It must be so difficult for Japanese people, they have to learn Japanese in school. Too bad they don’t speak their native language English instead.
So a little over a week ago I took the JLPT again. The JLPT is, currently, the most popular Japanese test and around half a million people take the test every year (almost half of those people are in China). There are four levels of the test given each year with four being the easiest and one being the most difficult, I took two. There is much more information that you can read about on Wikipedia and through Google so I don’t want to write much more about the test itself. If you want to see what prior tests were like you can get them from here.
What’s interesting is when you go take the test in Japan. The test is almost always at a university of some kind and since there will be people coming from all around to take the test there is definitely not enough room to fit everyone in one classroom, especially since they put a one seat gap between all students. This leads to you only being surrounded by a small cross-section of other applicants which you can only check against the body at large during intermissions. As you progress from level 4, you might notice the makeup (no, not this either) of the group changes slightly; there’s a significant lack of caucasians that take levels 1 and 2.
This isn’t to say that there were a lot of non-asians taking the test in Japan to begin with, there aren’t. The number taking the test at lower levels, like all the other groups, seems to mirror the population of the group in Japan (i.e. the percentages of applicants and the percentages of that group living in the country is roughly the same). However, the number of applicants from English speaking countries who take the test at each level seems to fall precipitously as you move towards the higher levels. Now there aren’t any published statistics on the number of applicants and test takers for each mother tongue (nor any other metric besides passing/failing and where they took the test), but since you must write all the important information needed to create the charts I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out that the organization has made, but does not share, graphs based on this information.
I was going to do all kinds of crazy new stuff to you but I can only do it if you pass 2級! Otherwise, no more WoW buffs.
Because of the lack of useful information, what I am about to say is, unfortunately, little more than conjecture and anecdotes. From my experience, people whose original language is English (or who can use English reasonably well even though it’s not their original language) that are living in Japan have an advantage that Indians, Koreans, and Chinese people don’t; many people here have learned some English and will try to use it. This does lead to a lower number of people who feel they need to know the language, even if they plan on staying here for a while. Related to this is that, most of the time, when they get a boyfriend/girlfriend that person seems to speak pretty good English; even if the native English speaker is trying to learn Japanese they now have a disincentive to learn. A third reason is that there is a large industry that uses only English and requires little to no Japanese, English teaching.
What ends up happening is that, even if they would decide to learn/study Japanese they have trouble since it’s easier to use English at their workplace and, possibly, with their significant other. After so much time passes they just decide to give up studying; by this point they know enough to be useful without knowing enough to engage in everything that a normal Japanese person would be able to do. Asians can’t usually work as English teachers so they are left to work at a place where Japanese is predominantly spoken. This lack of choice makes sure that they continue to study Japanese much longer than, what seems to be, the average native English speaker.
By the way, when I get my results (sometime around February) I’ll make sure to tell you what I got.
