A survey by Professor Hiroshi Ono (communication science) and others at the National Institute of Multimedia Education, an independent administrative agency in Chiba, found that university students’ Japanese proficiency has declined, with students possessing only junior-high-school-level Japanese ability accounting for 6% at national universities, 20% at four-year private universities, and as much as 35% at junior colleges.
[産経新聞 2004/11/24]
This is utterly astounding. Perhaps this is what “beyond imagination” truly means. Because I grew up abroad, I may unexpectedly have learned to use reasonably proper Japanese. Still, this problem may not be limited to young people. Even among people close to my age, there are countless examples of email messages whose intended meaning is completely incomprehensible, or in which honorific and humble forms are hopelessly mixed together. People who can write proper prose are truly only a tiny minority. This is probably one piece of evidence that something is wrong with Japanese language education in Japan.
It is certainly easy to imagine that people’s vocabularies are shrinking.
While the number of hours devoted to Japanese classes in compulsory education is declining,
there is email that “changes language” (especially mobile-phone email),
and media such as television and magazines overflowing with shallow language.
[漂える島 2004/11/24]
Recently, I have been exchanging haiku and tanka by mobile phone. On mobile phones, where typing is troublesome, these forms of Japanese poetry, which convey a message in a short space, are ideal. Emoticons are fine, but could we not make it popular to communicate what we want to say through waka? If we did, I think both the vocabulary problem and Japanese language proficiency would be solved in no time.
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