世論 What Japan Thinks

With the ubiquity of mobile phones and computers with kanji input abilities, both the need to remember and the opportunities for writing kanji, the Japanese language’s main script, has decreased. In addition, worries about education includes whether children are really learning kanji correctly. Thus, goo Research, in conjuction with the Mainichi Shimbun, conducted a survey into kanji ability.

Demographics

Between the 25th and 27th of May 2007 1,101 randomly selected internet users aged 20 or over (presumably chosen from goo Research’s monitor pool) completed this survey. More detailed demographic information is not available.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m studying for the Kanji Kentei examination in order to up my ability, particularly from the point of view of writing. Reading is relatively easy, and with a computer to aid you, electronic entry is not that bothersome at all, yet even my wife, who was always top of the class in school with kanji, occasionally forgets how to write even relatively common characters and has to resort to an electronic dictionary to crib the correct character from.
Read the rest of this entry »

Excuse the rather clumsy headline, but Macromill recently interviewed 309 members of their internet research monitor group who currently worked as either private or public employees and expressed a wish to enter or re-enter further education as mature students.

Demographics

Between the 4th and 5th of April 2007 309 people completed a private online questionnaire; 66.0% were male, 35.6% in their twenties, 42.1% in their thirties, 18.8% in their forties, and 3.6% in their fifties. All of them were considering entering a Japanese university as an under-graduate or post-graduate within the next five years.

In addition, 13.9% were married with no children, 27.8% married with children, 52.8% were single with no children, 0.6% were single, with children, but didn’t need to support them, and 1.3% were married with children that didn’t need to be supported. Regarding education levels, 11.0% had post-graduate qualifications, 57.6% had graduated from university, 14.2% attended college, 16.2% attended up to high school, 0.3% to middle school, and 0.6% didn’t answer.

Sadly, this survey does not highlight those wishing to do MBAs. Additionally, a number of UK and USA universities offering distance learning MBA courses in conjuction with Japanese institutions, but whether or not these would be counted as Japanese courses for the sake of this survey is not clear.
Read the rest of this entry »

Between the first and fifth of March this year, yet another survey that MyVoice conducted was into the matter of elementary and middle-school education, covering children between the ages of six and fifteen.

Demographics

15,765 members of their online community successfully completed the survey. 54% were female, 3% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 14% in their fifites.

Looking back on my school days, I cannot really say there was much wrong with the, alhough I did grow up in a small town where there were not many social problems. In the present day, however, I could rattle off a million and one things that may be wrong in both my home country and Japan. However, bemoaning the behaviour of the younger generation has been a universal trait since the days of Socrates.

I am surprised that Q4 and Q5 did not have more options about perceived failures of parents to teach their children how to behave, which I feel (as a non-parent) is an important issue in the degradation of the education system. Disturbances in class is just a symptom, not the root cause.

How do English language teachers or those with children in Japanese schools find Japanese schools? How would you rate the problems?
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into computers in the classrooms of elementary and middle schools.

Demographics

On the 16th of March 330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor panel working in the education field completed a private internet-based survey. 83.0% were male, 7.9% in their twenties, 29.4% in their thirties, 40.0% in their forties, 19.4% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties. 19, or 5.8%, worked in elementary schools, 6.4% (21 people) in middle schools, 11.8% (39 people) in high schools or vocational schools, 193 people (58.5%) in universities, 1.8% (or just 6 people) in technical colleges, 2.4% (8 people) in cram schools, and 18 people, or 5.5%, had other education-related rolls. 25 people actually had other jobs, and one was currently unemployed. The questions below were then asked only to the 40 elementary and middle school teachers.

It’s interesting that over half the sample consisted of university lecturers and the like. Perhaps this suggests something about the relatively light workload that allows that group to spend time completing online surveys?

