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TAC 2014, tabidachi 旅立ち - dampingwire | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 17 of 118 05 January 2014 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You say "studying" but you mean "planning" :-) let's see how things pan out over the next few months! One of the things that I found very helpful with TAC 2013 was setting monthly goals: that meant that instead of sitting down and wondering "what shall I do now" I usually had a list of things that I really should do. On top of that, tracking my time use with a spreadsheet meant that I could see whether I was spending too much time on "easy" tasks and neglecting other areas. So this time I decided to pick a goal (JLPT N3 in July) and write down everything that I probably need to cover in order to feel comfortable going in. I threw in some other things too for good measure (books, films, shadowing).
Me neither. Last year showed me that vocabulary isn't as frightening as it seems. JLPT N1 supposedly needs a vocabulary of ~18000 words. That seems huge - actually it probably is huge. But over 5 years it's only maybe 3600~4000 year. So maybe 80 per week? Two years into my voyage and I probably have nearly 4000 words, and I was most certainly coasting at the beginning. I expect that what will become harder is estimating my vocabulary: I doubt that I'll find or create an N1 vocabulary course - by then I expect to expand vocabulary almost exclusively by reading (news on the web, books etc.) Assuming you can stand to do 30 mins of SRS a day, vocabulary actually seems to become easier as you go on. Even in a language like Japanese without many obvious English/Romance cognates, the words do build on each other.
At the moment about 50% of the so-called N2 vocabulary seems to be words that I already know. What I'm less sure of is how many of them I've seen before on the N5/N4/N3 courses as opposed how many of them come from JapanesePOD101 lessons or NHK Easy News or みんなの日本語. The kanji deck is just for N5/N4/N3 words in kanji form, so that I get to recognise the vocabulary that I need for the test in the form that I'll see it on the test. So I won't be learning new words there, I'll just be learning a new way of recognising them. Anki is currently waiting for me to review ~75 kanji vocab and ~100 words in my two main decks. That hasn't changed much over the last few days. It's taking ~40mins to cover those two (including the sentence deck and the corePLUS deck ... but they're stable as I'm not introducing new items into those at the moment). That's a manageable load at the moment. If things change then I'll have to slow down the vocabulary flood somewhat or maybe re-evaluate the targets. I don't need N2 vocabulary for the N3 test, I'd just feel a lot more comfortable with it available to me. My weakest skill is listening, so watching j-drama and shadowing lessons are probably more important than amassing new words. So if the reviews do grow out of hand, I'll stop adding new words. As for memrise.com, right now I've not gone back to it. When it was mostly unusuable for a week or so, I imported the N2 course into anki and I've not been back. As I'm always on the look-out for otherwise dead time, I think what I may do is try to use memrise at work during the lunch break. That way I can keep the N3 course alive. It's not essential though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6563 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 18 of 118 05 January 2014 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for the detailed answer, your approach seems very good indeed. That situation where you sit down and wonder which activity you should do is very familiar to me. I try to avoid it as much as I can but I also don't want to make a specific list of activities that must be accomplished because that will make my studying less fun. But if it works for you then that's great. Good luck studying for the N3 exam!
