. You either are in the state of knowing something or not knowing it, there is not really an in-between, which is why once the moment where you acquire the knowledge has passed, you would say 知っている. 知らない is also fine, because you haven’t “flipped the switch” of knowing yet. 知っていない is harder to use since it’s literally “being in the state of not knowing” but you do hear this in the past tense
「あの2人が付き合っているの、知っていなかったみたい」
“it seems (someone) didn’t know that those two were dating”.

You also see 知っていない in sentences like
「この事は知っていても知っていなくても大丈夫だろう」
“It’ll be alright whether you know about this or not.”
and on this case, 知っていなくても can be replaced by 知らなくても with no issue. I linked a paper on the negative form of 知っている for anyone who wants to take a look, with some example sentences that might be good even if you can’t read the rest of the paper.

So how on earth would you be expected to remember all this? Well, some people can and do remember all this. I’m certainly not one of them. But you can’t tell me apart from the people that do have an amazing memory because I still use these words correctly. I do so, because when I come across example sentences that I will find useful (particularly once I found out that there are differences between 知る and 分かる) I made sure to write them down and run through them. Shows like Terrace House are amazing for picking up things like this.

If you found this article useful and would like to contribute to further writings on the subject, please consider a donation using the below service.

If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.

New Video: 水道管の工事現場で水噴き出す – 記事を精読する JLPT N3/N2 読解

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Article readthrough of a Japanese news article. I go through this line by line and explain vocab and grammar. I’d put this around N3 level for grammar and N2/N1 for vocab.
If you want to read articles like this, you should look at using a free browser extension called rikaichan/rikaikun, I’ve done a video on this topic if you’d like to know more.

If you’d like to get personalised one on one tutoring from me to help improve your Japanese, contact me through my Contact tab or book a lesson via Cafetalk by clicking on the below picture.

If you found my Japanese learning content useful or you’d like to support my work, you can do so down below via a once off paypal donation.

Japanese classes in a classroom environment is not the panacea you think it is

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I took Japanese classes in primary school, highschool and did my major in Japanese at university. Would I recommend them? No. Of course the very existence of this website and blog are for promoting my Japanese tutoring services (you can check out my fantastic YouTube videos as well!) so of course I will be biased, but let me make my case.

The cliff notes on why are:

  • bad value for money
  • classroom environments are required pragmatically to keep the class around the level of the weakest student; and
  • general ignorance of successful Japanese teaching strategies

Value for money

Japanese classes tend to be very bad value for money. How many hours per week of classroom instruction will you get for thousands of dollars? You can get much more Japanese immersion for free through YouTube, audiobooks, Japanese SO…
Nobody will care that you have a degree in Japanese. If your job requires you to speak or use Japanese, at some point you’re going to have to prove you can do that. Showing someone a piece of paper that says you completed a Japanese program will not help.
I learnt more in my 10 months exchange living in Japan than all the hours I spent in Japanese classes.
You won’t have a monopoly on the teacher’s time and as discussed below, your teacher is not necessarily going to be any good at teaching. I’ve met many people who’ve learnt to speak Japanese, and almost none of them got competent by attending classes.

The classroom issue and pragmatism

Classes progress at a snail’s pace. The learning has to be done by you, having a teacher read out kanji or vocab or going through grammar to you every day will never result in you actually learning it. So if students haven’t done the homework or got across all the material yet, classroom discussions are moot. The divide in language classes will be stark, as you will generally end up with people who are bilingual/went on exchange for a significant period and then everyone else. As the years progress and the class size gets smaller and smaller, the class discussion will be dominated by the people who can speak and understand on the fly, and the rest sitting there completely out of the loop and not contributing.

Kanji, one of the most important aspects of Japanese, is virtually never taught in a classroom environment. You might get a list of kanji that will be on the exam and if you’re lucky you will be left to your own devices you can work through it. If you’re unlucky, the instructor will make you do rote memorisation (ie writing each one out 100 times and hoping you remember it because that’s how Japanese people do it) which does not work.

Pragmatism is a big issue with Japanese learning due to the structure of the language. You have polite and casual forms in Japanese. Unfortunately, the polite forms are conjugations on the casual form. However for pragmatic reasons, that is because teachers/schools/educational experts prefer that students speak politely, the polite form is taught first. This causes a lot of confusion for learners of Japanese and I have to spend a few hours going through it whenever I get a new student. If I know they’re in school, the very first thing I will do is ask some basic questions to see if they get this point. Generally it will go like this:

Say “I will go to the park”
こうえんにいきます
Now say the same sentence, but casually.
こうえんにいく
And generally by that point, I’ve got enough information about their level to start teaching effectively. Spoilers, I have to start from the beginning of Tae Kim’s guide or Imabi.

General ignorance of successful teaching strategies

This is not particularly a problem with Japanese classes but with any type of learning.

First of all you have a selection bias with regards to anyone who makes it to a teaching position. There will be a large cohort of people who make it to become teachers, particularly where barriers to entry are higher (eg tertiary sector) or because of opportunity cost evaluations they make (“I’m already making good money in sales, can’t be bothered to get my teaching degree”), who just ‘get’ the material. It is hard to say exactly what ‘getting it’ is, but it could be biological reasons such as IQ or environmental reasons. The point is not exactly what it is, but because of human diversity there will be people who will do well in certain areas and others who will not.

However just because you make it to become a teacher, this does not mean you are going to be a good teacher. In fact, as many of the parts may have come easy to you, you will find it very difficult to ever convey this to your students.

Unless you luck out and get a good teacher who has examined the established teaching methods and rebuilt a curriculum on their own that will actually make you proficient, it’s not worth it. I always teach to a syllabus etc when I have school students but at the same time I’m using that as a list to make sure they know what’s on the exam, because in the end they are getting marked via exams and so I make sure that they get the highest mark possible. The rest of the 75% of the time I am trying to actually teach Japanese to them so that they understand why those items are on the syllabus.

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