People with Disparate Abilities (Reading/Writing/Speaking/Listening)

Correct. Most (almost all) of my interactions with Japanese people have been via the quiltmaking community on Instagram, so my reading and basic writing (composition) skills have developed to the point I’m happy replying to followers beyond コメントありがとうございます. I don’t know any Japanese people outside of the internet.

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Same! If only all written content came in an audible form I wouldnt need to work so hard at wanikani :joy:

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This is an interesting discussion! Thanks for bringing it up.

If people ask the big “What JLPT level are you at?” question, I’ll say I’m around N4, but I’m definitely better at reception than production.

I think reading is my strongest skill overall, mostly because it comes more naturally to me. I’m a book learner, and I think it’s easier to visually distinguish between similar-sounding words than it is for me to pick it up through listening. Even if I don’t know every single kanji I come across, I can usually guess at the approximate meaning of a sentence if I can see it written out.

Maybe this is a little weird, but I also like learning kanji the most out of the Japanese-learning skills; if I see a word with some kanji I know and some I don’t, I’m pretty likely to look it up.

As for speaking and listening, living in Japan, I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to have a conversation without necessarily understanding every single word or grammar point said. I have kind of a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach, but it seems to work pretty well for everyday life! :yum:

I’d say my writing (composition) depends on the topic. My handwriting is fine, but when it comes to a lot of kanji, I can vaguely picture it in my mind, but it’s not enough for me to write it out. If I can type, it’s obviously a lot easier haha.

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Thank you for saying this, because this IS how listening works! Understanding what you don’t know based on context clues is a super essential skill, and I don’t think people give themselves enough credit. If you know the gist of what was said, that’s super awesome! I encounter words I don’t know every day, but because the conversation flow doesn’t stop, to me, that’s a success.

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Definitely! The flow of conversation is an important indicator to me, too. Even if I sometimes respond in a way that’s just slightly off-topic (e.g. if they answer a question and I mistakenly answer a different question), they usually roll with it and we carry on talking. I doubt they’ll remember my mistake later—I certainly don’t remember things like that when Japanese people talk with me in English! I’m teaching English here, and it’s something I’m trying to teach my students, too.

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Interesting topic! I was able to pass N2 in December, but I wouldn’t say my skills are equal, either.

Reading - N3/N2 Just like you my reading skills are lagging behind, I feel. This was definitely my worst score on the test. My reading speed is too low, and I am not always able to pick out the information I need to answer the questions.

Writing (Characters) - N4. I think I can write quite few characters by heart, though sometimes I need to think on it and look them up, when writing a text.

Writing (Composition) - N3??? I am able to write simple emails and texts, and get my meaning across. I have one Japanese friend I regularly text with, and she is a Japanese teacher as well, so when I say something weird she always corrects me. Doesn’t happen too often, I feel. Writing emails is harder, since I have to deal with headers and sign offs, as well as sonkeigo/kenjougo, I feel. At least, I only email with my calligraphy teacher, and their emails are always so formal.

Speaking - N2 I find it hard to incorporate sonkeigo, and even more so, kenjougo in an appropriate manner. I am able to carry on a fluent conversation, and can adjust to fellow students’ levels, as well as speak with my teacher and Japanese friend on a reasonable level. Do I do have some trouble with 表現.

Listening - N2 I find it hard to relate the jlpt listening score to real life listening skills. I can watch certain programs without subtitles, and I can understand what people are saying in person, provided that pronunciation is good (most conversation partners are fellow students).

All in all, I feel I need to work hardest at reading, I do too little of it. I read a couple pages of HP every once in a while, but not on any regular basis. I should also be reading more for study purposes.

Edit/update: I just ordered a bunch of N1 shinkanzen master study books on amazonjp.

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Well, my Japanese is still atrocious in any skill, but let’s take for example French, a language I was pretty fluent in when I was in school…

The only thing I can still reliably do is read it. I understand basically everything. My sentences, be it spoken or written, are basic now. And listening is always the hardest thing to do.

I’m not English native either, but I’ve been surrounded by English media daily for over a decade I guess. But I sometimes still struggle when I watch a show in English, when people speak really fast, unusual accents come into play, or the language is very sophisticated.

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Since studying abroad at uni I have been able to cope with everyday speaking and listening with relative ease, but was basically illiterate. Over the past two years I have dragged my reading level up to a little below N2 (based on practice tests). But I still get a little shudder of dread when I’m faced with a large body of text.

One thing that has never improved is that I have a complete mental block on Japanese numbers over 10 万 - I simply cannot equate the words to numbers in my head, I have to write them down, with all the zeros like every time.

