My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - Printable Version

My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - Printable Version

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RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - Meriden - 2016-05-26

Returning to Read Real Japanese, does the fiction book contain horror stories? What about the essays one?

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - EratiK - 2016-05-26

(2016-05-22, 5:20 pm)ariariari Wrote: So I just did something I hadn't done in a while. After watching my weekly shirokuma episode I decided to watch it with subtitles. I felt like I just didn't get enough of what was going on, and felt bad about it. (After all, it's just a kids show, right?)

You shouldn't feel bad really. Personnally I almost never watch something without subs, and while I reckon Shirokuma is one of the easiest anime out there I always end up looking up words (and sometimes a lot, especially when he does a lot of puns); it's much harder to look stuff up without subs (granted when you watch without subs understanding everything is not the goal).

Meriden Wrote:Returning to Read Real Japanese, does the fiction book contain horror stories? What about the essays one?

No, the essays one talks about marriage, tempo, teaching, prize money, 9 to 5, Tian'anmen, hapiness, and the narrowness of Japan.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-05-26

(2016-05-26, 3:53 am)EratiK Wrote:
(2016-05-22, 5:20 pm)ariariari Wrote: So I just did something I hadn't done in a while. After watching my weekly shirokuma episode I decided to watch it with subtitles. I felt like I just didn't get enough of what was going on, and felt bad about it. (After all, it's just a kids show, right?)
You shouldn't feel bad really. Personnally I almost never watch something without subs, and while I reckon Shirokuma is one of the easiest anime out there I always end up looking up words (and sometimes a lot, especially when he does a lot of puns); it's much harder to look stuff up without subs (granted when you watch without subs understanding everything is not the goal).

Thanks so much (to you and everyone who said something similar).
A great example is
常勤パンダ

The main character keeps on calling one of the other panda's in the zoo that. It was only when I saw it in English subs that it clicked, I looked it up, saw that it meant "full time employment". It's now an easy card for me to get right.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - RawrPk - 2016-05-26

Hello fellow N3`ers! I recently felt productive today and I guess it was a good thing esp with the topic of trouble listening to watching unsubbed shows.

http://nihongo.hum.tmu.ac.jp/mic-j/listen3q/index.html
Made an N3 Listening Anki deck based on this N3 Listening quiz site. I believe this is ok to do since they allow the option to download the content so I thought making a deck would be good. It essentially almost looks identical to the Interactive Quiz site expect those without photos, I added a generic photo of the "1,2,3,4" selection as I didn't want it to be barren. There are only 32 cards so you can take your time with this. Smile

Google Spreadsheet
Anki Deck

I'm sure I made the deck correctly. Let me know if there are any errors and I will refer back to the Interactive Quizzes to compare and fix it. I hope this helps!

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - RawrPk - 2016-05-26

(2016-05-26, 4:10 pm)ariariari Wrote:
(2016-05-26, 3:53 am)EratiK Wrote:
(2016-05-22, 5:20 pm)ariariari Wrote: So I just did something I hadn't done in a while. After watching my weekly shirokuma episode I decided to watch it with subtitles. I felt like I just didn't get enough of what was going on, and felt bad about it. (After all, it's just a kids show, right?)
You shouldn't feel bad really. Personnally I almost never watch something without subs, and while I reckon Shirokuma is one of the easiest anime out there I always end up looking up words (and sometimes a lot, especially when he does a lot of puns); it's much harder to look stuff up without subs (granted when you watch without subs understanding everything is not the goal).

Thanks so much (to you and everyone who said something similar).
A great example is
常勤パンダ

The main character keeps on calling one of the other panda's in the zoo that. It was only when I saw it in English subs that it clicked, I looked it up, saw that it meant "full time employment". It's now an easy card for me to get right.

Don't feel too bad. I actually watch the majority of anime with Eng subs. Ep 15 of shirokuma especially since I was so lost.

A word that bothered me in both the anime and when I read the manga was 自然体. I thought it meant "be yourself" but it really meant "natural posture or stance (esp. in judo) relaxed, open attitude" or how I'm interpreting it: "act natural". This is what Handa said to Panda when he first got the part time job at the zoo. I'm sure there are plenty of words I still don't know but this one stood out because I assumed the wrong meaning based on instinct and it failed me lol

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-05-27

Man oh man. I just finished the first 内容理科 question in "drill and drill" book and wow was it hard! I only got 1 out of the 3 questions correct, despite totally understanding the gist of the passage.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-05-29

Quick update: I finished chapter 13 of my kanji book this morning (only 1 mistake!), so I'm keeping in line with my goal of 1 chapter a week this month.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-05-29

And another one: I just watched my weekly shirokuma episode. For the second time I watched it once without subtitles, and then with English subtitles. It really does help me a lot.

I also think that, while I'm planning to continue prioritizing my kanji book until next weekend, I'll probably cool it next month. Now that I'm more comfortable with my grammar book, I suspect that I'm best served by just adding 1 new grammar card a day next month, or something like that. We'll see. But overall that's my impression.

Yesterday I got to have a long 1-1 session with a native speaker, which was fun. I haven't done that in a while.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-05-31

So today I finished adding in all the cards from chapter 2 of my grammar book. I decided to start the next section, which was the review questions from the first 2 chapters.

My results are very mixed. On the one hand, I can clearly create sentences for all the grammar points and understand them. And clearly this is useful. On the other hand, I only got 5 of the 9 questions correct.

Has anyone else had trouble with answering grammar questions from the JLPT, despite having a good foundation in the actual points being tested? If so, how did you overcome it? I feel like the most common answer when issues like this come up is "read more", and maybe I should just do that.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - SomeCallMeChris - 2016-05-31

(2016-05-31, 8:05 pm)ariariari Wrote: Has anyone else had trouble with answering grammar questions from the JLPT, despite having a good foundation in the actual points being tested? If so, how did you overcome it? I feel like the most common answer when issues like this come up is "read more", and maybe I should just do that.

Just reading more is what I did... but people who pass the test *quickly* also review the grammar points for all the questions they miss in practice tests and make sure they understand what the correct answer is and why. That is what review questions and practice tests are for, after all - to identify your weak points so you can correct them.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-05-31

(2016-05-31, 8:40 pm)SomeCallMeChris Wrote:
(2016-05-31, 8:05 pm)ariariari Wrote: Has anyone else had trouble with answering grammar questions from the JLPT, despite having a good foundation in the actual points being tested? If so, how did you overcome it? I feel like the most common answer when issues like this come up is "read more", and maybe I should just do that.

Just reading more is what I did... but people who pass the test *quickly* also review the grammar points for all the questions they miss in practice tests and make sure they understand what the correct answer is and why. That is what review questions and practice tests are for, after all - to identify your weak points so you can correct them.

Thanks Chris. I think that at some point I'll have to work 1-1 with a teacher on this. I sense some italki in my future. On my own I can't make the leap between how the points are presented in the text and how they're being tested. And there's too many mistakes for me just, say, post here and get help.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - yogert909 - 2016-05-31

I haven't used this much because I'm not as intent on passing tests as I am on using the language, but perhaps jgram.org might be more targeted than "just reading more". There are grammar lists by jlpt level where you can click on the grammar point that you got wrong and go to a page with multiple example sentences containing the grammar pattern.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-06-01

Yeah, so I slept on this and decided to try and branch out with my reading. The questions were really technical (at least for me)! Like, should it be 間 or 間に here, should it be dictionary form here or continuous. I don't want to harp on the details of any particular question because there were so many problems, but you can get the picture.

I actually do quite a bit of reading, but I don't think that it's the right kind of reading. For example, I read a lot of NHK Easy, but as other people have mentioned, they don't really use a lot of N3 grammar points. So it's still useful, because it's still reading (how could it not be useful?), but it's not exposing me to natural usage of the grammar points that are "new" to me (should it be ところを or ところで here?).

For a while I was using the graded readers, but there was some kind of jump in the series where I just didn't have the vocab to proceed.

Anyway, luckily my library has a lot of Japanese manga. I just reserved new issues of yotsuba and shirokuma.

At the very least, if I continue what I'm doing, I should see a nice bump in my grammar score next year (how could I not?). But again, it's always a bit disappointing to get a bad score on something, and stare at an exam and feel kinda clueless, which is what happened yesterday.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to posting my monthly stats on Sunday and writing out a plan for the next month.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - RawrPk - 2016-06-01

(2016-06-01, 11:55 am)ariariari Wrote: Yeah, so I slept on this and decided to try and branch out with my reading. The questions were really technical (at least for me)! Like, should it be 間 or 間に here, should it be dictionary form here or continuous. I don't want to harp on the details of any particular question because there were so many problems, but you can get the picture.

