I was going through N1 vocabulary and found it strange that Massage (in katakana) is an N1 vocabulary. Is that weird?
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There’s actually quite a bit of katakana vocabulary in N1 curricula!
This is partly because the vocab is more niche compared to more common loanwords like ケーキ (how often do you talk about massages anyway? Unless you work as a masseur/se, not that often. Most katakana vocab at the advanced level is industry-specific, not broadly applicable),
partly because katakana words are not necessarily 1-to-1 mappings to their equivalents in their source languages ( スマート comes to mind),
and lastly because the majority of JLPT students are not native English speakers, and so these words are new to them even if they’re not new to us.
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The fact that it’s a katakana loanword might make you think “this is easy vocabulary”, but this distracts from the fact that “massage” is simply not a word you need everyday. It feels right at home at N1 (or later) to me.
Basically, if we can forget the fact that it’s katakana for now, I agree with “massage” being in N1. And the Japanese word for “massage” simply happens to be マッサージ.
I would also advocate stopping looking at this from an anglocentric point of view. Majority of people on earth are not native English speakers and therefore there are many people who don’t find such katakana words intuitive, not to mention that some of them may not be intuitive even for native speakers.
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I don’t really agree…there are plenty of words classified as N5 or N4 that we need much less in everyday life than some N1/N2 words (actually ive never understood these vocabulary classifications; they don’t seem to be based on difficulty, frequency, or themes, sooo…).
For example, 「真実」or 「頭痛」, which are classified as N1, seems far more important to me than 「産婦人科」, which is classified as N5. Or the fact that 「お湯が沸く」is N4 when 「熱湯」is N1, it’s maybe just me but sometimes those classifications feels weird (·•᷄_•᷅ )
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OK, but that’s a discussion about whether those words are positioned correctly. If OP’s question was simply why マッサージ is in N1 and not whether it should be positioned before 産婦人科, my opinion is still that it’s positioned fine.
This is probably the best point. メス (scalpel) is in N1. This katakana loanword simply means knife in my primary language. Mega easy for me, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the fact that N1 is an understandable place for the Japanese word for scalpel.
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Not everyone who learns Japanese can speak Englisch, so for some people the word might be pretty obscure. Also how often do you talk about Massages. The JLPT is also not without critique and imo pretty flawed (like 出来る「できる」 being an N4 word although it is extremely common and important).
Yeah, there are plenty of those words, two examples can definitely be something like テト and ソ連.
The first is cool, the second I don’t like and wouldn’t recommend.
No, I probably has spent to much time on r/languagelearningjerk in recent days, so now it’s sipping through me to this community…
I’m sorry guys… probably
By the way, in my language English loan word ノウハウ now means “innovation” so while doing N1 mock test I failed it.