g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5990 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 81 of 137 06 July 2013 at 11:33am | IP Logged |
Unicom released a complete set of books for N3. They are clearly titled with N3 so there's no
chance you will buy the wrong level by mistake.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4673 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 82 of 137 06 July 2013 at 1:38pm | IP Logged |
2002 JLPT 3
文字 91% (49/54)
読解 81% (96/119)
聴解 37% (10/27)
聴解 is still a problem for me, although it should be a passing grade.
(For this paper there was a mark scheme attached, so I followed that).
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4673 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 83 of 137 06 July 2013 at 9:53pm | IP Logged |
Last set of papers before the real N4 test.
2001 JLPT 3
文字 87% (65/75)
読解 62% (74/119)
聴解 48% (13/27)
I think I'll just do some gentle revision now and plan my day in London (well, the bit of
it that won't be inside SOAS anyway!).
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4673 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 84 of 137 07 July 2013 at 11:42pm | IP Logged |
I've been to London and back.
Adaname Shobo doesn't open until midday, but I did make it to JP Books. There's a
huge range of stuff there. I picked up みんなの日本語 中級 I & II, except for the
2nd 本冊 because they only have the "with CD" versions. The girl at the counter claimed
that only the "with CD" versions exist. I also picked up 新完全マスタ N3 文法 and also
the corresponding So-Matome (mostly because I just don't know which one I'll take to).
They both seem to be very densely packed with Japanese, but if they significantly
overlap with みんなの日本語 I'm only out £30 :-)
It's worth noting that you can sign up for a discount scheme which gets you 10% off but
you have to do it in store and you need photographic ID and proof of address: I
didn't have the latter so I couldn't do this. Still well worth the trip. I hope to be
back sometime to pick up native reading material rather than textbooks!
Having spent my budget there didn't seem to be much point in dropping in to Adaname
Shobo but I'll try it out next time if I can get the timings right.
On to the exam. The もじ ごい paper was mostly straightforward. There were bits that
stumped me, mostly vocabulary that I didn't know. The 文法 paper was harder. Oddly
enough the reading went quite well. The final question (with a printed timetable and
then questions about who can do what and when) seemed far too easy. That makes me
suspect that I missed a subtle twist. One of the reading questions had a sneaky twist
that changed an answer in para 1 by the time you'd read para 2. The particles part at
the beginning went less well, but I hope to have made up the lost ground with the
readings. The listening test was unusual in that occasionally they seemed to speak a
Japanese that I actually understood. At least I think I understood it :-)
Overall I can't be sure that I've passed. I'll stick my neck out and say that I think I
did well in the first paper, hopefully passed the second one and the listening was
hopefully a pass (but I may have just scraped through). The problem with judging the
listening is that it's so easy (for me) to miss a vital piece of information.
Anyway, what I've learned is that I need to stretch the vocabulary well past the point
that I'm supposed to reach, I need to internalise the grammar a good deal more and I
need to work on my listening comprehension. I knew this last one already and the
intensive listening and shadowing I've been doing have helped a lot; I just need to
manage to fit in much more of it.
Whatever happens with the result, the test has served it's purpose: it's kept me
focussed on Japanese, given me specific targets to work towards and shown me that
there's clearly a lot more to do still!
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4673 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 85 of 137 07 July 2013 at 11:44pm | IP Logged |
g-bod wrote:
Unicom released a complete set of books for N3. They are clearly titled
with N3 so there's no
chance you will buy the wrong level by mistake. |
|
|
Nearly forgot to say: the only thing I didn't find were the Unicom books. The layout only
leaves the spines showing and there were soooo many different books and my time
was so limited ...
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4673 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 86 of 137 09 July 2013 at 1:43am | IP Logged |
Some goals for the rest of July. I still have plenty to finish off around the house so
I'm going to take that into account and not try anything too ambitious for this month.
1. Keep up the Kanji reviews at Reviewing The Kanji.
2. Keep up with Anki reviews. Learn 50 new words each week. (This is in addition to the
new N3 memrise vocabulary).
3. Keep the memrise N4 course watered. Plant 100 words each week.
4. SRS and learn three JPOD101 Lower Intermediate lessons each week.
5. SRS 5 NHK Easy News articles each week.
6. Keep the audio going. I'll switch to listening to Lower Intermediate dialogues (pure
Japanese rather than lessons with some English) after the first week or so. The delay
is just to give me time to build up some lessons that I should know reasonably well.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4673 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 87 of 137 11 July 2013 at 9:37pm | IP Logged |
I think that my main task for the moment should be to power through the N3 vocabulary
as quickly as possible, so I'm going to concentrate on that rather than Anki. I'll keep
Anki going but I'll probably just have one or two catch-up sessions each week and I'll
not learn any new vocabulary through it for now.
I've managed to SRS 5 JPOD101 LI lessons this week already, and that's going to be my
secondary focus: I want to get through S5 and S6 thoroughly so I can start to listen to
the dialogues (rather than the lessons) on the commute. That does mean that Anki won't
be completely turned off as I may have to allow the new LI lesson vocabulary to bubble
through (tags rock!).
I'll probably relegate NHK Easy News to a lower rung of the ladder and use it for light
relief.
Once I get through the N3 vocab I'll switch the vocab focus back to Anki. Once I get
through the LI S5 and S6 lessons (and maybe the S3 ones I started a while ago), then
I'll switch back to Easy NHK for intensive listening and new vocabulary.
Incidentally, I have noticed that the memrise N3 course contains a few words that are
definitely on the N4 or N5 courses (四 for example!). In addition, because I'd already
studied some other courses and I've picked up a few hundred words from other sources
(books and JPOD101 lessons mostly), I think that I probably already know maybe 10% of
the words on the course. It's also shorter than I thought I remembered: ~1300 words
rather than ~1700. So I think once I've got through it I'll need to find a few other
sources of N3 vocab from the net and cross check, or maybe pick up the 完全マスタ ごい
book and work through it.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4673 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 88 of 137 20 July 2013 at 9:15pm | IP Logged |
N3 vocabulary is coming along nicely - I'm about 700 words in now, so that's over a
third of the way (not counting kanji!). I can't remember half of it the next day but I
can remember some of it, more and more each day. So that's good.
I need to work intensive listening and shadowing more into my schedule, but I have
various commitments until towards the end of August, so I may not get around to it
before then.
The other major piece of information from the N4 work was that I really need to
work harder on particles. I'm all at sea with them. I don't know why, but it is
something that I should be able to sort out. In principle, all I need to do is learn
which particles go with which verbs. How hard can it be :-) I've looked around for a
suitable Anki deck and I don't see one that looks right. I can find various decks that
have the sentences from various particle books, but I think I'd do better with a cloze-
delete style of deck, where I fill in the missing particles. Have I missed an obvious
deck somewhere or do I need to consider modifying one of the existing ones myself? Is
there a better way to learn particle usage?
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