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TAC 2013, Sakura 桜 - dampingwire | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Jaseur Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6077 days ago 50 posts - 51 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 33 of 137 06 February 2013 at 1:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Personally, I would just read through it as fast as you possibly can and move on to something else. It's just a textbook so it's never going to be that much fun. Actually, come to think of it, I would recommend reading something like The Handbook of Japanese Verbs instead of a textbook like Minna no Nihongo. If the JLPT is your goal then the sooner you can get onto something like the Unicom JLPT books, the better. Also, you should be learning kanji as fast as possible in order to be able to start reading real Japanese. Hope this helps. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4663 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 34 of 137 06 February 2013 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I went through MNN I quite quickly but I'm now having to go back occasionally to cover the points that seemingly didn't stick first time around. I'd like to do a better job with MNN II. I've also borrowed Japanese for Busy People II and that's an easier read but it covers far less of the grammar. I'm mostly using it for vocabulary but it's also useful for reading. MNN has only one short passage per chapter and then lots of drills. JfBP has several chunks of text to read for each chapter. The texts are not terribly challenging but it is giving me good reading practice, which I know I need.
Well speaking fluently is my goal but JLPT seems like a well defined stepping stone that will give me something to aim for and encourage me to work. I'll go looking for the Unicom books (I've just spent money on some readers, so it won't be before the summer I think).
Well it wasn't "as fast as possible" but I did learn the 2042 of RTK1 in less than 6 months last year. That's proved very useful as I've started to pick up vocabulary: at least I know what the shapes are! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jaseur Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6077 days ago 50 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English* | Message 35 of 137 07 February 2013 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm not entirely convinced that studying for the JLPT is the best way to achieve fluency (it might be better than translating patents though!). It is a nice measurable goal but I passed JPLT 1 back in 2005 and my speaking wasn't great so it's no guarantee of fluency. I guess I recommend prioritising conversation practice over cramming for the JLPT.
That's excellent, not to mention extremely fast. If you can blast through RTK at that kind of speed, I wouldn't have thought MNN and JfBP would take you much time. Still, I don't know all the details of your study situation. Anyway, let me know if you have any questions about the JLPT/Unicom books/whatever. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4663 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 36 of 137 07 February 2013 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm certain it's not ...
... it is that, and it means that I'll do at least some Japanese almost every day. I'm still at the stage where, even if I put together a sentence properly, I probably won't understand the answer. Even with written drills, where I can spend plenty of time reading through a sentence, I can find things where I know all of the words and yet still cannot extract the correct meaning. If I cannot do that from a written sentence I'm probably going to struggle with any kind of meaningful communication. Next to speaking, listening is my weakest skill. I trip over the first unknown and by the time I pick myself up again, I've lost the thread. I found the N5 listening test quite tough; I've just tried the official N4 listening test and, while there was plenty that I missed completely or misunderstood, there was also a decent chunk that I managed to catch. So things are getting better. I think once I get my vocabulary up to scratch and have the basic grammar under my belt (say by the end of MNN II) then I hope I'll be able to put together some meaningful sentences.
When I initially started with Japanese I thought I'd just "learn to speak" and skip the whole writing side because the kanji looked so hard ("2000+, you've got to be joking ..."). I quickly realised that just wasn't going to work for me: I learn through repetition and I seem to need written cues. So I started RTK, doing 5-10 per day. A few months in I realised that I'd hardly dented the mound to be learned, so I upped the pace a little and the sky didn't fall in. So then I pushed for ~50/day: my retention rate for the next day's reviews was bad (maybe 50% or so IIRC) but they did stick in a short while. Once I'd finished I looked over the forums at RTK and there are people who shot through RTK1 in 4 weeks. I wouldn't have believed it before I started, but now it seems entirely reasonable. All you need is the motivation to keep going and enough time available to spend in front of your SRS software. When I go back and cover RTK3 I think I'll just blast through as many as I can each day and let SRS fix everything up. As @kraemder said a few posts ago, RTK is easier than vocabulary. I'll add to that that (at least for me) vocabulary is easier than grammar. I'm wondering if I should find some way of building myself an Anki grammar deck to cover the points in MNN I and II. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 37 of 137 07 February 2013 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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@Jaseur I think the format of the JLPT has changed significantly since you took the test in 2005. Being able to read and listen well are now much more important than cramming all the kanji, vocab and grammar. It made prepping the N3 a bit more stressful (not sure what I was supposed to study, exactly) but it turns out if you have good comprehension skills it should be enough to get through the test. I even managed to pass N2 and I'm pretty sure I don't know 1000 kanji yet.
The Unicom books are great though, particularly the reading and listening ones. Once you're done with MNII etc the N3 reading book would be a great next step. I can relate completely on the feeling of knowing every word in a sentence and yet still not being sure of the meaning! Have you started looking at the passive yet? That adds another layer of complexity to the "who is doing what to who" problem! My advice would be break things right down, paying particular attention to how the particles relate to the verb and which elements of the sentence (e.g. subject) may be dropped. If you're still seeing a tutor, I would bombard them with questions about tricky sentences. For listening, is the problem that you are not picking up vocab etc that you already know, or is it just down to general lack of knowledge? If it's the former, I found shadowing was surprisingly helpful. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 38 of 137 08 February 2013 at 2:40am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Speaking of shadowing, how do you do it, g-bod? I find it extremely difficult to try to say what I'm hearing, while at the same time anticipating what is coming up next, all at normal speaking speed. I've experimented with pausing after every line and repeating, but I'm sure that is not shadowing.
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| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 39 of 137 08 February 2013 at 9:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I can't do blind shadowing either. I always work with a transcript. To start with I just listen and repeat, and once I'm confident at that I move on to speaking at the same time as the audio.
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| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 40 of 137 08 February 2013 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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@g-bod - OK, I was confusing shadowing with blind shadowing. It seems to be a lot easier with a transcript at first. :) I'll try that sometime.
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