My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread

Hi guys,

I just wanted to drop in a note since I haven't posted in a while. It's been a lot of fun for me to read what everyone's been writing.

I guess I'm writing because I had a lot of recent changes to my study practices.

I finish my last 5 lessons with JOI and liked it so much I decided to go ahead and immediately buy another 5 lessons. It's funny, because when I started I bailed on my first two lessons. I have no explanation as to why, I guess it was just hard to jump back into it.

I found the lessons to be much easier than I remember. I guess that might be because my vocabulary has improved, as well as other things. Also, it's nice to work on grammar again. And I've always found drilling new grammar with a teacher to be the easiest way to learn it. So there I am.

Speaking of vocabulary, for a while now I have only been adding in 2 (!) cards a day. As you can see here, I am now spending 1/2 as much time doing anki vocab reviews as I was a year ago:



This seems similar to a trend I had a while ago with studying kanji - when I went from production to recognition:



Overall, I am happy to be spending less time with Anki. The additional free time has gone into reading the Japanese graded readers and watching shirokuma.

Also, overall, I feel like I am in very good shape with my Japanese. I am spending less time studying it with anki and spending more time with books and tv shows. In fact, here's a clip of all decks anki time:



Since this is a JLPT N3 thread, I should also say that this transition, for whatever reason, makes me feel much closer to my goals thank I've felt before. I always said that I would take the first half of the year "to myself" before cracking the JLPT books again. I mentioned before that I felt like I completely tanked the reading and listening portions of the exam. Even if I flub them again, I can still read "real" 30 page stories and watch 30 minute anime episodes without subtitles!