I passed the JLPT Level 1!*

*In 2005. Ha. It was not called the “N1” yet. I begrudge the addition of the letter N in the ensuing years, and I will fib that I have passed “The N1” if needed. It is so very rarely needed.

I recently had occasion* to need to dig up the above certificate that was issued to me in 2006. I searched my files high and low. I gave up. It was lost and irreplaceable: The organizations that administered the test clearly stated that they delete the information of test recipients one year following administration of the test. A few evenings later, I bemoaned my abysmal recordkeeping at the dinner table. My wife nonchalantly said “Oh, I have that safely filed away.” Even in 2006, she knew her Derek well. But the physical evidence shows that she did not get to the certificate before I managed to fold it disgracefully.

I will tell you my thoughts about the JLPT in a moment, but indulge me as I first recount the story of taking it.

When I arrived for my second Japan sojourn in October 2004, I wanted to be a translator and interpreter. Someone who had been a Japanese-English interpreter had told me that they made as much as $900 a day! I had heard the JLPT was the way to prove your Japanese skill. I considered myself quite skilled. I was, if not to the degree that I thought. I wanted to take the JLPT, but finding out where I could take it, by what deadline I needed to register, and then executing the completion of an application and its transmission were tasks beyond my meager attention span.

In those days the JLPT Level 1 was administered only once a year. I missed the 2004 deadline and vowed to take it in 2005. Then at some very late date in 2005, I remembered with horror, probably due to some random and fortuitous stimulus, that I needed to register. I inquired and found out that all the slots around Tokyo were filled. At length, I found a slot in Shizuoka. Crisis mode had kicked in by then. I was able to execute the tasks to register. On the cold day of the exam, I took a train to Shizuoka and walked a country mile to some university. Probably Shizuoka University, which upon looking at a map, seems the direction I walked.

At the venue, I found my room and went in and sat down. I was the only gringo. Everyone seemed to be from Asia (sorry, truly, my unsung Nikkei American friend, who gets no credit from anyone for learning Japanese, simply because people mistakenly assume by appearance that you should know it already). I heard a lot of Chinese being spoken. This intimidated me. I assumed everyone was doing great with the kanji side of things, which was by far my biggest worry.

I had studied basic grammar and hiragana and katakana from 1994 to 2000 in high school plus a year of college. I had lived in Japan from 1998 to 2000. That whole time I was speaking with Japanese people from all walks of life, except six delightful months mostly acquiring Spanish, by the patience and grace of folks from Peru. After arriving in Japan, I had picked up the language quickly. I would hear a phrase I liked from someone who I wanted to emulate. I would repeat the phrase to myself ad infinitum in the shower and other solitary settings, such as while riding a bicycle. Someone walking in February 1999 on the 246 between Miyazakidai and Mizonokuchi in Kawasaki might have heard a gringo whizzing by on an orange Trek mountain bike solemnly intone “yaru shika nai, yaru shika nai,“ over and over.

I stumbled on that practice as a self-talker since long before, and it developed the mouth muscle memory to deploy phrases when an opportunity came. It’s the same principle as practicing throwing a baseball, or doing those classic ojisan golf swings on a train platform. You can’t speak a language well without your mouth muscles first gaining the physical memory to articulate needed phrases.

During that 1998-to-2000 era, I also owned the yellow A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and then-light-blue-but-now-apparently-darker-blue A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar. These are excellent books. They helped me, especially to look up things I heard. Like any dictionary, they were more dangerous to ply for things to try out, because then the content lacked the context of real-life usage and you might sound weird deploying it. The people around me called A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar the “Red Dragon.” I did not own or delve too greedily or too deep into it.

The thing that helped me the most to acquire Japanese was being fearless, even shameless, about just communicating with people first, and then polishing my language later. This is common advice, but so true. Imitate good examples of usage, and err on the side of trying.

After returning to the US, I had been a tour guide in the Southwest for tourists from Japan. I had learned rarely-useful terms like 侵食 / shinshoku / erosion so I could explain things like the provenance of the Grand Canyon. But my brain hadn’t usually learned Japanese words with the associated sight of each kanji. My kanji study had been centered around things like looking at the station names printed on the maps inside trains: 川崎 would have “Kawasaki” written under it. Okay, so that character’s kawa and that one’s saki. And so forth. This way I did learn quite a few characters, but there was no systematic survey of the official 1,945 (as of 2005) Jōyō kanji.

A good friend had provided me with the precious few salient pieces of information on which I based my cavalier decision to return to Japan and study politics in 2004. That friend had studied for the JLPT too, and in doing so created a Microsoft Word file, into which he copied every single Jōyō kanji in very large font—one character would fill up the whole computer screen. In tiny font, he had entered the readings of the kanji in either hiragana or alphabet, I can’t remember. In the final crisis days before taking the JLPT, I had used this file a lot to test my kanji knowledge.