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Since I’m self-study and I don’t plan to go to Japan, most of what I know is reading and listening. I’d say my listening is the best, next is reading, then writing. Speaking is definitely one thing I didn’t train myself to. If I’d rate myself in JLPT levels:

Listening: N3-N2 (I can listen to anything and understand mostly 80% of the stories I listen to)
Reading: N3 (I can read manga and novels now, but I still need dictionary every now and then)
Writing: N4? (I have basic grammar down, but my physical writing skills sucks)
Speaking: N5 to none (I never had chance to talk to any Japanese person before, and it’s not really necessary for me to do so)

I’m learning to be able to consume Japanese media especially manga, so I only “trained” myself on the comprehension than production. I often “write” as in type comments in twitter or youtube, but if it’s the physical writing, I can only write N5 kanji at most. I plan to attend physical Japanese classes once the pandemic calms down, and learn physical writing and speaking so that my abilities aren’t on the opposite ends of the spectrum :expressionless:

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My strongest point is reading all my other skills basically suck.

I can only write 30 or so kanji by hand.

Composition I call only write some basic sentences and still make some dumb mistakes.

Speaking I can say some easy phrases that’s pretty much it.

Listening is the skill I’m poorest at, I understand some words and phrases.

But I’m still learning so I may still improve my japanese skills.

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I’m also self-studying, and I’ve focused most of my efforts on listening practice. I basically can’t read anything at all unless it’s in a nice computer font, and even then it’s slow and difficult. This is actually a bit frustrating, since I never understand written stuff when it shows up in anime, even if it’s something really simple that the audience is assumed to understand.

Since I’m self-studying, I literally haven’t practiced speaking or writing at all.

Grammar is also a big weakness for me. I feel like I don’t understand grammar at all and just do my best to guess the meaning of sentences based on key words I recognize and context.

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The grammar is so weird at times. I can’t say it has really “clicked” yet. I hope to get to that point some time…

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I also have a lot of difficulty rating my Japanese level, because my skills are uneven and none of them are without their weak points. If forced to give an overall JLPT rating, I usually rate myself N5 because I feel like that’s probably what my abilities average out to. Plus, I’d rather undersell myself and pleasantly surprise people than oversell myself and look like an idiot xD

Overall, my comprehension skills outpace my production skills because I don’t really practice production skills at all. I’m also sort of just…like that, though, as a person xD It was like that when I took French classes in high school, too. Production of any language (I would say even my native one, English) comes less naturally to me than comprehension (although it’s obviously less noticeable in a language I’ve had my whole life to practice xD). I’m generally good at intuiting meaning, which makes my comprehension skills appear better than they probably are in reality. I think it actually hurts my production skills, in a way - when I know enough to get the gist, I don’t feel motivated to dig more deeply into it, so I don’t get the deeper understanding that’s necessary for production.

How I would rate my individual skills (with explanations under the cut because this got too long):

Reading - probably N4 on average?

It would probably be even better if I actually studied grammar, but grammar is boring and I’ve noticed that I have a lot of trouble internalizing it through explanation alone - like, you can tell me that X means “because” or Y means “if…then” all day long, and I’ll understand the explanation on an intellectual level, but I’m still going to be looking it up like 50 times while reading because I just can’t connect these abstract “linking words” to a meaning without a billion real-life, context-linked examples (idk if “linking words” is really the right term, but like…they mean nothing without context, basically? Essentially all the words that are not nouns, verbs, or adjectives/adverbs xD). I forced my way through most of Genki 1, but now I’m just sort of…osmosing it and looking it up as I need it. Reading is the one skill I practice with any amount of consistency, so no surprise that it’s my strongest skill (although frankly it’s still not even that strong). I still make good use of the dictionary while reading native stuff - sometimes just to confirm, because I don’t want to reinforce the wrong thing in my head, but there’s also usually some level of disparity between vocab that’s relevant for the thing I want to read and vocab that’s taught in general vocab learning resources anyway (also, learning vocab in a vacuum is not terribly interesting, so…there’s that). But I’ve gotten a lot better at knowing how to parse longer sentences, and I feel like my intuitive grasp of common grammar is pretty decent now. Even if I don’t really know the grammar, I can often make a good guess at meaning based on context and the individual words. Because WK was one of the first resources I used (I’ve never taken classes or anything), I never went through a period of “knowing words but not knowing the kanji.” As a result, hiragana/katakana vocab is a relative weakness of mine, and there are a number of words I can’t remember the reading of (I just know what the kanji mean). I’m probably opposite of most people in that I don’t try to keep myself from looking at the furigana while I’m reading, because it helps reinforce the pronunciation of the word in my mind - otherwise, my mind will just throw in whatever kanji reading it thinks of first, or worse just substitute an English meaning (looking at you, numbers - although to be fair, I avoid reading those out fully in English too xD). Tbh, I don’t really do much formal studying, so reading is kind of the main form of studying for me - I could probably “get the gist” of a fair number of things without a dictionary, but I just don’t usually read that way, so it’s hard to say.

