More vocab than you need

July 10, 2008 on 4:58 pm | In Language, Media | | Email This Post

I was just listening to some of the JLPT vocabulary for the level 2 exam, and noticed a few fun things.

“bar owner” is “マスター” (master) in Japanese.

Strange that it’s on the test… But then I remembered that there were a few seemingly obvious Katakana questions on the exam when I took it.

I distinctly remember there being a section where you had to choose the proper Katakana word to complete a sentence, for example something like… (though in JP of course…) “My mom drove to the store in her _____.” and then there would be options like トラック (truck) and ロケット (rocket) and other equally varied Katakana words. Duh, of course it’s truck right? Who would miss this? This is the JLPT 1 exam, so obviously reading the Katakana is not the issue…

Then I realized that native English speakers are not the only people who take this exam. If you didn’t know what a truck or rocket was in English, or in Japanese Katakana depending on your point of view, it could be a very difficult question. With no Kanji to guess the meaning from at all, you literally just have to know the word in order to get the question correct.

Likewise, if your own knowledge of マスター was that it was the Katakana word for “master”, and didn’t know enough about Japanese culture to know that you can call the bar owner a “master” as well… You’d probably miss that question. Tricky tricky!

Naruhodo!!! Hit those books.

- Harvey

Related Posts... (in theory)   Vocab: Fifty-Fifty    Japanese Study Tools    Japanese Vocab: ギャラなし  

Click here to Stumble Upon it!

6 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Gravatar

    “Then I realized that native English speakers are not the only people who take this exam. ”

    This is like saying “Then I realized that Judaism wasn’t the only religion in Japan.”

    Hardly any native English speakers take the exam. In fact the entire test is skewed towards Chinese and Korean students of the Japanese language. It’s one of it’s (many, many) criticisms.

    Comment by Krusha — July 10, 2008 #

  2. Gravatar

    I don’t think there is any test that isn’t criticized. No one likes the SATs. No one likes GREs.

    By the way, if you played final fantasy tactics, you’d know that bar-keep is マスター! And my wife told me gaming was a waste of time! Boy is she wrong!

    Comment by Alex — July 10, 2008 #

  3. Gravatar

    Here at my school in Japan it’s mostly Koreans and Chinese. We actually did a reading lesson recently about English loan words and it was the first time I felt I had a leg-up over them.

    Comment by Adam — July 10, 2008 #

  4. Gravatar

    I took the test in DC, and it was mostly Americans.

    The breakdown of participants totally depends on where geographically you are taking the exam.

    Of course if you take the test in Japan, Asia is much closer than “the West”, there are vastly higher numbers of Asians living in Japan than Westerners, so there are going to be more Asians sitting for the exam.

    I’m sure that there are many more Asians who take the exam around the world than Westerns as well.

    Don’t hate on me man! Where’s the love.

    The advanced Japanese program at IUC is mostly Americans. Most other language schools in Japan are mostly Asian.

    Enough of that for now!

    Comment by Harvey — July 10, 2008 #

  5. Gravatar

    Krusha’s comment is like saying “Then I realized that Japan wasn’t the only country in the world.”

    Comment by Joe — July 11, 2008 #

  6. Gravatar

    I could be wrong, but for the case of “マスター” the person in question can also simply be the bartender, making the meaning of “master” a bit more difficult for a native speaker to discern. The JLPT likes to test katakana words like ベテラン that can easily be confused with the meaning a native speaker might guess (war veteran). That said, there are some katakana words that are really obvious to English speakers on the test as well.

    Comment by R — July 13, 2008 #

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Study Japanese with help from J-List!
Study Japanese with help from J-List!

Homeowner Loan - Renegade motorhomes - New York Hotels - Debt Help

Powered by WordPress with Pool theme design by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^