Month / July 2019

by Inhae

Book review: 『下町やぶさか診療所』by Yo IKENAGA

About the book

Title: 『下町やぶさか診療所』(したまち やぶさか しんりょうじょ)
Author: Yo IKENAGA (池永陽)
Published by 集英社文庫

I bought this book in Japan, partly because I loved the cover, partly because I wanted to read something else than mystery novels.

Setting

Rintaro MANO, alias “大先生”, is working as a doctor in Asakusa, Tokyo. His prices are cheap, and it is no secret that people come to him to talk about their problems in life rather than to get a medical consultation.

We meet Rintaro’s patients and friends, and share their lives and fate through 7 short chapters of around 50 pages each.

Review

First of all, I loved this book, and I would easily recommend 『下町やぶさか診療所』. However, even though the doctor’s office is a central place in the novel, I don’t think you can call this novel a medical fiction. Rintaro does little more than applying his stethoscope to his patients’s chest. It is true that most of the stories show how people deal with diseases, but it is more about their daily life and moral choices than about the disease itself or medical treatments.

I think that the choice of a doctor as the main character is mainly a pretext to tell the stories of the patients who come to Rintaro’s clinic. This structure reminds me of another novel I have read in Japanese: 『向田理髪店』by Hideo OKUDA (review here). The clinic, as well as the barber’s shop, is a place where people of the neighborhood come to complain about their life and problems.

But while『向田理髪店』 was a heartwarming, light and funny novel, 『下町やぶさか診療所』is… the opposite. The novel deals with heavy topics, difficult choices and is at times very sad. But the author is a great story teller, I loved the characters right away and felt involved in their story.

As for the Japanese level, I found this novel surprisingly easy to read. I was bracing myself for complicated descriptions and an avalanche of medical terms, but there was none of these. The novel is mainly based on dialogues, which makes it really easy to read, there are not a lot of characters and almost no descriptions.

When I write about the books I have read in 2019 at the end of the year, I know for sure that 『下町やぶさか診療所』will figure among my favourite books.

by Inhae

Taking the JLPT N1 for the first time!

I have taken the JLPT N1 on July 7th (2019) for the first time, and I was not very surprised by my performance… I think that I might pass, but I also feel that I need the remaining months until December to increase my vocabulary and progress in listening.

Report on the July test

Vocabulary/Grammar

I found that the vocabulary part was not as hard as the drills I have been doing recently. I think that the Korean textbooks and drills that I use tend to be very demanding so that students are well prepared.

During the real test on Sunday, I was surprised to see that the vocabulary part was not that hard. I don’t mean that I answered everything right, of course, there were a lot of words that I didn’t know, and I picked several answers randomly. But I also felt that a little more work on vocabulary will be sufficient to ensure a good mark in that section.

The most surprising part of the whole test was the grammar section. I felt that all the grammar points that I had learned for N1 were more or less useless… I expected the test to challenge us on those grammar points (the ones that are labelled N1, and that you can find in the So-matome), but it was not really the case.

Before the test, I had been working with the 『日本語パワードリルN1文法』and these drills stay very close to the textbook So-matome. Each question clearly identifies one of the grammar patterns you have learned in So-matome. If you know your patterns well, it is very easy to answer the drills.

Duritng the test, however, I didn’t find many questions relative to N1 grammar points. The questions were more about your general knowledge of Japanese grammar. It is hard to explain, but instead of knowing 150 grammar points, it would have been best to have a very good and thorough understand of Japanese grammatical structure. More than identifying grammar points, you have to understand perfectly what each of the answers mean, and choose the right one to fit in the sentence.

As a consequence, you could say that the grammar part was easier than expected. I may be wrong, but my feeling during the test was that a student preparing for N2 could answer the questions. On the other hand, this is not what I prepared for, so I felt both confused and unprepared.

I think that going through textbooks of grammar is necessary but not enough. You need to be a lot in contact with Japanese to gain a sense of what is right and false. I felt that this N1 grammar section was not about how many grammar points you know, but more about how well you understand Japanese.

Reading

I found the texts of the reading section not too difficult, except for one or two. What I really found hard were the questions.

When I took N2, I would read the text only once, then read the questions (I always read the text before the questions). I remember that I could answer the questions without returning to the text. This means that one answer was obviously right and the others wrong.

I tried to do the same for N1, but it didn’t work. I read the text once slowly, but when I read the question and the answers, I found that several answers could be the right one. So I had to return to the text and re-read several passages before I could choose one answer. And even then, I was not sure if I had picked the good one because sometimes, two answers were obviously the right one??

