Dr. “Birigirl” Tsubota’s personality test

The film “Flying Colors” (ビリギャル), released last year (2015), is about a girl who originally has no friends and horrible grades, but works hard and drastically improves her grades. The film is based on a true story, which is captured in the novel “学年ビリのギャルが1年で偏差値を40上げて慶應大学に現役合格した話” (rough translation: “The story of a last-place girl who raises her grades by 40 points and gets accepted into Keio College”) by Dr. Nobutaka Tsubota (坪田信貴).

While this movie seems like it might be fun, I haven’t actually seen it so I won’t be commenting on it. Instead, this post is about an online personality test designed by the author of that story, Dr. Tsubota.

The test is called “人間は９タイプ・判定アプリ”  (~ “People come in 9 types – evaluation app”) and is comprised of 36 multiple choice questions.

If you are into personality tests it is a lot of fun, and even if you aren’t it is a unique way to practice your Japanese reading skills and learn new words.

The questions are generally very short and the answer choices are the same each time. I’ll go over the first question, and add my translation to give you a head start.

Q1:「おせっかいだ」と言われることがある。 (“People sometimes call you ‘nosy’)

１．すごく当てはまる (“Applies to me to a large extent”)

２．当てはまる (“Applies to me”)

３．どちらでもない (“Neither applies nor doesn’t apply to me”)

４．まったく当てはまらない (“Doesn’t apply to me at all”)

Notice that, as typical in Japanese, even though the word “you” is not listed even a single time, both the question and answers all indirectly refer to “you”.

If you aren’t sure what a few questions mean, just put “どちらでもない” for those.

When you are done, the results are summed up across different personality types, and you are given one or more personality types that match your answers.

I was given 楽天的 (Optimistic) as my closest match, and 研究者 (Researcher) as the second. “Optimistic Researcher” has a pretty nice ring to it, and I can’t say I disagree (:

Here is the test. If you take it, let me know what the result was!