How hard is Japanese B HL? I've taken JLPT

[noodleboy987]

What the title says..

And I've taken japanese language profeciency test N3. I kind of want a comparison. If I was confortable with the language test, will this course be super easy for me? Similar level? I don't know because the school I go to at the moment doesn't offer Japanese B.

[cricketcrazynerd]

i dont think any course in ib especially at high level can be super easy, but it wont be as challenging as the others probably for you then

[TykeDragon]

I don't know how proficient that test is... But I took my GCSE a year early and got an A* with no problem, but I find Japanese B SL incredibly difficult. You need to know several hundred kanji to get by. To be fair, the speaking and written papers aren't that bad and I get 6s in those, but paper 1 messes you up. You basically need to be able to read a full Japanese article and answer reading comprehension questions for paper 1. Don't know how much trickier HL is - but SL is challenging enough!! Was a huge step up from GCSE. How fluent are you?

[noodleboy987]

Ah I see. I've been taking French as my second language in MYP and been studying Japanese further outside of school.

Anways, level of fluency... uh...

Oral - can have a casual conversation pretty easily

Writing - grammar wise fine and in terms of the amount of kanji I know, probably around 600-700

Reading - the main problem would be kanji I can't read. But my vocabulary isn't the most amazing either..

Listening - I can watch anime and understand the majority of it

[TykeDragon]

Then I think you'd certainly be fine in Japanese B SL, with that amount of kanji See I can probably do around about 500, but still those reading papers are more than 50% unknown to me! Try checking out some past papers? Apart from that, I think you'll find orals and the two writing papers to be fine.

However, perhaps opt for SL and not HL - in HL you need to read complex japanese literature in the extra lessons, and the exams are harder - write a few hundred more characters per essay, more harshly marked, reading paper more complex, and so forth.

[milk out of nose]

In my school several kids that are native speakers take that class. But unlike Japanese A I think that the B focuses a lot on Kanji and technical things so if you can work hard you can do well.

[TykeDragon]

Hmmm... from what I can say for SL, this is what is needed, just anticipate extra literature-understanding and enhanced versions of all of these qualities for HL:

- Confident speaker. Need to be able to improvise responses to questions on the topic you've been studying, and be able to use interesting grammar/vocab without drying up.

- Good at recognising and remembering kanji for reading and writing!!!

- Good at remembering grammar rules. (Ie grammars like sugiru and nagara use masu stem not plain form as opposed to conditionals and opinions, and variations between i/na adjectives

- Being able to quote a japanese text to answer a question. Yes for paper 1 you'll be required to support an answer with a text reference. Also, the written assignment requires sound understanding of advanced texts as you use unseen sources. These sources are not written by IB/teachers - they are found online as real past japanese articles!

- Essay writing skills! For SL you need to be able to write at least 500 characters, for HL 800!!!

If you don't look at more than one or two of these and think uh-oh that would require a LOT of practice and shoddy work, then you'll struggle.

Ganbatte!

Edited December 6, 2012 by TykeDragon