Why Advanced Japanese Is So Difficult

And how to pass N1 — the highest level of the JLPT

Photo by Gu Ko (Pexels)

Japanese is hard. I’ve been learning it for 24 years and speak it fluently. Yet, even now, I still sometimes come across things I struggle to get my head around. Mostly it’s stuff I find in my JLPT N1 grammar textbook, which is basically a collection of obscure phrases you’ll never normally come across, designed to trip up anyone daring enough to attempt the test.

What is N1?

In case anyone reading this isn’t aware, the JLPT is the official “Japanese Language Proficiency Test.” It carries a lot of weight in Japan for work — and potentially for long-term immigration in the near future.

There are five levels, from N5 up to N1. N2 is recognised and highly regarded by many employers, while N1, the highest level of the test, focuses heavily on advanced reading and listening skills.

A remarkably small percentage of test takers pass the N1 level. It’s something like 24–32% according to a quick Google search, although who knows how accurate that is with all the AI slop out there now. In any case, from personal experience, believe me, it’s a difficult test.

But what aspects of Japanese make it so difficult to pass this test?

Grammar

Advanced Japanese grammar basically involves learning a bunch of extremely similar-looking phrases that you mostly stick onto the end of a sentence, where a change of just one syllable completely alters the whole meaning of the sentence.

To make it even more fun, there are often no direct English translations because these phrases convey a feeling that usually requires extra explanation.

Many are also literary and slightly old-fashioned, and so not used much in general conversation, making it harder to gain familiarity with them.

Similar-Looking Sentences

Take these two sentences as one example, and then multiply this by, I don’t know, a thousand, and you might be able to imagine the sheer challenge ahead for a would-be successful N1 test taker.

**行こうか、行くまいか **ikō ka, ikumai ka Should I go or not? (I’m deciding)

**行こうと、行くまいと **ikō to, ikumai to Whether I go or not doesn’t matter. (The result won’t change)

Rules Galore

There are also rules about what form of a verb or adjective goes with a particular phrase, and they enjoy testing you on that too.

I read some advice somewhere suggesting that extensive reading might help you get more of a feel for the language. I genuinely wonder how many old-fashioned academic texts you would need to read for it all to become intuitive. It would be interesting to know!

Grammar Learning Tips

• Write out the example sentences by hand in a notebook.
• Try to tap into how you feel when you say or write the sentences. Connect the phrases with an emotion or situation you’ve experienced personally.
• Always ask questions as you learn, such as: Why can’t you use this phrase here? What is another way to say this?

Vocabulary

Japanese has a huge vocabulary. There are usually several different ways to express the same idea using both native words and loanwords.

For example, the following all mean “to begin”: 始める (hajimeru)、開始する (kaishi suru)、スタートする (sutāto suru).

Knowing kanji actually helps a lot with learning vocabulary. You can often guess the meanings of words when you know what the individual components mean.

Unfortunately, some just seem designed to completely bamboozle everyone.

Take 無茶 (mucha) for example. The two characters individually mean “no” and “tea”. However, combined, this word means “unreasonable, reckless, absurd or impossible”.

Maybe that’s how you would feel if you didn’t have any tea to drink? Personally, it’s a lack of coffee that gets me discombobulated.

Vocabulary Learning Tips

• Don’t try to learn everything. Pick and choose relevant vocabulary that you’re drawn to and think you’ll use.
• Learn words in context. I am tempted to write this one out again as I cannot over-emphasise the importance of this.
• Always have a notebook with you so you can scribble new words when you come across them.

Reading Comprehension

Reading Japanese is way harder than learning to speak it. I’m not just thinking about the roughly 2000 kanji characters and all the anomalous readings you’ll need to learn. That’s just the starting point. By the time you’re studying for N1, you’ve probably come across most of the kanji anyway. The real challenge is understanding how written Japanese actually works.

Japanese texts follow a different logic from English texts. The academic study of this is called discourse. It might sound boring, but without some knowledge of it, you may find yourself reading over a paragraph, understanding pretty much every word individually yet completely lost, not knowing who did what to whom or why, let alone what the author thinks about it all.

The regular omission of subjects, the use of the passive voice, and a tendency towards ambiguity make reading in Japanese extremely tricky.

In conversation, you learn to bluff your way through to fluency. You can guess and extrapolate a lot from context, plus you have the option of checking details by asking questions to confirm if what you’ve understood is correct.

Written Japanese, however, is much more complex. At the N1 level, the four answer options to the reading questions tend to follow the pattern of one being fairly absurd, another being somewhat unlikely and then two that sound almost exactly the same.

Still, if you’ve got that far, I suppose your chances are 50:50, which aren’t too bad odds considering the passing score is only 56%.

Tips to Improve Reading

• Make sure you get a designated N1 reading textbook so you can practice reading texts at the right level.
• Go through these texts looking up vocabulary and checking grammar patterns. (This will help you reinforce the grammar and vocabulary you need for this level.)
• After that, reread the texts, trying to “feel” the meaning as much as you can rather than translating in your head.
• Read anything and everything, as much as possible.

Listening

As someone who has lived in Japan for so long, the listening section feels like the easiest part of the test to me. My biggest issue is staying focused on what are mostly quite boring questions. It’s very easy to get distracted by a fly buzzing nearby or by someone scribbling when you’re not.

Even outside the area where it’s spoken, listening to a foreign language today is much easier than it was when I studied European languages at uni back in the late nineties/early 2000s. Yay for the internet and streamed video.

As with anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

It’s important to listen to a wide range of language in a variety of situations, though, especially with Japanese having so many different layers of formality.

Tips to Improve Listening Skills

• Use the tech — podcasts, TV, online streaming, etc.
• If you’re in Japan, go out alone to a local pub/restaurant and sit at the bar. It’s almost guaranteed you’ll get into conversations with the staff and/or other locals.
• When watching movies, use subtitles in Japanese, not English. Pause and listen again to things you didn’t catch. Jot new words down in a notebook if you want.
• Do practice listening questions so you can get used to the kinds of questions being asked in the test.

Is N1 Worth It?

For many people living and working in Japan, N1 isn’t necessary. I don’t believe it’s a particularly accurate measure of fluency. It’s more of an academic reading test than anything else.

However, for me, it’s been worth the effort and time. I’ve learned a lot of things I may never have if I hadn’t pushed myself to improve beyond the N2 level. It’s also given me a better foundation for moving on to reading novels, newspapers and more academic texts.

I’ve lived more of my life in Japan than in England. It’s my home. It makes sense to me to want to improve my Japanese as much as I can. It’s hard, though, when you’re already fully functioning in the language in your daily life. I think this test can give you that little extra push.

It isn’t easy, but for me it’s precisely the challenge that makes it so much fun.