Note: At this point in writing this post, I asked that friend and anyone else to whom I might have passed along the file if they still have it. If I get it, and it seems as good as it did back then, I might try to share it here.

Another thing that had happened along the way was that in 2005, I went to work for a member of the Japan House of Representatives as an intern and then an aide. Since my use of Japanese in interactions with constituents and supporters, etc. could have an impact on the Boss’s political fortunes, I got a lot of instant feedback when I made mistakes. Feedback is the most painful but effective way to learn, in my case. In the political party office that was connected to the representative’s office there worked some old men. They were all great to me, and one in particular was fascinated that I had chosen to come back to Japan. I told him I wanted to read Japanese literature (this was before I found out a lot of it is depressing to me, haha). The man later brought me an original copy of 雪国 / Yukiguni / Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari.

I took the book home and started reading. The kanji really bogged me down for the first dozen or so pages. The only thing that kept me engaged was pride and wanting to hear the story. Reading a novel in Japanese, especially with a deficient knowledge of Jōyō kanji, means the first few pages are extraordinarily hard. Things then start to move slowly, and then they comparatively sail by, as one first encounters the characters and then gets a number of repetitions to retain them. I had a kanji dictionary, but because I am lazy my preferred way of learning kanji was by context. If I couldn’t understand one at its first appearance, I would persevere and often later get it thanks to a difference usage.

Oh, the important thing about that copy of Yukiguni: Having been published in the 1930s, it was written in the 旧字体 / kyūjitai / old character-form kanji. I had been playing the kanji game in Super Hard Mode without knowing it. [Rueful trombone sound]

Many kanji went unchanged in the big 1946 simplification, but many changed a lot. For example, the very word kyūjitai is now written 旧字体, but before the promulgation of the 新字体 / shinjitai / new character form, it was written 舊字體. It took me longer to realize this difference in a raft of characters while reading the old novel edition than I am even now comfortable acknowledging. But there is no useless information. The ol’ brainster salted away quite a few of those old forms. They proved useful or at least interesting to recall later, including when I was in Korea and Taiwan. The Chinese characters I encountered in those places resembled the kyūjitai more than modern Japanese. An old university gymnasium I visited in Korea had over its entrance the character 體 instead of 体, to read 體育館, for example.

Side note: Here is a cool site for converting between old and new character forms.

So things got easier when I bought and read other novels in frigging modern Japanese.

Amid my meandering, a possibly useful point here is that if you are like me and not great at systematic, abstract study, a novel might be a good way to keep you interested enough to acquire many kanji.

The broader point is: Do [thing you like] in [language you mean to acquire], rather than just studying [language you mean to acquire].

Anyway, I was nervous to take the JLPT. But I passed, thanks to the above help from my friend who created the study file, and the man who gave me a book, and lots of other people and experiences and influences.

I was driving The Boss the day after receiving the notice and certificate. A silence and mirror confirmation that he was awake in the back seat afforded me a chance to boast.

“I passed the JLPT Level 1.”

“You damn well better have, with your Japanese skill.”

Highest praise from The Boss.

With the JLPT Level 1 certificate in hand, I began to cite it to the many potential clients I approached for freelance translation work. I imagine it meant something to some of them. I can’t really say if it was the deciding factor. When I later became a sometime requester of translation work, I would mostly choose a freelancer based on (a) the fact that they could help me this very minute, and (b) an overall survey of their CV to find some semblance or totality reaching the level of credentials, which certainly included JLPT Level 1 certification. Conversely, if I saw a CV citing a JLPT level other than Level 1, I fairly or unfairly treated it as a red flag that the person might not be qualified to do the translation. My thought, perhaps flawed logically, but probably not, I dunno; was: “They couldn’t pass the Level 1?”

With all that behind me, I just feel very happy for people who I see announce their passing JLPT results, of any level. I remember the excellent feeling. It is so nice to have one’s efforts at doing a hard thing recognized and confirmed. I am sure JLPT certifications mean something to the people who must somehow evaluate the Japanese skill of various other people. I admit that I am happy to no longer be one of those people.

I imagine the N1 examination rooms are now more diversely populated than they were in December 2005. This is a joy. And I feel like I encounter way more folks in Japan these days who do not appear to have been born here but speak Japanese tremendously. Some of the best work in convenience stores. They run linguistic circles around supposed McKinsey geniuses who I see wielding it far more rudimentarily for vastly more money.

Random note: The less I think about the fact that I am speaking an acquired language, the less people I encounter in Japan mention it at all—self-fulfilling apathy for the win.

It is a great individual achievement to acquire a language. It’s also great that doing so seems to be getting more commonplace. Good job, everyone who is making an effort.

*On which I may elaborate at some point.