If it is unnatural, it didn’t affect any of my test subjects as every single one of them breezes through the questions. After all, they’re not really used to doing this kind of thing, right? As a person who finds these exercises annoying in English, let alone Japanese, I wondered if this unnatural exercise would present a challenge for my students. This can be frustrating for many learners as it requires knowing, for example, that a noun followed by たる is usually followed by another noun. Here, the test taker has to rearrange words and grammar points into an order that makes a sentence. One of the most common complaints by visitors to Japan is the ridiculousness of the next part of the exam. However, even they are far from the 49 percent mark needed to fail. Most told me that they have seen the word, but have never really thought about its meaning. ![]() It seems that the students’ approach of just whizzing through the questions without really thinking about them was better for this section.Ī few of the junior high school students made mistakes on the tiny nuances in vocabulary. When I later asked one of them about this, she explained that the difference came down to the use of a single word and so they wanted to make sure they accurately understood everything. Interestingly, the businesswomen took longer on the vocabulary section, simply because often “these two meanings are almost identical” but aced the whole section whereas the students had occasional mistakes. The best performers were the specialist school students who did the questions as fast as they could, barely pausing to think about the subtle differences between words. Initially, the hypothesis that the test would be difficult for native speakers was blown out of the water as the first questions, which test kanji and vocabulary, was a breeze for everyone-even the kids. On separate days, using questions from the official materials for taking the exam, I interviewed businesswomen from a reputable firm who have a 短 ( たん ) 大 ( だい )or 4-year degree, students at a 専 ( せん ) 門 ( もん ) 学 ( がっ ) 校 ( こう ) (specialist school), and some junior high school kids to keep things interesting. The guinea pigs for my experiment were a range of Japanese people. However, it got me interested in seeing how Japanese people would actually do on the N1. “We’d use something like にも instead.” She’s actually right, I would later discover, as (に)だに is only really used in certain types of literature and にも is far more commonly used. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this,” she explained. I showed her example questions and she laughed. “Are you sure that’s Japanese?” she ventured. At first, I got that look that Japanese people give when they are convinced that the speaker has made some fundamental error. ![]() ![]() I didn’t really believe it until one day, trying to explain a grammar point to one of my younger students, I used the infamous (に)だに (even) grammar point from my N1 grammar cheat sheet to explain.
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