JLPT 2022 thread(Results out now!)

Not really, but I always get the answer wrong and complete forget the meaning between reviews. So I tried to look up the meaning of the separate Kanjis again to see how they connect to the meaning of the Jukugo.

And it doesn’t connect, at least for me :sweat_smile:

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I guess one big issue is that 疎’s components help with its reading (束, そく→そ), but not its meanings, which are ‘distant (relationships)’, ‘diffuse/loose (packing or grouping)’ and ‘fluid passage’ (especially if you read the etymology of 疏, which is an equivalent of this kanji in some cases). However, so, there’s 通, which is about ‘passing through’. That’s the objective here: you want to make something conducive for other stuff to pass through it. That’s the essence of 疎通: you achieve fluid passage/flow by removing obstacles, perhaps by loosening them up. (It’s a verb in Chinese.) In Japanese, 疎通 is also a (する) verb, but it focuses on the movement that occurs after clearance, which you could see as the intransitive movement nuance of 通. (That nuance is also possible in Chinese, but it isn’t as strong in my opinion.) In other words, 疎通 in Japanese is the act of communicating (in the – somewhat rare – physical sense of connection or the sense of conveying messages) without obstruction.

Side note: if you need to remember the left side of 疎… apparently it’s a foot. The problem is that it’s not the typical shape for anything historically associated with foot, but if you remember it as something midway between 正 and 足, you should be OK? Imagine using a foot (足) to kick the blockage aside and set everything right (正). Maybe it’s a Foot of Righteousness/Justice? :joy:

To remember the overall reading, you could use 出(しゅつ)as a starting point – when a passage is clear, it’s easy for things to ‘come out’ – then modify it by using 束 and 通 to remember そ and the long vowel. You’d have to know the readings for those two kanji first though (but in your case, I’m sure you do).

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I’m signed up for N3! It’ll be a bit of a challenge, but one I’m looking forward to! :durtle_megane:

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Hmm. What would be the applicable use of that vocab? I’m picturing it on a bottle of Drano, or a toilet plunger, or an enema…?

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I don’t know if any of those are actually possible, but this word is typically used for describing two people who understand each other without difficulty. Effective communication.

意思疎通
意思が疎通する

Edit: Yeah, all of the examples (scroll down to 例文・使い方・用例・文例) are about communication.

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I don’t think that would work in Japanese, but you could probably use the word like that in Chinese: ‘use (any of the things you’ve mentioned) to 疎通 (that which is unblocked)’. In Japanese though, what Leebo said. That and the sense of ‘passing fluidly through something, going from one place to another’ are possible, though I think the latter is older and quite rare today. (When I check my dictionaries, that physical definition only appears in Daijirin, and not in either of the smaller monolingual dictionaries I own.)

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Makes sense. Although that immediately makes me want to use “Hmm, the pipe is clogged” to describe a language barrier, and wondering if that would be understood in context :smiley:

Thank you, this helps a lot! :pray:

I think I have to dig a bit deeper into this Kanji (疎).
At some point I would l like to have a better understanding how Jukugo words are made up in order to be able to memorize difficult ones like this.

I didn’t know the radical is a foot, in Wanikani it is a “coatrack” :joy:
I might update my own mnemonics in some cases like in this one.

Finally I did the most obvious thing, checking the Kanken dictionary.
As meaning 4 for 疎 it says:

とおる。とおす。通じる。「疎水」「疎通」
参考
もと「疏」の俗字。

Finally I think I understood the importance to look up meanings in Japanese sources :sweat_smile:

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Hahaha. Kinda looks like a coatrack though! But yeah, it’s foot + something above, but I have no idea what. It’s just that it’s similar to the left-side radical for 足 in some older scripts. I’m not sure if they’re actually related.

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Good point, I will try to find it out!

Wait! I researched that already today :eyes:
It is from the family of 疋部 and means あし (leg) and ひき like the small animals counter, a currency unit and fabric length unit.

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Got a question for all the people that have already taken the N2. How important do you all feel like is the ~5000 word long vocab list that sites like jisho.org reference?

Did some analysis of my vocabulary size today and by December I’ll be comfortably past 6000 words actively SRS’ed (so not including things I picked up through exposure alone). However, the overlap between my known vocab and that required for the JLPT apparently isn’t very large :rofl:
I’m assuming that by December, I will not have actively SRS’ed about 1500-2000 of those 5000 words. (I have no intentions to specifically cram JLPT vocab)
I’m hoping some of those 1500-2000 words I’ll know from exposure, and a couple more I’ll pick up while doing a bunch of practice tests. However, that still feels like a lot of vocab is missing.
So… how screwed am I? :see_no_evil:

I can tell you that 5000 or 6000 is not nearly enough for N2. My vocab size is around 9000, and there were still dozens of words in the N2 test I didn’t know, maybe around 100 even. And I’ve been slowly adding the most common words I found. The 10k most common words are definitely a good standard to shoot for, but you might need even more.

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10,000 words is commonly given as a number for N1, so 5000-6000 for N2 makes sense to me.

That’s not based on my experience or comparing my vocabulary (because I can’t recall what those were at the various points in the past), just what I’ve seen listed for the various tests, and how many words resources for them tend to compile.

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I think the 10’000 was before the reform (2010). Now the pool is at least 15’000 for N1 but might include things they expect you to know anyway. They use a specific word database which is not communicated publicly anymore. So any list you will find is most probably compiled from the old 10k pool of the old N1 and not that relevant anymore. Source 新完全マスター

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I know 6000 is given as a standard for N2, but in my experience, that’s complete nonsense. No way 6000 is enough. As I said, my vocabulary size was around 9000 when I took N2 this year, I prioritized a lot of the most common words, and it wasn’t nearly enough.

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I have vocab resource series with the N designations that don’t get anywhere near 15,000 words in total.

I mean, I guess it’s possible those are just garbage, I didn’t really use them that much anyway. I guess I just expected them to be decent.

Additionally, wasn’t the revamp about smoothing the transition from the old 3 to the old 2, which was a huge leap, and that gap is covered by N3. That was my understanding anyway. I never heard that N1 was supposed to be like 50% harder than the old level 1.

I guess it’s just hard for me to contribute to the discussion when I’ve basically never kept track of my vocabulary size at any point (I couldn’t tell you what it is now either). I take your word that 9000 wasn’t enough.

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Huh. I picked up somewhere that they mostly just added a level between N2 and the old level 3 (now N4) but left the other levels similar in difficulty, so that the test results could be compared to the new test. (E.g. someone that passed the old level 1 would also be able to pass the N1)
But I suppose SKM would be a reliable source :thinking:

Japanese-Language Proficiency Test - Wikipedia see comparison section on the bottom of the page.

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A jump from 10,000 to 18,000 seems like it would be more than “slightly more advanced”, but then again, I don’t know precisely how they count words to begin with, so maybe it’s possible that you can hear two resources talk about how many words you need to know, and they’re both right, they just count differently. Dunno.

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Well, at least N2 supposedly remained about the same? :see_no_evil: