|
 |
rewire’s 日本語 (& miscellany) adventures | ||
Tags: Intermediate | Japanese | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4973 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 73 of 81 24 February 2014 at 11:16am | IP Logged |
|
I haven't seen a post here in ages... I was looking at my post above from August and it really confused me lol.
Glad you're back. What's the shadowing book? I know what shadowing is but didn't know they had shadowing books per se. I barely passed the N3 last year (phew!) but I hope to not be so close this year with n2. I'm redoing the core from the beginning myself. I read about how you are writing a 作文 about your trip and have had a real Japanese tutor for a while. I think you might have passed the N3 or been close. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 74 of 81 03 March 2014 at 6:13am | IP Logged |
|
@kraemder Oh, I never saw a notification for your reply, sorry! Yeah I didn't realize I'd been gone
that long either, hah. I got this book from White Rabbit. It starts off really simple, just like "はい" and "そう", but ramps up until full sentences and short dialogue. I'm still doing Unit 1 right now. Congrats on passing the N3! The problem for me is that my vocabulary is still limited, so I end up guessing a lot... it's possible I'd have passed had I taken it, but if I had I think it would have been pure bizarro luck, hah. I can often cross off at least one answer as obviously wrong, but I seem to often second-guess myself and pick the wrong answer since I am not sure which one is right. I'm going to try it this year, unless I end up feeling way better about where I am by registration and think I have a shot at N2. Edited by rewire on 03 March 2014 at 6:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 75 of 81 03 March 2014 at 6:44am | IP Logged |
|
So I ran into some problems with the Japanese Kindle store. Detailed offsite, but the
short version is: if you're using the Kindle store without living in Japan, be aware that they might ask for proof of legal residence and restrict your access if you can't provide that proof. That aside, I'm still pretty happy about having the HP ebook on the Android Kindle app with the J-E dictionary. I know I should be moving to a J-J dictionary sometime, but I tried the J-J dictionary first, and since I can't look up words easily in the definitions, I can see that easily annoying me and making me quit reading. I'll have to be careful about not looking up words just for the hell of it, though. I notice I do that sometimes with rikai, where I look up one word and then forget I can read others and start looking up everything even if I don't need to. But as I mentioned in my tumblr entry, I'm already finding the dictionary useful for getting pronunciations of words I don't know. Much quicker than trying to use a kanji dictionary. I might set the "Read Real Japanese" book aside again, because I keep not really wanting to read it anyway, and just read HP instead. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 76 of 81 12 March 2014 at 5:35am | IP Logged |
|
Almost done with Core 2000 and finally started Core 3000. Half of Step 1 was either stuff I knew or stuff I sorta
knew and is pretty easy to distinguish... the other half is a bunch of words I can tell will be helpful for listening to or reading news, but is going to be a struggle to get to stick in my head. I kept mixing up a lot of them while reviewing. Had someone ask me how long I've been studying Japanese today, which is always a weird question for me. I'm never sure if I should tell them 20+ years (first time I went to Japan and learned hiragana), ten years (started college courses), or three years (when I started taking self-study seriously). I feel like the three years of college were only about one year's worth of actual studying because I wasn't very focused and managed to graduate with literally zero practical skills at all despite earning good marks in class. But it's a little weird to say I've only been studying for three years when I've been kind of off-and-on studying since I was a kid. Even though aside from the vague jumpstart I had from college, the past three years are really where the bulk of my ability has come from, so really that's the most relevant. Maybe I should just tell people "many years" if it comes up again, ahah. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 77 of 81 03 July 2014 at 11:12pm | IP Logged |
|
I found out a week or so ago that this year there will finally be a Colorado JLPT testing center in Boulder. So now I
have no excuse-- when registration opens I'll definitely register for N3. I took the online practice questions the other day and ... the ones for N4 were super easy, which was awesome, I've never felt like they were actually easy before so now it's for sure that I'm closer to N3 than N4. But the N3 I didn't do so well with... not sure the exact percentage I got correct because it didn't actually give me a total score and I thought it was going to so I didn't keep track manually, but it was probably only like 50% or less correct. Lately I've been chatting with another (日本語を勉強するアメリカ人の) friend online for at least a couple minutes almost every day, which seems to be helping out a lot with production. I still talk to my native-speaker tutor at least once a month, but though there's certainly mistakes neither of us catch or things we can't figure out how to say, it's been almost more helpful talking to my friend. Probably half just because it's regularly putting me in a producing- Japanese headspace. But it's also kinda nice not feeling like I need to rush to say something in real time so I can try to actually say things correctly instead of just whatever comes to mind first, wrong or right, and also the back and forth corrections we do for each other help some grammar points and vocab sink in. And since it's a conversation with a friend I am already comfortable with, I have less time staring blankly, not sure what I should talk about. I keep not actually doing iKnow/Anki/any sort of vocab study, though. I've been tired and stressed a lot from work so it's kind of dropped off and have been stuck on Step 1 of Core 3000 for months. Would kinda like to fix that, especially since I think a lot of what I'm lacking about N3 stuff is lack of vocabulary again. I had to guess on too many of the words to make proper sense of the questions/answers. But there's still a lot of external stuff going on in my life so we'll see if I can figure out a way to cram in more study time or not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 78 of 81 22 July 2014 at 7:30pm | IP Logged |
|
I ended up finally figuring out how to get other dictionaries on the Kindle without wiring it up to my computer to
overwrite the dictionary file... apparently you have to access it through the dictionary selector found while reading a book, not the dictionary list in the settings, which is where I kept going. So that's cool. I keep being bored trying to read HP, though. It was never my favorite book series to begin with, and the very beginning of it bores me in English. I might try to skip ahead a couple chapters and see if that is less boring for me. But I kind of keep just getting distracted by reading other things instead. Finally set up a second amazon.co.jp account (and vpn, to be on the safe side, as supposedly what triggers the account lockdown is ordering too often with an IP outside of Japan) so I can buy ebooks. Mostly for manga, so I set up that account through my iPad and picked up the first volume of 放浪息子. Also, once again, picked up some of my old year 3 and 4 textbooks and started reading some of the material in there, too. Trying to get back into doing SRS somewhere, but mostly I'm just reading/watching things/sometimes talking to people. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 79 of 81 03 February 2015 at 7:38am | IP Logged |
|
Last year was so busy, I basically did not do a whole lot and haven't been good about logging what I did do.
But I did sign up for the JLPT N3 last year and took it and just checked my scores today... I failed, but only by 2 points overall if I'm reading the scoring correctly. It seems like each individual section got a passing score? Which is actually a lot better than I was expecting. I think my problem was that my lack of instantly-available vocabulary held me back, so my reading speed on the test was very slow, and since I wasn't able to take the time to attempt to understand questions/answers thoroughly via context clues, it lead to a lot of guessing (about 50% flat-out guessing just to try to answer at all is what I estimated, which seems to be reflected in my score). And I did significantly better on listening than reading/vocab, which is ... fascinating. It's so different from where I was when I started this log. I'm debating whether or not this means I should aim for the N2 this year after all. It seems like it's probably pretty simple to push myself into actually passing N3 this year, and I'm already working more with memrise to try to boost my vocabulary to that end. But given how much that impacted me, I don't know if I'll be able to expand enough to reach N2-level by December or not, since I'd also need to study grammar for N2. I suppose I might reevaluate mid- year and see how much I've been able to study and how much it looks like I'll be able to. Various things kept me so busy and exhausted last year I didn't have a lot of time/energy to focus on Japanese, but many of them shouldn't be factors this year, so I might be able to push harder. Anyway, I just wanted to log the milestone, as good-and-bad as it is. (I'm excited, honestly, but also know it's not a pass, so it's still a bit bittersweet.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4973 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 80 of 81 03 February 2015 at 6:02pm | IP Logged |
|
Sorry you didn't pass the JLPT and that's a really close score. The N3 for some reason has a higher standard
to pass.. You need a higher score than the other ones. If you're going to focus on vocab anyway it doesn't sound like you need to decide on N2 or N3 for a while since the vocab lists for those two in particular overlap a lot. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
