Japanese lost for words

Eric Johnston in Osaka
Thursday November 25, 2004
The Guardian

With its phonetic symbols and complex vocabulary, Japanese can defeat even the most talented linguists. Now it seems to be baffling native speakers, too.

Nearly a fifth of the students at Japanese private universities have the reading ability expected of 13- to 15-year-olds, according to the National Institute of Multimedia Education (Nime), which surveyed 13,000 in their first year at 33 universities and colleges.

The students were presented with a multiple choice test and asked to define nouns, adjectives and adverbs.

Two-thirds of the respondents thought that a word meaning “to grieve” actually meant “to be happy”.

The study showed that foreign exchange students who had spent some years learning Japanese could sometimes read better than locals.

The survey confirms a trend which educationists have noted for at least 10 years.

And although the Nime report gives no reason for the low standards, the Japanese have long attributed the reduced vocabulary of today’s students, at least in part, to the proliferation of comics, which use simple ideograms and sentence structures.

The research team has called on the education ministry, to which the institute is affiliated, to introduce remedial classes for the students that need them.

Foreigners have long considered Japanese to be one of the world’s most difficult written languages.

It uses two separate sets of phonetic symbols and thousands of Chinese ideograms, and some words have as many as a dozen meanings and nearly as many pronunciations.

The good news, the researchers said, was that only 6% of the students at state universities were reading at junior secondary school levels.

The national universities tend to have tougher entrance exams than private colleges.

original article