Last year as I was studying for N4 I kept on wanting to be able to read NHK Easy News. I kept on wondering "how far away" that goal was. A lot of people I know were in the same situation.

Well, last week I happened to have magically been able to read thru several articles for the first time. I say "magically" because the last time I tried to read an article on that site (I don't remember when) I could only read a few of the titles. As for the articles, there were just too many words I didn't know to get anything out of them. I felt that I was using a dictionary too often to feel that I was reading at all. I just got frustrated and quit. But all of a sudden I seem to be magically on the other side of the language barrier and it's a heck of a lot of fun.

To help other people who wanted to know how much farther they have to go, I thought that I'd post some stats.

In terms of JLPT level: I passed N4 in early December and now it's late March. I scored 67/120 on the "Language Knowledge" section with a break down of A on vocab and B on grammar and reading. At that point I still couldn't read the articles at all. I've taken a lot of lessons and added a lot of vocab since then, but it's only been 3.5 months.

In terms of Anki stats:
*vocab: 3,569 mature, 517 young+learn.
*RtK Kanji: 504 mature, 271 young+learn, 79 suspended+buried.

Hopefully this helps some people.

I should also mention that, as they say, when one door closes another one opens. What I'm saying here is that for the time time I've been able to enjoyably articles on the site and and discuss them with my Japanese friends in Japanese. Not that I can read them all, not that I can read them without consulting a dictionary, etc.

Congrats and thank you for posting your observations.

I have been mostly able to get the gist of NHK Easy News articles but since I haven't passed any JLPT exams yet, it was interesting to me to know how those two correlate

Ariaaria thank you for telling us your direct experience! Could I ask you a couple of questions?
So, do you think reading NHK Easy is a good reading practice for N4? And what about the audio? Do you think it is good to practice listening for N4? Could you give us a brief summary of what resources you used to study for it?

[RawToast]

The last time this was discussed I believe the conclusion was that the vocabulary is ~N3, while the grammar is ~N4.

The articles are tougher than the N4 reading sections; if you can read them then the N4 reading section should be a doddle.

RawToast Wrote:The last time this was discussed I believe the conclusion was that the vocabulary is ~N3, while the grammar is ~N4.

The articles are tougher than the N4 reading sections; if you can read them then the N4 reading section should be a doddle.

Thank you for your answer!

cophnia61 Wrote:Ariaaria thank you for telling us your direct experience! Could I ask you a couple of questions?
So, do you think reading NHK Easy is a good reading practice for N4?

That's a good question. My gut tells me that NHK Easy News is not good practice for the N4 reading. The reason is that there is too much vocab and grammar in those articles that are outside of what they'll test.

When I took the test the reading section mostly used vocab and grammar that I knew, but there was some I didn't. The longest reading passage was like 3-4 paragraphs and the questions required me to go back and look up things in the text. There were also questions with signs about when some service (like a gym) was open, and then they gave you a sample time and asked who using the gym during that time. There were complicating factors like holiday vs non-holiday schedule, and so on, so you had to be careful. Over and over and over again. In a timed setting.

So if you are using material where you constantly need to look up vocabulary, you won't get to practice some of the main skills being tested. Because a lot of what they are testing is how you handle having a few words thrown at you which you are not expected to know.

Also, while it's now become good reading reading practice for me, I don't think that it will be sufficient prep for the N3 reading comprehension test. At the very least, I'll need to spend some time with a practice book like this that gives me questions along with the text. That's the skill they test.

cophnia61 Wrote:And what about the audio?

My summary of the listening on N4 is that it's all the same. It was two people negotiating a scheduling conflict. Over and over and over again. This is probably not accurate, but it was my impression immediately after the test:

Person A: Let's schedule something:
Person B: OK!
A: I'm free Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the morning. Other weekdays I'm free in the afternoon. On the weekend I'm free at night.
B: I'm free ...
A: It sounds like our schedules meet up on both x, y and z. Which would you prefer.
B: Let's do x.
A: OK!
B: Oh wait. I can't do x after all. Let's do the option we talked about after x.
A: OK!

So, like, I was asked to retain a lot of information that was being said, and process it and refer to it later in the conversation. With only listening to it once. It was hard, and it surprised me. I thought that I would be OK because I did a lot of speaking with native speakers, but I wasn't.

I don't think that a newscast is good preparation for it - there's only one person speaking. Note that at N4 there isn't a lot of native material (e.g. NHK Easy News) at that level. I felt that they did a good job of constructing a (lengthy) listening test using the limited subset of vocab and grammar that was on the test.

cophnia61 Wrote:Could you give us a brief summary of what resources you used to study for it?

Sure. But first let me say the resource that I learned about towards the end, which wound up being the most useful: online, experienced, cheap Japanese teachers who specialize in JLPT prep. I used Japanese Online Institute (JOI) but may other people use italki. They can give you an infinite number of mock exam questions, which is really helpful. I think that if more people used resources like this, less people would fail. Most people fail the JLPT - you can see the stats from the last exam here.

