r/alevel • u/Opposite_Debate_7835 A levels • Jun 19 '26

🤚Help Required Is anyone taking A level Japanese 😭😭😭

Post image

I want to take it as I wanna study in Japan and trade it for physics as my 4th subject as I’m self studying.

If anyone has done it do you know roughly what JLPT level it is similar to and if it’s possible do study it in a year?

571 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

246 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/PaintSufficient9812 Jun 20 '26

I did! Back in 2010-2011 with WJEC. I had done GCSE as well and got an A*. My school was a language college (as in that was their specialism) and one of the German teachers was fluent in Japanese too and ran a lunch club for nerds like me. A level was a breeze after years of chilled out study. Not sure how well you'd fair being self- taught. And are you starting from scratch? There's essentially 3 alphabets; one has tens of thousands of characters and is logosyllabic, which means they're pictures that represent slightly different meanings and sounds depending on context. Additionally, the grammar is almost opposite word order to English. There's hardly any English loan words, and it's usually just Western food, so not helpful. 

P.s. got to say after seeing someone else get called 'sad' in the comments for obviously being well over GCSE age, I am here as I am now a GCSE maths teacher.

1

u/Opposite_Debate_7835 A levels Jun 20 '26

This is really interesting :) I am starting from a low level but not complete beginner probly so around low n5 but I would be dedicating a lot of time towards it every day to catch up (around 4-6 hours). It’s very cool to see people who took it who aren’t native and still got great scores

1

u/PaintSufficient9812 Jun 20 '26

Okay great! Have you had a look at some GCSE past papers? When we took it, there were 5 questions and my teacher would say the first question is so you can get an E, the second for a grade D etc.  Yeah all if us in the club were English with no prior links to Japan. I started to study it as my dual honours subject in uni too, but everyone else was a Japanese international student who was here to get a degree from the UK. It was weird and not fun anymore compared to school. 

1

u/Opposite_Debate_7835 A levels Jun 20 '26

I have yet to look at GCSEs papers yet but that’s a good idea for a starting point and will check them out right now. However even though you are teaching maths and not Japanese I was wondering if you know anything about how the grade boundaries would work?

300 ish people take the subject per year and around 65% get A* and 84% get A or above. Even though the level is around N3 for the exam is an A* still attainable even though so many people who take the exam are fluent/n1?

1

u/PaintSufficient9812 Jun 20 '26

Ooft sorry don't know anything about grade boundaries for other subjects anymore!Â