I actually do quite a bit of reading, but I don't think that it's the right kind of reading. For example, I read a lot of NHK Easy, but as other people have mentioned, they don't really use a lot of N3 grammar points. So it's still useful, because it's still reading (how could it not be useful?), but it's not exposing me to natural usage of the grammar points that are "new" to me (should it be ところを or ところで here?).

For a while I was using the graded readers, but there was some kind of jump in the series where I just didn't have the vocab to proceed.

Anyway, luckily my library has a lot of Japanese manga. I just reserved new issues of yotsuba and shirokuma.

At the very least, if I continue what I'm doing, I should see a nice bump in my grammar score next year (how could I not?). But again, it's always a bit disappointing to get a bad score on something, and stare at an exam and feel kinda clueless, which is what happened yesterday.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to posting my monthly stats on Sunday and writing out a plan for the next month.

Perfect timing to pick up on reading again too! It's a new round of tadoku (full month) so it will be a fun way to motivate you to read more. Anyone is welcome to join. Just need a twitter account.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - pm215 - 2016-06-01

(2016-06-01, 11:55 am)ariariari Wrote: Yeah, so I slept on this and decided to try and branch out with my reading. The questions were really technical (at least for me)! Like, should it be 間 or 間に here, should it be dictionary form here or continuous. I don't want to harp on the details of any particular question because there were so many problems, but you can get the picture.

I kind of feel like for that kind of thing reading isn't a very efficient way to attack it, because it's quite easy to just glaze over the detail (for instance for 間 vs 間に you can generally read quite happily without knowing the distinction, because the meaning in any particular sentence will be obvious from context), but JLPT questions love to check if you know the distinctions and which verb form goes with what, and so on. I think grammar is one area that can benefit quite a bit from "drilling" (anki or otherwise), just because there aren't that many "grammar points" to deal with (unlike words). It maybe depends whether you feel the things you're getting wrong are "no idea why that is the correct answer" or "looking again at the grammar explanation I see why it is the correct answer, I just didn't have it in my brain"...

If you do want to ask grammar questions here I don't think people mind answering them (I certainly don't); you could always start another thread if you don't want to clog this one up with them. Others have done that kind of thread before.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - SomeCallMeChris - 2016-06-01

(2016-06-01, 2:28 pm)pm215 Wrote: I kind of feel like for that kind of thing reading isn't a very efficient way to attack it, because it's quite easy to just glaze over the detail (for instance for 間 vs 間に you can generally read quite happily without knowing the distinction, because the meaning in any particular sentence will be obvious from context), but JLPT questions love to check if you know the distinctions and which verb form goes with what, and so on.

It's certainly not efficient in many ways - you have to read the same expression dozens, maybe hundreds of times before you develop a sense of what 'sounds right'. On the other hand, every page you read is effectively reviewing dozens of grammar and vocabulary points.... from the recognition side only, but still. It gets the job done eventually, and you *do* have to read a *lot* to pass the JLPTN2 and N1 (not so much the N3 I think, although I never took it), because if your reading speed isn't up to par you won't be able to finish the test. It doesn't help to score very highly on only the first 60% of the test and get a zero* on the other 40%.

Still, I agree that you'll improve faster if you make a point of figuring out the grammar points. I don't know about 'drilling' them in the sense of Anki, but still. I realize having a lot of missed questions can seem overwhelming, but you can just ask …here or on another learning site... or just search the web. Just take the points one at a time.

The first result on googling "difference between 間 and 間に" has a pretty good answer, for instance.
http://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/12539/difference-between-%E9%96%93-and-%E9%96%93%E3%81%AB

*(Pedantic note... Of course you shouldn't get a zero for any section of the JLPT... if you run out of time, fill in random bubbles. Or just a single column of bubbles, or whatever bubble pattern you like... you'll average 25% instead of 0% on questions that you 'didn't answer' that way.)

