世論 What Japan Thinks

In November last year, DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed via an internet-based questionnaire 3,604 people (1,620, or 45.0% male) regarding what foreigner they thought was good at Japanese.

To most people who have never been to Japan this probably sounds like a really bizarre question to ask, but with Japan having only about 2% non-Japanese residents, and with the vast majority of these actually being born in Japan and often bred as Japanese (Google for zainichi), the number of non-native speakers of Japanese is very low, and of course Nihonjinron tells the Japanese that we gaijin cannot learn the language properly. (Actually, Japanese is relatively easy for basic speaking fluency, as most verb and noun conjugation is regular, the core vocabularly is quite small, and pronunciation is mostly straightforward. However, the intricacies of polite language and kanji (although kanji is not excessively difficult, there’s a lot of it to learn!) inhibit most people from getting to perfect mastery.) In fact, being told you are good at Japanese by a Japanese person is more often than not お世辞, oseji, flattery, bordering on the line of patronisation, which I suspect is the reason that the third-placed person is there.
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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.

Looking at this survey on Japanese and their language, performed last year in January and February, it seems that three out of four of the 3,000 Japanese surveyed would normally read my blog’s title as yoron rather than seron! Only 18.9% plumped for seron whilst 73.6% went for yoron, with the remaining 7.5% either use both readings equally or just don’t know. Further investigation indicates both readings are perfectly acceptable, so one is neither more or less correct than the other.