Unrelated to the current discussion, but I know that some light novels, including ノーゲーム・ノーライフ 1 ゲーマー兄妹がファンタジー世界を征服するそうです | L36 have been banned in Australia for being deemed to contain depictions of children under 18 doing err inappropriate things.
I wonder if there should be some sort of warning about those?
(That being said, I’m not a legal expert, I don’t know if there’s anything against owning it there, I think it just means that the translated version cannot be sold).
I’m another person who never read fiction until after passing N2. Not novels, children’s stories, or even manga. I took classes and used textbooks and JLPT prep books to learn. But just to be clear, I was living in Japan, so it definitely wasn’t the case that I didn’t have exposure to native reading materials. I had bills to look at, official letters to struggle through, recipes, instructions of various sorts, and blogs and interviews by my favorite bands. Did I fully read all these things? No, I usually didn’t even try because it would take too long. I’d skim it for the most important information. If my skimming was wrong, there were real-life consequences.
As it turns out, those sorts of things are closer to what the JLPT tests for in the N2 and under range than fiction. And once I had learned the N2 material, my ability to navigate all those daily matters improved so much that it took a big mental load off me. That’s when I finally started to look at children’s books and manga.
That’s a very good point. Though the plot of the series (and anime) was nice, a lot of the fanservice did make me uncomfortable because she’s a minor. If we do ever start getting summaries, I hope that we are able to add potential warnings. It was definitely something that I wouldn’t watch around my mother (lol, sorry mom) and that I couldn’t recommend for my oldest nephew to read/watch without my inciting wrath for my older sister.
Interesting. Well, MAL and AniList don’t mention anything special. I’d imagine that yes when community descriptions come along, people can mention in the description.
Since I am not a bookseller, I highly doubt there’d be legal issues, but I’m not a lawyer either.
I saw some talk about N1, but I am just replying in general.
Generally, the kanji on N1 is very easy for the level (this is true for all levels of JLPT). Both native speakers and people good at kanji should not find any of the kanji difficult.
The N1 vocab is very everyday stuff. I have encountered pretty much all the vocab from the N1 tests, somewhere. Sometimes in conversations, sometimes on TV, sometimes in books. Children books often have a fair deal of N1 vocabulary. People who read native content often will likely know or have seen every vocab word that appears on the JLPT. I know people who aced the vocab section without ever using a JLPT test book.
I made a thread about interesting JLPT grammar. N1 grammar is more specific, but some of it is quite common. But actually, the JLPT doesn’t really test N1 grammar very much and the most the grammar questions are N2 or above. You can easily pass N1 without ever studying N1 grammar. In fact, a lot of people would recommend not to study it and just read native material.
I have seen Japanese people get questions wrong from all of the sections, even listening lol. Sometimes they try to claim the questions are wrong. My father in-law (native Japanese speaker) claims that N1 questions are beyond his level and won’t even try to answer them. How this is all related to Natively… I DON’T KNOW!!! The level scores right now seem to be pretty accurate, and I treat the N1, N2 as just group names and don’t really relate it to the JLPT.
Hmmm, textbooks and lots of vocab via Anki.
I also went to a language school in Japan during the holidays twice, which is where I first picked up Genki I and II as well.
I managed to go from N4 to N2 in about a year, so I didn’t feel the need to change my approach either, because it was working. For the upper levels, I just learned the grammar from SKM and I also used TRY! I had Anki decks with vocab for each level (4750 words up to N2, 8000 total for N1), so I studied those in preparation for the test as well.
For reading, I basically had the textbook texts/example sentences and the SKM 読解 books, and they were pretty tough
Although I do remember having a graded reader at a really early point in my studies.
Edit: Almost forgot about the university courses! Around N3, I started taking courses at uni. They were below my level, but they got me some more speaking/reading/writing practice. They also encouraged us to read NHK Easy News, which was also good practice.
Yes, it’s kinda wild to me. Wikipedia also doesn’t mention anything about it. If you google it, you can find some minor news outlets talking about the ban (and, of course, the official website of the Australian classification organization that I linked has the info as well) but it’s really not on the forefront.
lol I love that people are claiming it’s wrong! It’s like when a friend will ask me why I might get a TOEIC question wrong and I tell them it depends on if native speakers know the “technical” correct answers (that, and the majority of us don’t study the majority of the “official” rules of our native languages since it’s our language.) Lol, FIL, good luck!! I’m sure you’re truly beyond it all.
But now that you mention it, I have had some of my friends tell me that the JLPT was giving me wrong answers because some of them don’t sound natural, so I reminded them that it’s not necessarily about what sounds natural in conversation but what’s considered to be “correct” in the situation
I didn’t even know that there was a section where we could see the stats per book that we read. I can’t figure out where to locate reading speed on my profile
I told @brandon that it’s not immediately obvious that you can do that in the site. Is a nice feature, but most people don’t know where to find it or that it even exists, or what it produces by disclosing/tracking that data.
Right now, the only way to time your reading is from the front page, on the currently reading:
You can also edit the sessions manually, and by clicking reading time you can fill the missing data:
I just saw this part lol. But, when I’m recommending books from Natively in my server, I do actually use that descriptor along with the Natively grade. So since I know that purple is 20-26, I’ll generally say 24-26 is N3 “intermediate-upper intermediate” since everyone’s reading level is different even if we’re all in the same JLPT bracket.
yeah i know it’s not the most obvious. I’m going to be implementing an FAQ pages finally and I can sell it a bit more there (perhaps with a link next to the ‘add time’ widget on the update book progress popup).
Oooh, I’ll make sure to mention that! Rn, I have some posts that explain the concept of Natively that are floating around, but I do need to make a post saying that you’ve added a forum. I think I’ll wait until the FAQ is up because then more questions may be answered for them.
Getting back to this, I just graded a book that’s between 25 and 30, and all books I got pit against it were level 28 or 29. Well, unsurprisingly I mostly said “similar difficulty”.
