20% of Japanese University students with 13 to 15 year-old reading abilities
Guardian Unlimited : Japanese lost for words
Quote:
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.
I don't think this should be attributed to manga. I have used manga to practice my kanji reading, and some manga use many non-Joyo kanji (true that I read a lot of historical manga, but it's also a fact that there are lot's of them). And in 3 years of very casual learning of Japanese (only 5 month of lessons in a language school to learn the very basics of Japanese, the self-learning when I feel like it), I also have reading abilities of a 13 to 15 years old (actually more 15 than 13) and know many kanji that some of my adult Japanese friends don't. That brings us back to the question : why are the average Japanese so bad at languages - and not just foriegn but even their own mother tongue ? I think it is partly due to a too relaxed approach to education (as a matter of fact, almost nobody has to repeat a school year in Japan, even if they fail in all subjects).