I mean the English-speaking online Japanese learning community. Many resources (e.g. Bunpro) explicitly organize their content around JLPT levels. We usually get a few threads a year in these forums of people asking WaniKani to add “all missing N1 kanji”, whatever that means.
You can find many people in these forums or places like Reddit who discuss taking the tests, where they can take the tests, should they take the tests, how good they did at the tests, what tests they’ll do next…
Meanwhile I’ve been studying Russian for close to 15 years. Do you know what the Russian aptitude test is called? Apparently it’s the ТРКИ. Do you want to know how I know? I just googled it. Literally never seen it discussed before within the Russian language learning community. Nobody cares about it.
To be clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having interest for the JLPT, but it is something that surprised me when I started studying Japanese a few years ago, so I understand where @maenbalja is coming from with this thread.
And, the ironic thing about that question is that creators of the JLPT; the Japan Foundation, and the Japan Educational Exchange and Services no longer publish any official lists of Kanji, or vocabulary.
Oh wow, I totally misunderstood your post. When you said Japanese community, I thought you meant Japanese people/companies/universities. But, based on the forum we are in, it is kind of obvious that you meant Japanese learners…oops.
I think on Wanikani there are Japanese learners studying for JLPT and those studying as a hobby. I am not sure about the distribution, though. But it doesn’t really matter because no matter what your goal is for learning Japanese, there are active threads on this forum that will help you achieve that goal.
So, what is your reason for learning Japanese?
One of my goals is to read novels in Japanese, so I will recommend the Book Clubs thread. In a few weeks, I will have more time to read novels, but for now, I am reading some manga so I also visit the Beginner’s Manga Book Club thread often. I am not actively reading along with these book clubs, but I find so many great recommendations for reading material here.
After I get much further along in Wanikani, I think I might sit for the JLPT just to test how much I learned through Wanikani and comprehensive immersion.
The JLPT is a little expensive. If you want to try the test, by all means go for it. But if you want to save some money, check out the free practice tests on the JLPT website.
I’ve always treated the JLPT and various books as a benchmark rather than an overall goal. Honestly, I think Japanese has a problem that it’s too easy to directly measure progress in ‘objective’ ways. Whether it’s the number of kanji you’ve learned, number of flashcards you’ve gone through, JLPT level, etc., it can encourage people turning it into a game or trying to minmax language learning in ways I haven’t seen in other languages. The numbers must go up as fast as possible.
I’ve stuck with WaniKani so far because I think it’s the best kanji learning tool I’ve seen, I think the reviews and lessons are fun and satisfying, and I like the community on the forum.
I do want to take the JLPT N1, but that isn’t the main reason for using Wanikani or learning Japanese.
My main reason is that I want to travel more to Japan or even stay there mid term. The other reasons would be to consume content in Japanese for anime, novels , light novels, manga, vtuber, games, and news
The sad part is that a lot of Japanese games are region locked for the Japanese language so people who bought the games outside of Japan can’t switch the game language to Japanese. I guess I’ll mostly be playing Chinese games in Japanese coz the Japanese dub is better for most Chinese games
But since I didn’t have any reason to read Japanese in my daily life I realized my reading skills were deteriorating. There is, and always has been, something about seeing a text full of kanji that makes my brain short-circuit in a panic. Even though I can read most words fine when I actually look at them one by one.
So I took up WaniKani to deliberately train my kanji knowledge. I really like the way it connects radicals, to kanji, to vocabulary. Besides WaniKani, actually forcing myself to read a little bit daily has also helped a great deal.
I use WK for kanji learning which will help the reading. I don’t intend to do JLPT, but my sensei encouraged me to take at least N5 this year. My learning goal is to just enjoy learning things as I get older. Haha
hi! I’ve been studying Japanese for about 2 years now (WaniKani only for a little over a year) and i don’t care at all about the JLPT, i’m just here doing my own thing with WaniKani, renshuu and a book called Elementary Japanese Volume One (excellent book btw).
that being said i did take an online japanese course at some point and 90% of the people were there aiming for the JLPT.
i think most people see it as a north star and then, once they take the test, can get some reasonable idea whether they’re doing good or not.
my mind doesn’t work like that though, so i highly doubt i’ll ever take one of those tests (especially since it costs like $100 bucks which i’d rather spend in anything else)
Learning for the joy of it. I started finding reading hiragana and katakana difficult without spaces and realised it was time to break through the kanji barrier. Lurked around wanikani on the free level for ages until they had the sale at Christmas. I try to practice daily.
Me. I did a Japanese course while I was at university and figured that the certificate I got was ‘good enough’. I never heard about the JLPT until I started lurking on the forums here. In any case, my goal is to read manga and watch anime in the original language without any subtitles and I don’t need a certificate for that.
When you said Japanese community, I thought you meant Japanese people/companies/universities. But, based on the forum we are in, it is kind of obvious that you meant Japanese learners…oops. 