Disclaimer: Entirely based on my own experience taking 1-kyu over a decade ago (so glad with the rename to N1~N5, by the way). I think it is worth taking the JLPT for its own sake as well as for making work applications marginally easier. This Mainichi article gives a good-enough summary of the limitations of the test (but honestly, the headline could have been made both shorter and less aggravating by removing the word “foreigners” entirely) and was published after I started writing the draft for this post, but I thought I’d send this out anyway.
This is the fundamental feature of the JLPT and the root of most of the other issues discussed here. I guess it is logistically unfeasible to employ or dispatch people to do speaking tests (or to grade freeform writing questions) in a globally unified and time-coordinated exam.
I’d like to believe that generally, people try to write in a way that doesn’t intentionally confuse (though they don’t always succeed), but I felt the options for the multiple-choice questions were often confusing when I was studying for and taking the test. Like, I think some of the options in the vocab questions might work or might be actually spoken by people in informal contexts, but they aren’t the “right” answer so you can’t choose them.
A majority of the total score is made up of reading comprehension and grammar questions. This test is supposed to be the de-facto standard for jp language ability, but it doesn’t test speaking at all.
In my own experience of taking JLPT 1-kyu, I was really bad at speaking and listening but decent enough at reading, so I scraped a pass by having a strong literacy score and a bare minimum listening score. The mainichi article above talks about employability, and I will tell you I was not ready for business communication when I passed JLPT 1-kyu.
But not everyone will be taking JLPT for work in the first place—looking at the mainichi article above, there is a whole 40% of people taking the test for reasons other than work or academic requirements (the article doesn’t mention the source for these survey statistics, and this post is supposed to be zero-effort, so I didn’t look for it, but I’d like to know more about that 40%... Oh wait, here we are—33.2% simply want to test their level of proficiency, and then there’s the elusive 5.8% “other” and 1% “no response.” On second thoughts, I’d like to know a breakdown of reasons for each level between N5 and N1. I’d bet that N5 to N3 skew more towards non-career/academic reasons, while N2 and N1 skew more towards work/school. By the way, these statistics show that just over half of all July 2022 JLPT examinees took N1 or N2, and just under half took N3 to N5).
As far as I remember, the test covers barely any informal language or colloquialisms, for example. It’s all “standard” Japanese all the way up to N1. It may help to work with a “standard” form of the language to start with, but people do not use “standard” from-the-textbook language all the time, of course.
(There is a whole bunch of non-standard variants across the country, so where would you start, you say? There are corpora with less formal usage, like extracts from the Japanese version of Yahoo Answers, so it would be a bit of a slog but still not impossible to extract commonly used informal/“regional” lexemes. It’d be more of a slog to extract commonly used grammatical constructions, I guess).
I guess the bottom line is that the JLPT has little competition and effectively serves as the “one-size-fits-all” metric of Japanese language ability, but like anything marked as “one size fits all” it does not and cannot live up to that label.
By mojilove on 2022-12-12