Anki was my main source of study. I had 3 main decks:

vocab: "Minna No Nihongo 1 Vocabulary Complete" (a shared deck), Genki 2 (which I made myself) and "out of class vocab" (which I made myself)

Kanji: I used RTK Lite, and had a good grasp of the N5 and N4 cards.

Grammar: Verb Conjugations, Dictionary of Basic Jap. Grammar (shared deck).

Overall, I felt that I did poorly on the grammar section. Since the exam I've developed a habit of going to lang-8 and writing example sentences of the grammar points I learn. When I get good feedback from native speakers I add them to anki.

In person classes: I took a night class one night a week after work for 6 months. It was helpful, but if I had to do it all again, I would have jumped straight to online classes.

Hope this helps.

ariariari Wrote:

cophnia61 Wrote:Ariaaria thank you for telling us your direct experience! Could I ask you a couple of questions?
So, do you think reading NHK Easy is a good reading practice for N4?

That's a good question. My gut tells me that NHK Easy News is not good practice for the N4 reading. The reason is that there is too much vocab and grammar in those articles that are outside of what they'll test.

When I took the test the reading section mostly used vocab and grammar that I knew, but there was some I didn't. The longest reading passage was like 3-4 paragraphs and the questions required me to go back and look up things in the text. There were also questions with signs about when some service (like a gym) was open, and then they gave you a sample time and asked who using the gym during that time. There were complicating factors like holiday vs non-holiday schedule, and so on, so you had to be careful. Over and over and over again. In a timed setting.

So if you are using material where you constantly need to look up vocabulary, you won't get to practice some of the main skills being tested. Because a lot of what they are testing is how you handle having a few words thrown at you which you are not expected to know.

Also, while it's now become good reading reading practice for me, I don't think that it will be sufficient prep for the N3 reading comprehension test. At the very least, I'll need to spend some time with a practice book like this that gives me questions along with the text. That's the skill they test.

cophnia61 Wrote:And what about the audio?

My summary of the listening on N4 is that it's all the same. It was two people negotiating a scheduling conflict. Over and over and over again. This is probably not accurate, but it was my impression immediately after the test:

Person A: Let's schedule something:
Person B: OK!
A: I'm free Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the morning. Other weekdays I'm free in the afternoon. On the weekend I'm free at night.
B: I'm free ...
A: It sounds like our schedules meet up on both x, y and z. Which would you prefer.
B: Let's do x.
A: OK!
B: Oh wait. I can't do x after all. Let's do the option we talked about after x.
A: OK!

So, like, I was asked to retain a lot of information that was being said, and process it and refer to it later in the conversation. With only listening to it once. It was hard, and it surprised me. I thought that I would be OK because I did a lot of speaking with native speakers, but I wasn't.

I don't think that a newscast is good preparation for it - there's only one person speaking. Note that at N4 there isn't a lot of native material (e.g. NHK Easy News) at that level. I felt that they did a good job of constructing a (lengthy) listening test using the limited subset of vocab and grammar that was on the test.

cophnia61 Wrote:Could you give us a brief summary of what resources you used to study for it?

Sure. But first let me say the resource that I learned about towards the end, which wound up being the most useful: online, experienced, cheap Japanese teachers who specialize in JLPT prep. I used Japanese Online Institute (JOI) but may other people use italki. They can give you an infinite number of mock exam questions, which is really helpful. I think that if more people used resources like this, less people would fail. Most people fail the JLPT - you can see the stats from the last exam here.

Anki was my main source of study. I had 3 main decks:

vocab: "Minna No Nihongo 1 Vocabulary Complete" (a shared deck), Genki 2 (which I made myself) and "out of class vocab" (which I made myself)

Kanji: I used RTK Lite, and had a good grasp of the N5 and N4 cards.

Grammar: Verb Conjugations, Dictionary of Basic Jap. Grammar (shared deck).

Overall, I felt that I did poorly on the grammar section. Since the exam I've developed a habit of going to lang-8 and writing example sentences of the grammar points I learn. When I get good feedback from native speakers I add them to anki.

In person classes: I took a night class one night a week after work for 6 months. It was helpful, but if I had to do it all again, I would have jumped straight to online classes.

Hope this helps.

It helped very much! I didn't expected a reply so detailed, thank you to have put the effort and time in writing it!

cophnia61 Wrote:It helped very much! I didn't expected a reply so detailed, thank you to have put the effort and time in writing it!

Yeah, I realized it was getting kinda long as I was writing it. But one of the best experiences I've had on this site is when people who recently got thru a level I was in sort of passed the torch in a helpful way to me. I thought it would be nice to return the favor.

I struggled with NHK News Easy after finishing Core 6k. The difficultly wasn't so much vocab/grammar as general comprehension ability.

I see they've added annoying & broken furigana. What they should have done is made the pop-up definitions (which now seem to have disappeared) more Rikai-friendly.

anotherjohn Wrote:I struggled with NHK News Easy after finishing Core 6k. The difficultly wasn't so much vocab/grammar as general comprehension ability.

I see they've added annoying & broken furigana. What they should have done is made the pop-up definitions (which now seem to have disappeared) more Rikai-friendly.