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - pm215 - 2016-06-01

Agreed. Some of this shades into 'preferred learning approaches' too -- I like to build up a kind of 'scaffolding' by working on an intellectual understanding of things like grammar, verb endings, etc, and then building up the intuitive actually-know-the-language understanding over time with the aid of the scaffolding, so that's what I tend to recommend.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - RawrPk - 2016-06-01

Time for the monthly Anki stats! I put a reminder in my Calendar app so I don't forget Wink

Mature Core 2k/6k cards: 231 (today) - 187 (April) = +44
Percentages of Core 2k/6k cards: 5% Young+Learn; 4% Mature

Only did Anki reps for 6/30 days (20%). I added Anki reps in my Habitica Daily so I'm punished for not reviewing daily. I hope the fear of losing my character will motivate me to review lol

Deck life. Kinda bad for 6 months but as they say "slow and steady wins the race". I'm winning in that I am learning, but I know that if I ever want a fighting chance at N3, I will have to pickup the pace. Also, grammar. Been reading JTMW but not reviewing in any way. I have some plans though. Just need to see if it will work in my favor.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-06-02

(2016-06-01, 11:57 pm)RawrPk Wrote: Time for the monthly Anki stats! I put a reminder in my Calendar app so I don't forget

Mature Core 2k/6k cards: 231 (today) - 187 (April) = +44
Percentages of Core 2k/6k cards: 5% Young+Learn; 4% Mature

Only did Anki reps for 6/30 days (20%). I added Anki reps in my Habitica Daily so I'm punished for not reviewing daily. I hope the fear of losing my character will motivate me to review lol

Deck life. Kinda bad for 6 months but as they say "slow and steady wins the race". I'm winning in that I am learning, but I know that if I ever want a fighting chance at N3, I will have to pickup the pace. Also, grammar. Been reading JTMW but not reviewing in any way. I have some plans though. Just need to see if it will work in my favor.

Nice! Glad to see someone else posting stats. It's on my calendar for the first sunday of each month to post. (Because I literally started the day of the JLPT).

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - ariariari - 2016-06-02

Just wanted to take a minute to thank everyone who posted suggestions to me about how to deal with this problem I've been having with grammar!

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - yogert909 - 2016-06-02

I just got off a job that had me working crazy long hours leaving very little time for anki reps. So I'm currently in anki catchup purgatory with close to 2k reviews to work through and more reviews coming due every day.. Angry

I probably won't be able to add any new cards for about a month while I catch up, setting back my already set back lesson plan. To top it all off, after finishing rtk my mature kanji cards were stagnating without any increase for a month or two due to a high mature fail rate.

Fortunately, the project I'm on now seems like it will be cakewalk for the next month. So I'll have some time to power through the reviews and spend some extra time with my kanji deck.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - RawrPk - 2016-06-02

(2016-06-02, 12:48 pm)yogert909 Wrote: I just got off a job that had me working crazy long hours leaving very little time for anki reps. So I'm currently in anki catchup purgatory with close to 2k reviews to work through and more reviews coming due every day.. I probably won't be able to add any new cards for about a month while I catch up, setting back my already set back lesson plan. To top it all off, after finishing rtk my mature kanji cards were stagnating without any increase for a month or two due to a high mature fail rate.

Fortunately, the project I'm on now seems like it will be cakewalk for the next month. So I'll have some time to power through the reviews and spend some extra time with my kanji deck.

I stopped adding new cards on my Core and RTK deck too as of today. I have a few reasons for this: 1) I'm behind and want to clear it out before adding again, 2) trying to take this June tadoku round more seriously by putting more time into it, 3) Finish reading JTMW by the end of next week so I can move onto Nihingo Challenge grammar, 4) starting a new job soon and I have no clue what my schedule is (new restaurant opening) and 5) summer classes.

So I have myself a pretty busy month ahead. With proper time management and daily exposure to Japanese of any kind, I think I'll be alright Smile

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - FlameseeK - 2016-06-02

(2016-06-02, 12:48 pm)yogert909 Wrote: I just got off a job that had me working crazy long hours leaving very little time for anki reps. So I'm currently in anki catchup purgatory with close to 2k reviews to work through and more reviews coming due every day.. I probably won't be able to add any new cards for about a month while I catch up, setting back my already set back lesson plan. To top it all off, after finishing rtk my mature kanji cards were stagnating without any increase for a month or two due to a high mature fail rate.

Fortunately, the project I'm on now seems like it will be cakewalk for the next month. So I'll have some time to power through the reviews and spend some extra time with my kanji deck.

I could have sworn you guys - that is, yogert909 and RawPk - were both N2+ or at leasts shooting for N2!

I guess I'm the one who's crazy to attempt to go over N2+ content in my first year of study (started last year on Sep 15). So far, I've finished RTK, Genki 1-2, Erin's Challenge, and read all entries in DoBJG (srsing what's worthwile). I've also started my own vocabulary deck , which has pretty much 1k words at this point.