Speaking - 0

99% of the time, this doesn’t bother me, because I don’t have anyone to talk to in Japanese and building that skill is just not worth the anxiety of having to do verbal lessons and speak to strangers. But then I go to Japan and feel like an idiot because I can read a lot of the signs and I can often understand what people are saying to me but I can’t produce a response (even a single word, most of the time) to save my life. That’s always fun.

Listening - better than speaking, but probably N5 at the most

I can do simple sentences/common phrases, and I can often get the gist (ish) if I have visual context (ie, its not a podcast), but it’s easy for me to lose the thread if I’m not concentrating or the sentences get too long/complicated, and once everything becomes gibberish, it’s difficult to come back. xD I am trying to practice this one a little bit more, by listening to stuff, but I either get bored/annoyed quickly because I can’t understand or I get tired quickly because it’s a lot of effort to understand. …Or I get bored quickly because the only things I can easily understand are boring things like “The weather is great today!” “Yes, it is!” xD Either way, it’s been difficult to find Japanese listening material that particularly grips me, so it’s difficult to find the motivation to practice a lot. :stuck_out_tongue:

Writing - これはペンです level for spontaneous composition, on a good day

Unsurprisingly, my grammar holds me back quite a bit here, but my vocab production also lags behind my vocab comprehension. I wrote a short paragraph once (with some assistance from jisho.org for vocab) and had a native speaker correct it - basically all the particles were used incorrectly, but my kanji usage (according to this person) was good xD If that doesn’t sum up my knowledge level, I don’t know what does. Handwriting - forget it, hiragana and katakana only. My handwriting is bad anyway, and some of the kanji are so detailed that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hand-write them in a size that isn’t humongous. But I don’t have a lot of use for that skill, so I’m not terribly concerned about it.

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I’m in a pretty similar boat here. Doesn’t help that I’m just actually not very chatty in general anyway :woman_shrugging: I’ve had really fun conversations with Japanese people who are in the reverse situation of me where they just speak Japanese and I just speak English. Because of the way English learning works in Japan, I think there are a ton of Japanese people around with terrible speaking skills but who can understand spoken English pretty well. I’ve heard of a lot of other people doing this too. The only problem is that… my Japanese speaking skills are still terrible :sweat_smile:

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I’m on team listening and speaking for sure. My reading and writing are trash. I use Japanese everyday so even though I don’t know all my grammar and vocab I manage to talk around a lot of things and can speak at a natural tempo. I started wanikani to mainly improve my vocab knowledge. Reading better is a bonus haha. Still gotta increase my grammar which is sadly lacking. I’m using the kanzen master books but I’m terrible and book study lol. Any suggestions would be awesome. But I’m fairly certain buckling down and hitting the books is the most effective way…unfortunately

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I’m a naturally good test taker, so even though I can usually figure out what the questions are asking, when they ask using different words than what’s used in a text (obviously to check for understanding by equating the two meanings), it throws me off. This has gotten so much better since I started WaniKani though.

This is also super valid. I mentioned it earlier, but don’t forget that shorter pieces also count as reading. I like being able to say I “finished” something, so I feel much more accomplished sitting down in one sitting to read a three page article or short story, than I do when I start on a longer reading project. The shinkanzen master books have the little sections broken down, so it might feel better to be able to “finish” each section as you go through.

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I’m a native English speaker and I have trouble when these things come into play, haha!

But yeah, I feel like the reception of langauge is a longer lasting skill than production (lasts longer/fades slower). I took Spanish for 7 years in school and I was pretty good at it, but now I can’t even start a sentence in Spanish. It just… turns into Japanese as I speak. (Does anyone else have this problem?) I can still read and understand conversations, perfectly well, though.

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Same! I can sort of read Spanish a little bit, and I can understand bits and pieces, but I basically can’t speak at all any more. My Japanese Sister-In-Law studied Spanish in college and works in Mexico. When she brought home her Mexican boyfriend for New Years the two of them were communicating in Spanish, he and I were communicating in English, and my husband and I were communicating in Japanese. It was quite the mix!

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Yes! I never really kept up my Spanish skills after 5 years of studying in high school. I went to Guatemala about 5 years ago, and I could communicate reasonably well, apart from limited vocabulary. But 2,5 years ago I started studying Japanese, and when I went to Costa Rica next, I could hardly speak 2 sentences at the start. But it did get better as my time there progressed. Exposure is key. I should be subjecting myself to more Spanish, if I don’t want to lose the language completely.

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My fiance has lived in Japan for five years and I’ve been here a year and a half. Our learning styles are very different – I’ve taken classes in college and study with books and applications while he’s pretty much learned through immersion. He only just started learning to read, whereas I can “read” without knowing what it means. So we read a lot of children’s books together, where he’ll help me with vocabulary and I help him with kana.

I guess writing is my strongest skill, at least sentence composition – writing on the computer is obviously easier than remembering how to write kanji by hand. Listening is my weakest. But I doubt I’d rate better than N5 at any of it.

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