Here's a plugin to disable furigana from appearing on NHK Easy News: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detai...ofhi?hl=en

So here's another update:

~6 months after first being able to read NHK news at all I can now read most of the articles without a dictionary. I think that I read 3 or 4 articles over coffee this morning. I read on my phone, which doesn't have furigana, and I didn't use a dictionary for any of the words that I didn't know. I feel that I read the articles fairly quickly, which, in retrospect, is a new experience for me.

I think that it took me a long time to be able to "read" without knowing every word. There are still a lot of words that I don't know, but it's no longer nearly as important as it used to be.

In terms of Anki stats:
*vocab: 4,240 mature, 767 young+learn
*Kanji: 660 mature, 188 young+learn, 226 suspended+buried

Again, hopefully this helps other people who are in the position I was in a while ago with really wondering when NHK Easy News would "click".

For those who like stats, here are the stats from when I was first able to read NHK Easy News at all
*vocab: 3,569 mature, 517 young+learn.
*RtK Kanji: 504 mature, 271 young+learn, 79 suspended+buried.

ariariari, this is amazing. Thank you for writing this! Can you venture a guess as to how many hours you have invested in learning thus far?

yogert909 Wrote:ariariari, this is amazing. Thank you for writing this! Can you venture a guess as to how many hours you have invested in learning thus far?

So this is actually very difficult for me to answer. But I'm guessing that you think that my best guess will help you, so I'll try my best. Overall I've been studying about 3.5 years. What stands out to me are 2 things:

1. Living in Japan vs. not. I did a lot more speaking and writing when I lived there. Living there was overall a mixed bag for me. For example, I really didn't like the career options that I felt I had. But in terms of my relationship with the language, Japanese was a lot more enjoyable when I lived there. There was just more variety to how I interacted with it, I could put things I studied immediately into practice, and it felt more spontaneous and fun. Now studying is less directly beneficial to my life, and my interactions with native speakers are overall less enjoyable.
2. My study methods have progressively become more efficient. I only have study times via anki for the last 1.5 years. But I feel that the combination of weekly lessons with a professional teacher + anki + JLPT prep means that the time I spend "studying" is very clearly delineated from the time I spend "using" the language, and the study time feels extremely focused and effective.

That being said, here's the best I can give you for my study diary:

2000: Arrived in Japan for JET. Knew no Japanese. Did "self study", which my fellow teachers recommended. This basically meant practicing writing kanji using this book, and maybe reading "Japanese for Busy People" by myself. Overall, regardless of hours spent, I don't feel that I got very far.

2001: Found a great teacher, took weekly 1-1 lessons, quickly learned that I didn't really need to learn any more kanji. Focused instead on grammar, vocab and speaking. Used minna no nihongo with my teacher. Exponential progress.

2002-2013: Did not study Japanese. It turns out that it's not particularly useful in the US unless you want to be a translator, intrepretor or work in a consulate/embassy. That was disappointing to me, because I like speaking foreign languages in general, and had spent a lot of time studying Japanese in particular.

2014: took a free refresher course at the consulate for JET alumni. Liked it, signed up for a course at the local Japan society, where the teacher gave us kanji writing quizzes. Joined some conversation groups. Learned about anki and RtK. Decided to take the N4 in December. Got an opportunity to give a talk on my research in Japan in December. Gave the talk in Japanese. Studied a lot for both the test and the presentation.

2015: Decided to take the N3. Decided to stop practicing writing kanji by hand. Moved from classes at the Japan society to online classes at JOI.

In terms of hours studied, here is my weekly "time spent studying with anki" graph:



Note that my presentation was the day before the N4 exam in December. When I look at this graph I can see the a few milestones:

week -41 was almost certainly the week of the N4 and my talk in Japan. In the last year, preparation for that trip was the greatest time I spent with Anki.
week -20 was probably the week that I gave up RtK, and moved my kanji deck to be kanji -> definition. That's why there's yellow there - I wanted to review the ones that I got wrong. That's also why my time in Anki has reduced since. Practicing writing the kanji took a lot of time. I'm pretty happy that I'm regularly spending less than 5 hours a week with Anki, and I expect that number to reduce even more after the N3.

In terms of the future, the next big thing is of course the N3. I also have tentatively planned a presentation in Tokyo in early April (cherry blossom season). So after the N3 I will likely switch to 1-1 lessons in italki so that I can get more speaking practice in.

Wow, thanks again ariariari! I love reading summaries of people's language learning journeys like this.

yogert909 Wrote:Wow, thanks again ariariari! I love reading summaries of people's language learning journeys like this.

Glad to help. By the way, since you like language learning stories, I think you might also like this chart. It's the one that I'm most proud of:



It shows that the number of mature cards I've had has steadily increased over the last year. The huge spike in the beginning was most likely the remaining cards from genki 1 or minna no nihongo 1 converting over to mature. (I dumped all those words into anki in a short amount of time, because they felt familiar from my old study days). It's incredible to me that the number of mature cards I have has roughly doubled in a year.

It's too bad that Japan is so far away from me. I'd love to go there for a short trip just to see how different the experience is of being there with such a larger vocabulary!

Looks like nice, steady progress of about 100/week. Excellent work.