Summer is drawing to a close, and so is yet another university year. I recently acquired my Japanese N2 certificate, so I thought that would be interesting enough to blog about and boast a little. 🙂
Current Life
To give a brief on my current situation, I’m enrolled in university and nearly wrapped up my Japanology BA. I want to enroll in the master course because it features some interesting courses on Japanese society in addition to a 10-month exchange program. I think my Japanese skill is okay, but (as is the case with any language I guess) hearing goes way better than speaking. I don’t have a lot of opportunities here to speak with Japanese people and really want to make myself speak fluent Japanese to proactively engage in a discussion without sounding like a clumsy foreigner too much. I also really want to spend a long time in Japan. I’ve been there on holiday and it always felt like home, but a holiday is vastly different from living somewhere for a long time. I’m very clumsy so I want to see if I can live on my own that long, and push myself to talk to people in Japanese and make Japanese friends and connections. With that in the back of my head, I’m applying for an exchange program at Chuo University near Tokyo.
As for what the future holds, I don’t want to think too much about that and live in the now. I got a game development degree and would love to work in the games industry in some capacity, and if I could combine games and Japanese that would be amazing. Other than writing my thesis about the Japanese video game industry, I haven’t engaged that much with the technicalities of video game development, so I hope that once I’m on the job market my skills won’t be outdated too much. I still try to program a little something during every holiday, while also binging ser-, I mean, having a semblance of a social life and meeting friends for coffee. Still, I’m always worried my skills are getting stale and out-of-date. But no use worrying, we have to move on!
JLPT
On July 1st I took the JLPT test on N2 level. The JLPT or Japanese-Language Proficiency Test is an important and globalized test and having an N2 certificate is especially handy when you want to work or study in Japan or apply for a job that involves Japanese. Apparently, the test was doable for people who studied Japanese at my university in the third year, so I decided to give it a shot. Over the past few years I’ve learned a lot of Japanese in university, but when I look at the vocabulary and grammar parts that test applicants should know, I still felt there was a gap with my university knowledge.
To my surprise, I passed this (at least to me) difficult test. It wasn’t a disaster, but I seriously underestimated the time and couldn’t get through the reading section. I also left open some questions, thinking I could get back to them once I had gone over the test ones. Big mistake. Additionally, in class the JLPT exercises we did had us listen to audio clips twice, and it’s often the second time that I fully understood it and could really confirm my answer. On the JLPT test itself, we only got to listen to it once and sometimes only understood 60% of the dialogue and had to make an educated guess. Everything went by so fast, and I was so frustrated I couldn’t go over everything again and fill in blanks, double check answers and think a little bit longer about certain answers. But in the end, I still passed, and it’s a pretty important certificate so I’m overjoyed (and still a bit in disbelief).
Maybe I could’ve done better if I proactively read more Japanese and studied more Japanese, maybe I could’ve done better if I didn’t have Korean exams the week before? Who knows, but I’m still glad I passed. More than anything, the test was a good measure of my progress and reassured me I knew some Japanese, but also that I still my work cut out for me when it comes down to reading and vocabulary.
To summarize my Japanese, it’s a bit like riding a bike with wheel attachments. I can have a daily conversation with a Japanese person and say what I want to say, but it’s still clunky and I don’t see myself in a Japanese company fiercely debating design meetings. I can read a Japanese article and understand the gist of it, but reading something more advanced like a novel or sociological article still goes slow and in bits and pieces. I definitely need to consume more input and take more opportunities to talk with Japanese people in real-life situations. I’m happy because I made tremendous progress over the last year, but I still want more, and that’s frustrating at times.
I guess the root of all this evil is that my quick response is really bad, in any language. I need time to think before I say something, or before I give my opinion. Even this very blog post took a lot of time to consider various things and it still feels like it’s written by an 8-year-old. I try hard not to have the conversation go silent and keep things speedy and interesting, but it’s difficult. I’m not that social and my friends know me through and through so sometimes it’s difficult to maintain an engaging conversation, even in my foreign language. 🙂 In that regard, I feel my speaking is my weakest link and therefore having an exchange where I’m forced to hear and speak Japanese daily would be very handy to improve my language skills.
If I compare myself with last year, I used to be really afraid to try and read Japanese news articles or books. When I try them today, I feel like they’re more comfortable to me because my vocabulary and grammar knowledge has significantly increased and I’m getting used to more complex and non-Dutchlike Japanese sentences. It doesn’t go smooth, but it’s not impossible either like it used to feel. The cool thing about studying a language course is that you can really feel progress. I love the feeling of finding something new difficult, slowly learning to master it and eventually have it become second nature and plain as day. It’s empowering to feel your brain get used to something. I notice this the strongest when watching Japanese. When I watch a lot of Japanese shows (without subtitles) then at a certain threshold these sounds will become very sharp in my head and I can pick them up much more easily than when I haven’t heard any Japanese for a week. Similarly, I can find these old post its and school notes with Japanese things that I used to struggle with that now are just… obvious. It’s so… empowering.
On the other hand, I struggle with more advanced things now and I really want to force myself to read more, speak more, listen more and have my Japanese be in a really good state to be considered worthy of my JLPT certificate.
Thanks for reading and have some great weather, a good coffee brew and lots of dogs!
Nick!
Ctrl+Shift+B and Another Mug of Coffee 