My goals right now are:

* Finish Core 6k by the end of the month. Not taking words in my own deck, easy katakana words that are a given, and words that I added in advance, there should be about 1k words left, perhaps 1100 or so. Taking a quick break to finish Tobira - after that, I should resume adding 50-60 words a day to get it out of the way quickly.
* Finish Tobira asap. Been using it just for reading/listening at this point (95% grammar/vocab in Anki already). Pretty much just 4 chapters left, which I could finish in 4 days.
* Go over whatever is in the Dictionary of Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar that I haven't seen yet. Assuming I've seen up to 100 of these grammar items in Tobira and in the wild, I should be able to finish this in 30-40 days by going over 10 items a day.

I want to read Planetarium before the anime adaptation comes out (next month I believe) though, since I already have it on Steam. Good thing it's one of those super short visual novels that take no more than 10 hours to finish - i.e. in English, so I still wonder how long it'll take in Japanese. I'd rather read other visual novels at this point, but this should be a good start since the length is manageable. That being said, I can already see myself adding a gazillion words to my vocabulary deck. I guess I'll just use one of those tools to quickly look up the meaning of any new words, then load up a save file afterwards in order to add those words without having to stop all the time while I'm reading.

On a side note, how did you manage to pile up so many reviews? I know input is super important, but if there's one thing I make sure to do daily with top priority, it's to review my flashcards. The system becomes so messy if you skip days that I'd probably give up on it if that happened and start focusing on maximum amounts of input to compensate for it. Not sure if "compensante" is the right word though, since that might actually be a better approach anyway. Kinda hard to know imho.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - yogert909 - 2016-06-02

(2016-06-02, 2:18 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: I could have sworn you guys - that is, yogert909 and RawPk - were both N2+ or at leasts shooting for N2!

I guess I'm the one who's crazy to attempt to go over N2+ content in my first year of study (started last year on Sep 15).

Nope, I'm not sure if I'll even be ready for N3 this year let alone N2. I'm kind of taking it slow and not really shooting directly for JLPT although passing N3 would be a feather in my cap at some point. I'm more into understanding media which I'm finally feeling is within reach.

N2 in a year is really ambitious. I'm jealous that even seems like an option to you. I've been at this over 3 years and it's going at a glacial pace. I don't really think languages are my forte, but I'm going to do learn this language if it kills me.

(2016-06-02, 2:18 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: On a side note, how did you manage to pile up so many reviews? I know input is super important, but if there's one thing I make sure to do daily with top priority, it's to review my flashcards. The system becomes so messy if you skip days that I'd probably give up on it if that happened and start focusing on maximum amounts of input to compensate for it. Not sure if "compensante" is the right word though, since that might actually be a better approach anyway. Kinda hard to know imho.

I usually have about 400 reviews that I clear every day. About 2 weeks ago, I started on a project that had me coming home at 2am and waking up at 6:30am the next day (weekends excluded). The company ordered in food for lunch and dinner so I didn't even have my usual lunch hour to knock out a few reviews over lunch. Fortunately, that job was a quick turn-around and only lasted 9 days. But 9 days is long enough to rack up 2k reviews. fortunately I found just enough time to finish the 2 decks that I've been adding to lately, so the backlog is mostly older cards that I won't completely forget.

RE: My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread - FlameseeK - 2016-06-02

That sounds rough. But yeah, I'm not studying for JLPT either and I don't even intend to take the test this year to be honest. That being said, I've been doing is using it as a rough guideline to measure my overall progress. I guess you could say I'm trying to get a lot of coverage in advance, just so I have less things to worry about once I start breaking away from this technical/systematic approach.

I've read in the N2-N1 thread that N2 is closer to 10k words than 6k nowdays though, so I don't think I can get that much coverage in a single year by Sep 15. Maybe by the end of the year? I really don't know though, since I'm not sure how useful Core 10k would be in the end. People say N1 isn't about cramming 18k words per se; rather, learning about 10k words should be a solid foundation and then it's mostly a matter of reading until you become super fluently. So I'm not sure how much cramming even more random Core vocabulary until you reach 10k helps you reach N2 level of comprehension. As long as I'm able to start enjoying the things I like without much trouble though, I guess it'll be all fine and dandy.