For the questions presented below, the sample size is probably far too small to be any use, but I present the data regardless.
Read the rest of this entry »

goo Research recently published the results of a survey conducted amongst a slightly different population from usual, that of elementary school children, on the subject of what they do after school. The fieldwork was conducted over two weeks from the 24th of October to the 7th of November last year, with respondents gathered via a public web-based survey from users of the primary school children-targeted portal site kids goo. There is no mention of parental involvement in the data collection. I presented another survey last year on a similar topic, but that time it was the parents interviewed regarding their children and their extra-curricular lessons.

Demographics

1,500 children completed the survey successfully. 60.1% were girls, 2.9% were in the first year of elementary school (age 6 or 7), 5.5% in second year, 13.7% in third year, 22.9% in forth year, 27.7% in fifth year, and 27.4% in sixth year.

The most surprising thing to me is probably Q2, with not more than 3% met at the school gates by their parents. This to me is a great figure, as it indicates the relative low level of parental paranoia in the country, and of course the lack of cars associated with the school run is good for the environment.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the first 5 days at the start of the New Year, MyVoice surveyed its monitor group to find out their views regarding foreign language learning. 10,504 people successfully completed the survey; 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

Note that putting Q1 and Q3 together we see that around half of the poplation would like to study English but currently aren’t doing anything about it. You may want to cross-reference the results here with a similar survey on English last year, also conducted by MyVoice.

I’m trying to find a way to tie this into the news today that 7 NOVA “English” “teachers” got busted for drugs, but I’m failing miserably.
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, goo Research published the results of an opinion poll it conducted on the subject of children’s extra-curricular education. Demographics are sketchy – the only available information is that the parents of 1,026 children aged between 3 and 14 years old. For people with more than one child, I’m not sure exactly how they answered – averaging all children, picking one, or each individually. 41% of the children were boys, 59% girls. The fieldwork was conducted between the 14th and 16th of November.

I know that there is a big industry around children’s education, what with advertisements on prime-time television showing children aged just four or five intensely studying, an image that makes me and my memories of a stress-free childhood uncomfortable. When it comes round to my turn to have children, I’d like to say I want to keep my kids away from this sort of pressure; I’d only want to force, or at least strongly persuade a future mini-me to study music or dance for enjoyment, as it probably is the one thing I most regret not having any ability in.

For the English teachers in my audience, note that in Q3 almost one in five want to make their kids take English lessons, surely a business opportunity for you all!
Read the rest of this entry »

infoPLANT recently released the results of an opinion poll they conducted into what correspondence courses people were currently taking. They used their usual method to gather respondents, namely a publicly available questionnaire through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode menuing system. Over a week at the end of September and the start of October 4,819 self-selecting people completed the survey successfully. 64.3% of the sample was female. Age breakdowns may be seen later.

For those wanting to better themselves in Japanese, applications for this year’s JLPT, Japanese Language Proficiency Test, have already closed, but there’s still time to apply for next February’s 漢字検定, kanji kentei, the thrice per year kanji level test, which is a fun and useful mode of study.
Read the rest of this entry »

MyVoice recently surveyed its internet monitor community to see what they were currently learning. At the start of June 13,584 people completed the private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 3% was in their teens, 22% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties. Note that “studying” covers practicing too.

I’m currently studying Japanese (obviously!), both translation and kanji; if I had any free time I’d join a Go school and do a correspondence course in ペン字, penji, which is the art of writing longhand (or cursive, or joined-up handwriting) in a neat manner. With the roman alphabet, you only have two or three strokes per character, but for kanji with up to 20 or so strokes for even common characters, methods of writing quickly but legibly are very important. My current handwriting, is a horribly unbalanced child-like scrawl. And my Japanese writing isn’t any better – I wish that statement was actually a joke!
Read the rest of this entry »

This is a slightly old survey carried out in March 2001 by the government regarding foreigners learning Japanese. Japanese language classrooms from around the country were sampled, with 581 foreigners aged 16 and above living in Japan responding to the questions. The questioning was, presumably, carried out in the native language of the respondents, but it does say that the question and answer sheet was read and completed by the respondent. Note that especially if local government classes were selected, the level of the classes would be rather low. Due to the lack of Japanese language teachers and the cost of one-to-one lessons, I think that lower-level students would be over-represented in this survey. Amongst my foreign friends and acquaintences, once we pass JLPT 3 level we tend to stop formal study.

