The calculation method of Japanese difficulty

The calculation method of Japanese difficulty

1. Introduction

2. Extraction of Difficult Words

3. The Judgement of Level of Difficulties

4. Counting the Number of Episodes

5. Conclusion

1. Introduction

The level of difficulty of the Japanese in anime works are calculated based on three factors- “the number of difficult words”, “the number of episodes”, and “the level of the difficult words”. Anime with a large number of “difficult words” has a higher difficulty for Japanese learners. This includes detective works, works with brainstorming elements and relatively more lines, as well as those about wars and politics. On the other hand, Slice of Life and love stories have less difficult words and thus they are easier for learners. In addition, anime with a high “level of difficult words” is not suitable for learning purpose; for instance, those with a huge number of specific names and professional language in the military or medical field. Definitely you won’t even be able to catch the difficult words and check them if they appear frequently in a 23-minute episode. Yet, what happen if difficult words come up occasionally? The impression of the same 100 difficult words in 13 episodes are undoubtedly different from those in 26 episodes.

Therefore, I aim to calculate the level of difficulty of Japanese in anime works here on this site using the formula “number of difficult words” / “number of episodes” x “level of difficult words”. The value of adding the difficulty level to the number of difficult words per episode is considered as the level of difficulty of Japanese. For example, in “Celestial Method”, the values of the three factors are as follows. So, the difficulty level is hence “21” as in 32 terms / 12 episodes × 8th grade ＝ 21.3 ≒ 21

• • The Number of Difficult Words- 32 terms
  • The Number of Episodes- 12 episodes
  • The Level of Difficult Words- 8th grade

I are going to explain the calculation of the “number of difficult words”, “difficult word level”, and “number of episodes” in the following.

2. Extraction of Difficult Words

Different sounds come and fly out in one single 23-minute episode. The opening and the ending song, chats, noises, music, sound effects, and lines of the characters. To extract difficult words, it is crucial to extract the lines of characters only. Furthermore, it is necessary to decompose the lines into words and extract only difficult words. It might be possible to catch all the lines manually and break them down into words, but it is not realistic at all when I have a large number of anime.

Therefore, I have developed a program that helps to extract only the necessary difficult words out of the different sounds using the AI technologies of speech recognition and morphological analysis. The extraction of “difficult word”s was, especially a hard task. Judging “リンゴ” (りんご, apple) as a simple word and “邂逅” (かいこう, encounter) as difficult then extracting only the latter is extremely difficult indeed. As the result of trials and errors, I succeeded ensuring a certain level of quality by adopting the JLPT vocabulary list as the master information of the judgment criteria for the program. I have received a lot of advice from my fellow researchers and friends over the internet. Acknowledgments to those involved are here- thanks a lot!

The program shows the number of difficult words as a parameter when I input an animation work into the IN parameter. AI technologies were tuned and optimized, and the accuracy is guaranteed by using “teacher data” (the correct number of difficult words) of 300 anime works. Besides, the teacher data refers to the result when I myself watched 300 anime, listened to all the lines, decomposed them into words, and extracted difficult words. I should mention that as a result of this, I have become an anime otaku (maniac) as a by-product.

3. The Judgement of Level of Difficulties

After extracting difficult words successfully using the program, it is then necessary to evaluate the difficult word level. There are multiple types of difficult words- intermediate, advanced, and super advanced. Moreover, while some anime characters speak like we do, some others use dialects, and some speak in a unique ways, such as Tsundere (initially temperamental and sometimes hostile before gradually showing a friendly, caring side over time) and Chunibyo (teens who have delusions of grandeur). Hence, I decided to evaluate the extracted list of difficult words and the way the characters speak in a comprehensive manner, and divide the difficult words into five levels,

• • Elementary School Level-5th grade
  • Junior High School Level- 8th grade
  • High School Level- 12th grade
  • University Level- 16th grade
  • Professional Level- 20th grade

The difficult level of works such as “Chi’s Sweet Adventure” that mainly involves conversations between elementary school students and kittens is regarded as elementary school student level, 5th grade. In “Fate / Zero”, grown characters talk in an ancient way so it is evaluated as the professional level- 20th grade.

4. Counting the Number of Episodes

Everyone can count the number of episodes without problems as you might simply check that on the internet. However, some works do need special attention- there are short ones with just 5 minute or 15 minute in one episode while there are anime with episodes lasting for 120 minutes like a movie.

As a result, I set a standard on this site that one episode lasts for 25 minutes. Short anime works with four 15-minute episodes are regarded as having two episodes. Long ones like 120-minute movies are counted as 5 episodes.

5. Conclusion

As captioned above, I calculate the difficulty level of anime works on this site using the formula “number of difficult words” / “number of episodes” x “difficult word level”. The calculated Japanese difficulty is set in the item “Japanese Difficulty” of Anime Recommendations. You can also sort the works by their Japanese difficulty by clicking on the item.

The relationship between the “Japanese Level” and “JLPT” items on the right side of the “Japanese Difficulty” item is as follows. JLPT learners should find the table below helpful.

[Japanese Difficulty Japanese Level JLPT]