dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4668 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 17 of 91 04 January 2015 at 12:26am | IP Logged |
This week has been a bit of a lazy week so far, but that's OK. I'll start the serious
work next week :-)
Apart from RTK, Anki and a little J-Drama, I've mostly been looking at 新完全マスター N2 文
法. I've decide that, in addition to finishing off the book, I'm going to start from the
beginning again, this time trying to thoroughly learn the grammar points and also work
through the exercises. I'll aim for 1 Chapter per week to start with and see how things
go from there. At the moment I've had plenty of spare time as I've not really done any
reading to speak of and only a little Japanese of any sort this week, so the grammar
hasn't had to fight for time with anything else (other than general merriment).
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4668 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 18 of 91 04 January 2015 at 12:31am | IP Logged |
Nieng Zhonghan wrote:
I was told that the Japanese course is one of the best available
among Pod 101 series. |
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I think that JapanesePOD101.com was the original site and all the others came about
because of the success of that first site. Over the last ~10 years they've put together
over 1000 lessons. All the levels (usually) have a pure dialog track available, but by
the time you get to the Upper Intermediate, the bulk of the lesson chit-chat is in
Japanese too. The only lessons I've never listened to are the Advanced ones, which are
in the form of a blog, usually.
Nieng Zhonghan wrote:
I am going to use the Chinese, Korean and German versions this
year for shadowing and
other purposes. Hopefully it will work with me. |
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I'll be interested to hear any comparisons you may care to make. I'm not currently
planning to get into any Chinese language or Korean, but German is on the horizon, so
that might be interesting.
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TimmyTurner93 Groupie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3670 days ago 45 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese, Japanese
| Message 19 of 91 05 January 2015 at 4:47pm | IP Logged |
Just stopped by to wish you good luck team-mate. I'll probably end up reading all your
previous logs so expect a lot of random posts.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4668 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 20 of 91 05 January 2015 at 6:07pm | IP Logged |
TimmyTurner93 wrote:
Just stopped by to wish you good luck team-mate. I'll probably end
up reading all your previous logs so expect a lot of random posts. |
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Thanks. We might even both be at SOAS this December!
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TimmyTurner93 Groupie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3670 days ago 45 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese, Japanese
| Message 21 of 91 05 January 2015 at 6:37pm | IP Logged |
dampingwire wrote:
Thanks. We might even both be at SOAS this December!
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Haha hopefully
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4668 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 22 of 91 06 January 2015 at 1:23am | IP Logged |
Last week was quite slow language learning wise: I just decided not to try to squeeze
oo much in before the holidays were over.
I'm trying to get back into Japanese this week.
I've already set reading goals for January, but I think next month I'll set myself a
time target rather than a page target. I'm now going through some of the Japanese
Short Stories stories for the second time in less than a month and I'm finding it
helpful. I'll probably jump back to A Homestay in Japan one more time, but after
that I think I'll alternate between JSS and intensive reading of イタリア幻想曲. I have
just found a Japanese version of The Little Prince so I'll try to squeeze that
in somewhere too.
Over the past few days I've been getting back in to grammar study. I'm approaching this
on multiple fronts. In all cases I'm making electronic notes (I always end up losing
paper ones!) which also means that revision is quite straightforward.
I'm slowly trying to catch-up with みんなの日本語中級, which I go over with my tutor most
weeks. I'm currently making notes for the chapter that we're on and I'll work backwards
from there as time allows. Obviously I'll be keeping up with future lessons too.
The bulk of the notes are going to be made from 新完全マスター N2 文法. This is obviously
going to take some time, but when I did this for Chapters D, E & F I found that a
reasonable fraction of the points were already covered by existing notes, or I just
needed to mildly tweak the existing notes to handle a new case. Effectively this means
I'm going to start Part 1 of the book again, whilst still continuing through to the end
of Parts 2 & 3?). That's OK: I think I certainly need the revision.
I never made proper notes for 新完全マスター N3 文法 last year, so I would like to do that
this year. I can see from the TOC that I do have what seem to be notes for most of the
grammar points in the first 12 chapters of Part 1, but that's probably only 60% of the
book. I also haven't ever properly checked that the notes I have and the book actually
correspond, so I may be completely missing some usages. This will also present a good
opportunity to go through the exercises and properly mine the vocabulary.
I'm also going to work through 日本語総まとめN3文法 and 日本語総まとめN3文法. I suspect that
most of these will end up being covered by one of the other books, this will probably
be mostly a review plus a chance to go through the somewhat meagre exrcises. (I can't
complain too much: 総まとめ does mean "roundup" or "summary" so it's even telling me
that it's The Big Fat Quiz of The Year rather than a serious tome :-)).
I hope that this will test and improve my vocabulary, show me how much I really
remember of N3 (and older) grammar and also help me with consolidating the N2 grammar,
at least a passive knowledge of it.
Anyway, it's too late to frazzle my brain with more grammar tonight, so it's time to
spin up another J-Drama.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4668 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 23 of 91 06 January 2015 at 1:30am | IP Logged |
Just before heading off to watch J-Drama, this thread distracted me
and I ended up watching a few language related youtube videos :-)
That lead me to this book:
Quote:
Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self-Study Course and Reference |
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has anyone read this? Can anyone recommend it or describe its contents?
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4668 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 24 of 91 20 January 2015 at 12:59am | IP Logged |
Looking at my kanji deck I see about 3600 words to learn. At my current pace, that's
about 5 months of steady work.
If I cut that down to just words from the みんなの日本語 series, the 新完全マスター series
and the books I'm reading, then it becomes a more manageable 100 words, or maybe 2
months.
The one thing that's missing from that deck is the bulk of the remaining N2 vocabulary,
which would be about 3000 more words. However, a reasonable fraction of that, say 50%,
is probably already in there, or doesn't need to be recognised as kanji (but does need
to be known with furigana ... that's OK, that's what my other deck is for). Throw in
another 2 months for that.
So from a vocabulary perspective alone, I might be able to tackle N2 in July.
What about grammar? I'm on track to finish reviewing the 新完全マスター N3 grammar, by
just past the end of February; this time I'll have completed all of the exercises, so I
should at least have an idea of what percentage of that grammar I know reasonably well.
If there are no glitches, that would leave me about 4 months to try to consolidate the
N2 grammar. That sounds possible too.
That would leave reading and listening. I've yet to get going with reading at
lunchtime. I really need to start to pick one NHK News article (or similar) each day
and work through it in depth, perhaps producing a translation and getting some of those
reviewed. I've found that process quite helpful with the 新完全マスター N2 reading
exercises. It will still be tough to get my reading speed up to where I think it will
need to be, but at least I'll have a reasonable amount of practice done.
Listening has always been my worst skill. Well, speaking is probably my worst skill,
but that's not tested :-) I'm trying to get some intensive listening and shadowing doen
with the JPOD101 Upper Intermediate material and I'm also trying to watch as much drama
as I can. However, the latter is down from last year as I'm putting quite a bit more
effort into reading. I think I'll just have to wait and see where I think I am when
April rolls around and I need to think about enrolling.
Of course, this is N2 and, from what I've seen, the number of places doesn't appear to
have been exhausted as quickly as the N5 and N4 slots go. So I can probably afford to
wait until the near end of the registration period before deciding whether to take the
plunge or not.
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