First, Japanese language ability in various formal situations was investigated, broken down by length of study of Japanese. It doesn’t say if this means fulltime or nightschool classes, which would make a huge difference to ability, of course.

Q: In which of the following situations can you communicate in Japanese?

	All	Less than one year	One to two years	More than two years
Talking to doctor about illness	63.7%	56.2%	78.1%	88.8%
Discussions/questions with council officials, etc	50.6%	43.2%	63.5%	76.3%
Reading notices from schools or council, etc	48.9%	43.2%	56.3%	71.3%
Writing a CV	37.5%	33.5%	45.8%	47.5%
Reading work documents	28.7%	25.4%	36.5%	40.0%

Reading and writing ability seems rather too high!

Next, five situations where Japanese may be needed were rated in degrees from “absolutely essential”, “needed”, and so on down to presumably “not needed at all”. Note, this is a summary of a full survey, so a lot of detail is omitted.

Q: Do you think Japanese ability is absolutely essential in the following situations?

Exchanging greetings	60.4%
Telephoning a Japanese person	50.3%
Asking for directions	48.4%
Talking to doctor about illness	47.3%
Writing addressing in kanji	44.2%

Q: Can you do the following reading tasks?

	All	Read hiragana	Read katakana	Read romaji	Can’t read kanji but understand the meaning	Can read some kanji	Can read kanji	Can read and understand kanji	Can’t read anything	No answer
All	581	84.3%	75.2%	51.5%	15.0%	48.5%	12.9%	19.6%	1.9%	1.4%
<1 year study	370	85.4%	74.9%	54.9%	17.6%	47.0%	11.1%	16.5%	1.9%	0.5%
1-2 years study	96	88.5%	79.2%	50.0%	11.5%	47.9%	19.8%	22.9%	2.1%
>2 years study	80	86.3%	85.0%	43.8%	7.5%	66.3%	15.0%	32.5%	1.3%

I hope that table makes sense! I think if there had been some more distiction made between understanding kanji and reading (ie, knowing the Japanese pronounciation) kanji it would have been better, as Chinese (and Koreans to some extent) have a distinct advantage over other foreigners in that respect.

Q: Can you do the following writing tasks?

	All	Write hiragana	Write katakana	Write romaji	Write a few kanji	Can’t write enough kanji by hand but can when using word processor	Write sufficient kanji	Can’t write at all	No answer
All	581	84.0%	73.7%	49.1%	49.4%	9.3%	17.6%	2.9%	1.4%
<1 year study	370	84.6%	74.1%	51.9%	45.9%	7.8%	17.8%	2.4%	0.5%
1-2 years study	96	89.6%	78.1%	50.0%	57.3%	11.5%	17.7%	3.1%	1.0%
>2 years study	80	86.3%	78.8%	43.8%	68.8%	11.3%	16.3%	1.3%	1.3%

Q: What do you hope will be the outcome of your studies? (Multiple answers, top five answers only presented)

Become able to speak Japanese	59.0%
Can increase number of friends	55.9%
Be able to get to know neighbours	36.8%
Can understand TV programs better than before	32.2%
Be able to write my name	31.5%

Q: How will you use the results of your studies? (Multiple answers, top five answers only presented) Not sure on the exact difference between this and the last question!

Speak Japanese	71.1%
Study lifestyle and culture	54.2%
Increase number of friends	47.7%
Talk with everyone	43.7%
Deepen understanding of the differences in culture and viewpoint	30.8%

Uggh, that was impossible to translate! I had to skip the last couple of tables as they made very little sense to me. There looks as if there ought to have been another document describing the survey questions in more details, but I can’t see it at all.