Listening

Listening is my weak point, so there is no surprise here. I could not understand some of the dialogues (this means that I wasn’t sure of what they were talking about), and even when I understood the dialogues, I would often miss the crucial information to answer the question.

The most difficult part by far is the part where you hear the questions and answers after hearing the dialogues. I think that I picked everything randomly in this section! 

I also find the listening section more stressful because it seemed to me that all the other test takers in the room were choosing their answer right after the audio had stopped playing while I was still trying to remember what had been said in the dialogues!

Time

Time was not a problem as I had ten minutes left at the end of the vocab-grammar-reading section so I could go back to some previous questions and double check my answers.

How to improve and get a better score in December?

I will take a two-weeks break, and then I will be back to my JLPT preparation. My goal is to get a good score in December. (Actually, my real goal is to improve my Japanese, and I use the JLPT to achieve this goal.) So how should I study during the four remaining months?

Vocabulary

There is no shortcut here, the more words you know, the easier it will be to pass this section. I will continue to learn vocabulary as I have been doing, looking for example sentences in the dictionary and systematically learning the words in context, which means, adding sentences to Anki instead of words only.

Grammar

Instead of trying to learn even more N1 grammar points, I should focus on reviewing the N2 and even N3 grammar and be sure that I feel at ease with it. I will also try to be more attentive when I am reading in Japanese, and analyse why I don’t understand a sentence. I think that this kind of exercise will be useful to pass the grammar section of the JLPT.

Reading

I don’t know what I can do to improve my reading, because it was not the texts that I found difficult, but the questions. I am sure I would find them as difficult if they were in English! (And I wouldn’t be surprised if native speakers of Japanese said that the reading section of the JLPT N1 was difficult…) Maybe I should buy the Shin Kanzen textbook for reading and study with it?

Listening

Here again, no shortcut: I must listen to more Japanese! I feel very motivated to take on the challenge and try to improve my listening level before December. I don’t think that the dialogues use words that I don’t know, I think that the problem is that I just don’t recognise the words that I am supposed to know. Practice is key!

This is it for my JLPT report! I don’t know if I will pass, but I am confident that I will be able to pass in December if I study accordingly until then!

I will be away for two weeks, and I will be back to studying Japanese on Monday 22th! (And I will certainly post a book review in the meanwhile!)

by Inhae

Book Review: 『ガーディアン』by Gaku YAKUMARU

About the book

Title: 『ガーディアン』
Author: Gaku YAKUMARU 薬丸岳
Published by 講談社

Gaku YAKUMARU is a popular author of mystery novels and thrillers. Recently, one of his novel has been a huge best-seller in Korea (where I live). The novel is 『誓約』 , and I have read and liked it. When I was in Japan for a short trip earlier this year, I saw that Gaku YAKUMARU had released a new mystery novel, 『ガーディアン』whose topic and setting was very appealing to me.

Setting

The story takes place at a middle school, and while the topic of the novel is school bullying, there surprisingly seems to be very little bullying problems in this establishment. We follow several students and professors, in particular professor AKIBA, as the school year progresses and secrets get revealed.

Review

『ガーディアン』 is a great school mystery novel. I loved reading it, it was easy to feel involved in the story of each characters, and it was easy to read in Japanese.

I am interested in the topic of school bullying in Japan, and I think that novels are a good way to try to understand this social issue. 『ガーディアン』has an interesting way of tackling this topic and leaves some questions open as to what is right and wrong. I also liked the end very much.

Apart from the social issue it tackles, 『ガーディアン』is also a good mystery novel. I often took my book to read 20 pages (it was my daily goal) and ended up reading 50 or more (it does not sound much, but it is when you read in a foreign language!).

As for the language level, I found this novel easy to read: there are a lot of dialogues, and I found no difficult part or description. However, there are a lot of characters (both students and professors), so I highly recommend to make a list. While it is not essential to understand the story, it is best to know in which class and year a student is, as well as who their main professor and friends are, so here again you should take notes while reading.

This is the second novel I read by Gaku YAKUMARU, and I liked 『ガーディアン』much more than the other, 『誓約』(review). 『誓約』 had maybe more suspense to it, but I find the story of 『ガーディアン』more interesting and the plot more credible, so I would recommend this one over 『誓約』 . In any case, Gaku YAKUMARU is becoming one of my favourite authors of mystery novels!