I agree, though I understand why changing this (right now) and having half the DB be ?? levels isn’t great either.
I have a product question related to this though. Before the 6 rating limit was added, let’s say someone rated a book 30 times. Do all 30 of those ratings still influence that book’s level or was this updated so only 6 ratings impact the level? If another user comes in and rates the book 6 times, do they have equal influence compared to the first user or only 6/36 (= 1/6) of the total influence on the level?
Well, only @brandon has the definitive answer, but you can still do extra gradings and I assume they count just as much as the regular gradings? Anyway, there should be no difference between someone who did 30 gradings and someone who did 6+24 extra gradings
So I know that seems like an obvious add (and it is!), but I’ve been wary of just allowing filtering of furigana without building in a good mechanism for users to be able to update whether or not a book if furigana.
I guess I’m probably too conservative here as the major downside right now is not inaccurate furigana markings but limited furigana markings. If I just do the search filter it’s trivial to add, so maybe I just do that as I keep not doing it
So, we chatted a long time ago about this, but remember Elo treats a rating with 10 gradings the same as if it had 100 gradings. So when I locked grading down to 6 gradings, I basically set all the grades to the last person’s opinion and then limited the max power of every subsequent grader.
For example, if snow country was at level 30 and @Naphthalene thought it should be lvl 45 and did 30 gradings… they’d be able to move it to level 45. However, after I implemented the 6 limit, every subsequent grader can at most move it by 1-2 levels… so even if you thought it was lvl 38, you could only move it to lvl 43… we’d need other graders to share your opinion and grade.
Thus, the grading limit really just limited future swings. Does that answer your question?
I think I still just don’t understand Elo enough. It sounds like you’re saying those 30 ratings from the first user don’t have unfairly large influence compared to subsequent users. Is that what you’re saying?
Ah, true, the history of how you got to a certain rating doesn’t really matter. But I guess the point here is that someone with only 6 ratings has less potential impact than someone who had 30 ratings. So if I used 30 ratings to maliciously increase or decrease a rating, it will take 5 users (@ 6 ratings) to move it all the way back… I don’t think anyone ever did something like that, though.
… but I technically still can do that, right? I just need to do extra gradings… or do they count less than the normal gradings?
Edit:
Extra Grading: These grades don’t currently count towards difficulty ratings, but eventually we’ll figure out a way to incorporate them, so we appreciate it!
I think that if a user is submitting a book to be added to the site, they (hopefully) know enough information about it to know if it uses furigana a majority of the time. If not, then maybe the people who are grading it can receive a pop-up question in their grading of “did it have furigana?” When I’m scrolling through samples of things that I’m about to read, I can generally get a gauge of if a novel/manga has furigana before I add it to cart. So if I’m submitting it, I (in theory) should know that information.
That’s what I’ve been saying! CEFR isn’t universal, but the JLPT is known well-enough throughout the community because the exams are still offered in different countries. As a side note, I’ve studied other languages besides Japanese in and out of formal settings as an American, and I also didn’t hear about the CEFR until I had people complaining about using the JLPT system in my server. (but my server isn’t a majority European and that system was originally developed for Europe by Europe, so I have no regrets.)
Supposedly, that’s not actually the case. The leap in knowledge between the lowers levels (N4 to N5) is significantly lower than the leap of knowledge between the upper levels, but they did that on purpose. The gap between the N2 and the N1 is so large since the N1 oftentimes includes kanji/other things that a lot of native speakers don’t know or use. But in general, the JLPT is known for that kind of nonsense because even the grading isn’t linear. They use a system where they “determine” if you know the answer based off of your answering pattern. That can be a bit annoying because it’s possible that you’re not receiving points for something that you got correct because they’ve “determined” that you didn’t actually know it–even if you’re actually better at one grammar point than another, whether or not one is considered to be a higher difficulty than the other. I know somebody who failed the N2 by either a single point or 3 points as she was absolutely infuriated (rightfully so, since you don’t even get to see what you got wrong). My professors have always taught me that the leap is so big between the N2 and the N1 because a lot of jobs/university in Japan only ask for N2 as the minimum.
It would be cool to have a Tsubasa Bunko or Aotori Reader section for people who are looking to read popular series but have the aid that they need.
I’d just say that it’s no different than a user getting through the current temporary rating system and fully grading a book by themselves. They ‘set’ the book’s initial level and then every subsequent user has limited changing power.
So yes, if the initial user has a dramatically different opinion of a book’s difficulty than the consensus, it may take a number of users grading the book to reach the consensus.
However, that initial user doesn’t continue to have an outsized impact into eternity, if that makes sense.
Well… yes, because it’s doubling every time. It takes ~400 hours to get N5 (according to the numbers from the organizers), ~750h for N4, ~1400 for N3, ~2200 for N2, ~3900 for N1 (so a little less that doubling, but close enough)
Even if it does, it’s probably just a single question in the whole test. I did a past test with one of my Japanese friends back in the days and he got literally 100% correct. Now, he is well educated, but still.
I think it’s luck of the draw sometimes, because while I was abroad, all of the Japanese students at my uni who were studying to be Japanese teachers had to take the N1 and a good portion of them did not get 100% and talked about seeing stuff they had never encountered before. But it’ll definitely be easier to build up your gap from the N5 to the N4 than it is to get from N2 to N1 (mentally crying).
I have to retake the N3 because I had seizures during the first one, so my one section of my score was abysmal…but now we know lmao
I’m not @Myria, but in my case, I went through classes up to N3, took some classes at the N2 level but didn’t continue. I did read the whole textbook, though, in preparation for the test.
By the way, I think I also mentioned not reading books until nearly N1 (if we forget about the one I slogged through before that point), but by “book” I mean 活字 (so, not manga). I did read manga since I was ~N4.
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
CEFR isn’t universal, but the JLPT is known well-enough throughout the community because the exams are still offered in different countries. As a side note, I’ve studied other languages besides Japanese in and out of formal settings as an American, and I also didn’t hear about the CEFR until I had people complaining about using the JLPT system in my server. (but my server isn’t a majority European and that system was originally developed for Europe by Europe, so I have no regrets.)