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| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 19 of 118 06 January 2014 at 11:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm going to try the official N3 practice test before signing up to see whether I'm on the right track. Sadly there's only one of those, so I can't try out a few year's worth of past papers to see where I'm weak. Although they're probably too hard, I'll try using some of the older JLPT2 papers before then (and I may get one of those books of unofficial practice tests). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 20 of 118 08 January 2014 at 1:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well it turns out I haven't found a magic formula. Sadly I'd somehow set the parent deck to allow no more than 200 daily reviews. My kanji deck took up ~90 of those a day and that limited the vocabulary deck (which is the only one I've been adding to so far in January) to ~100-150. So now that I've removed that unintended limit, my vocabulary deck would like me to get through 2000 reviews! I got through 400 tonight, but, unless I conjure up a few spare hours from somewhere, it's going to take a few days to work through the excess reviews. Luckily, since quite a bit of the vocabulary I've seen before, the reviews are going quite well, so things aren't as bad as they could have been! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 21 of 118 13 January 2014 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I ordered some graded readers last week: Volume 1: Hikoichi, olume 2: Momotaro, the
Peach Boy, Volume 3: The Inch-High Samurai, Volume 5: Shitakiri Suzume and Stories (Graded Readers) (by Teramura Teruo). The first four arrived on Friday, although I've yet to look at them. The order from Japan for textbooks also came through today so now I need to decide how to make time for Kanji in Context and 完全マスターN3聴解. KIC looks like it is going to be a lot of work, so I'll have to try it out and work out some kind of study plan that works for me and fits in to my schedule. Although I think I'll have to modify the schedule to make time somehow. I've not looked at 完全マスターN3聴解 at all yet - I'll do that tonight - but I think I'll fit it in by slowing down on the intensive listening of JPOD101 lessons that I've been doing. Ideally I'd like to put the two CDs onto my iPod and work thorugh it in the car, but I suspect that the written questions will be an integral part of each lesson, so that's probably not possible. I've put the 3 完全マスター N2 books in the cupboard at work: I certainly don't have the time to look at those at all right now and it's better to put keep them somewhere I won't be tempted. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5993 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 22 of 118 13 January 2014 at 6:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It is. But it will also take you all the way to N1, so there's no need to rush it. One day I plan to finish it too! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 23 of 118 13 January 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm glad it'll take me all the way to N1. There's no way I could rush it. A quick glance at a random "unit" in the middle suggests that it would take a minimum of 3 hours to work through a unit for "Stage 1", and quite possibly longer. Even assuming that the stages don't get harder, that's 9 hours per unit (for all three stages, i.e. everything). There are 156 units so that's ~1400 hours. That's about the amount of studying I manage in a whole year. Realistically I could maybe do 2-3 hours a week of KIC studying (unless I dropped lots of other things). So that's maybe 8 years or so. Wow. Maybe I've been overly conservative, but it's clearly going to keep me going for some time to come! I'll probably try to work through units over the next few weeks just to get a feel for how the book works, how long things take and how good it is a cementing in some of the vocabulary and kanji recognition. Even at the very start of the book some of the example vocabulary is new to me - luckily no the essential stuff in red print, but certainly enough of it that I can see that if I make it to the end I'm going to know those 9000+ words quite thoroughly! I've also had a quick peek at the 完全マスター N3 Listening book too. As expected, I'm not going to be able to tackle that one just by listening in the car. It does look as though it will be worth my while making time for it in my study plan as it's the only structured approach to the listening exam that I've seen. Time will tell whether it helps or not. Edited by dampingwire on 14 January 2014 at 12:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 24 of 118 15 January 2014 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My weekly log update is here.
My Anki snafu has taken a little time to cure and that time has come out of my N3 grammar work so far. I've covered 4 lessons rather than 7. Every 7th lesson is a review of the previous 6. I've decided to leave the review to the following week, so I have longer to "forget" (i.e. I'll cover W1D7 after W2D6 and so on). Depending on my results I may go back and review earlier lessons at the expense of ploughing on with the later ones. The intensive listening is on track. However, now that I have the 完全マスター N3 聴解 book I may decide to work through some of that in preference to further JPOD101 listening lessons. My article reading is on target if I don't count the weekend days, but I think I should try harder to read so I will try and get through 7 articles this week. I did set myself a goal of 12 books and 12 films or series by the end of the year but I realise now (and should have realised earlier) that that's easily gamed. For example, the readers I recently ordered are quite short to start with and each story appears 3 times: in Japanese, in Japanese with a gloss and in English. I've not counted but there are probably no more than 20 A5 pages of Japanese in each one. "A Homestay in Japan", even though it is a relatively simple text, is 20 units, each of which has at least 3 full pages of text. Similarly, 日本人の知らない日本語 is 12 30m episodes, so 6 hours of viewing. A film will typically be 1-1/2 hours, maybe 2 hours at most. So I think I'm going to redefine my goal as 36 hours of Japanese viewing, without subtitles. If I go back and watch with subtitles (or watch with subtitles first) or just choose to watch again, only the first time will count towards my goal (although all of it will count towards my study time). I'll come up with something similar for books but it'll have to be some sort of page count and a page will have to be defined as approximately some number of characters. I'm not going to count characters for each page in each book, but I'll come up with a rough characters-per-full page for each book I read and count pages and half pages as I go along. I'll probably use AHIJ as my base and work out a new yearly target based on whatever that turns out to be. By my count I have 8 books that could contribute towards this target, so I'll need to cast around for some more I think. Anyone have any suggestions? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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