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ariariari Wrote:Hello. If it's not too much trouble would you mind reporting back to let us know how you find her lessons? £4ph is an absolute steal for even a half-decent language teacher, she might be just what I'm after.

Sure, I'll take a few lessons first!

Yeah, Doraemon has kanji, but it has furigana for most (all?) of the kanji.

CK_Byuu Wrote:Oh, Doraemon has kanji?

Btw, I'm also will be taking N3 this July. This is my first time taking JLPT test, I hope I'll be able to do it just fine.

One thing I'm really worried about is my listening. I tend to lose focus easily. Even in my native language too sometimes.

Welcome to the thread! Yeah, it has kanji with furigana. It always makes me laugh when Japanese make a big deal about furigana though. Most of the time when I don't know a word it's because I don't know the word, and saying it slowly or writing it in kana doesn't help.

I found the N4 listening to be hard. It doesn't help that it's the last part of the test and that they only play it once. How are you studying for that part of the exam?

ariariari Wrote:I found the N4 listening to be hard. It doesn't help that it's the last part of the test and that they only play it once. How are you studying for that part of the exam?

I'm studying for N1, but this should still be relevant.
I've found, so far, that the biggest impact on my performance in this part of the test is the time it takes me to focus on the audio when it first starts. I'm still trying to figure out how best to study for that, but it seems like it'll just be a matter of practice.
Do mock exams. After you've done one, use the accompanying text book (if yours has one) to study the audio (if your book has a transcript).

The listening portion of the test is, objectively, the easiest part of the test; the passages are much less complex than reading portion of the test; but listening isn't something most of us have practiced that much, and it's harder to prepare for, which reflects in our scores.

But yeah, mock exams and lots of listening practice...

ariariari Wrote:Welcome to the thread! Yeah, it has kanji with furigana. It always makes me laugh when Japanese make a big deal about furigana though. Most of the time when I don't know a word it's because I don't know the word, and saying it slowly or writing it in kana doesn't help.

Thanks! Oh, I thought the manga use only katakana/hiragana. But that's good. Might pick it up after I find Crayon Shin Chan.

Wow, didn't know furigana is an annoyance to Japanese. :0

Quote:I found the N4 listening to be hard. It doesn't help that it's the last part of the test and that they only play it once.

Do you think the listening test was faar harder than the sample one? I tried the N3 sample test and managed to pull through, but is the sample too easy compared to the real one?

Quote:How are you studying for that part of the exam?

I'm playing visual novel and listening to JPOD. I'm not sure how many hours/minutes I should spend on listening though. How do you do yours?

I've recently gone back to Japanese study after a loooong break, and might take JLPT3 this year just to give me some kind of focus for my studies.

For listening pracitce, as well as prepping JLPT words and grammar, I highly recommend the 日本語の森 YouTube channel. It's a bunch of free Japanese lessons put together by some Waseda University students, mostly tailored specifically towards JLPT exams:

N3 videos are here:
N3 Grammar
N3 Vocab / Kanji

@andye Welcome! And thanks for those links. I just watched the first vocab video in that series and it was fun. I like that it was all in Japanese.

@CK_Byuu I haven't started studying for the listening part specifically yet. My thought is to spend the first half of the year working on the "language knowledge" section: kanji, vocab and grammar. I'm much further along on the kanji part than the vocab and grammar parts, so most of my study time is spent on vocab and grammar.

Re prep for the listening part of the exam: I get to interact with native Japanese speakers on a weekly basis, so that is some practice. But that on its own isn't enough targeted practice for the exam. I own the Nihongo So-Matome N3 Listening, which I play to start working thru once I get more comfortable with my language knowledge. My tentative plan is to start with that in the 2nd half of the year.

All right, I've got 2 things to mention today.

1. Remind me not to sign up for N2 in 2016! Today I found myself quite bummed because I spent the hour or so I alloted to Japanese doing anki and JLPT grammar prep, rather than doing something fun with the Japanese level I've already attained (like reading). I realized that this is just part of the tradeoffs you make when you decide to prepare for the exam.

2. I'm really questioning whether to continue with JOI as opposed to finding a 1-1 tutor on italki. Yesterday I took a JOI lesson and thought that I understood the grammar point pretty well. JOI doesn't give homework, so I went to lang-8 to try and create my own sample sentences, which sounded easy. My plan is to then add them to anki. But it turns out that I missed some critical nuance of the grammar point and people on lang-8 marked all my sentences as wrong. So now I'm scheduling some time with my native speaking friends to review it. I realized that this is a pretty common pattern after my JOI group lessons. And ideally I'd leave my lessons confident on usage of a new grammar point.

Oh, and a follow up on listening resources. fluentU has been recommended a bunch in the past for that. I think that it's a fairly new site. I spent a little bit of time on the site and liked it. But I haven't been using it seriously. That's mostly been because I've been spending my Japanese time focusing on language knowledge, not because I didn't like the site. If you wind up spending time on it and develop an informed opinion, please share it.

Halfway thru the month. A bit irritated by my Japanese studies lately, so I thought I'd post my anki stats to just remind myself that progress in, in fact, being made:

mature vocab cards: 3,649 (today) - 3,597 (end of March) = +52
mature grammar cards: 313 (today) - 299 (end of march) = +14

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ariariari Wrote:Oh, and a follow up on listening resources. fluentU has been recommended a bunch in the past for that. I think that it's a fairly new site. I spent a little bit of time on the site and liked it. But I haven't been using it seriously. That's mostly been because I've been spending my Japanese time focusing on language knowledge, not because I didn't like the site. If you wind up spending time on it and develop an informed opinion, please share it.

I've been listening to the radio at work since last Wednesday. I started off with NHK radio 1/2/FM, and have moved on to a community station (FM Kiryu/桐生) which was suggested by a teacher on iTalki.

It's mostly incomprehensible at the moment, but I can often work out the topic and the odd sentence/word -- oh and the weather report

I've had a torrid time with Anki too! I 'decided' to skip 2 days worth of reviews and ended up with a backlog of around 300 sentences... I ended up stopping adding new cards for 3 days to get my reviews under control. Funnily enough, I only have 36 reviews today...

I've found a "Tae Kim vocab" deck, which I've managed to delete hundreds of cards from (thank you Morphman!). Eventually I'll review the cards I haven't seen before, then look at adding cards for the Advanced/Special Expressions sections from Tae Kim. This way I'll only need to concentrate on the grammar and not the vocabulary.

Sentence Cards:
Mature Cards: 1101
Young&Learn: 310

Kanji Stats:
519 total unique kanji. (472) +49, not bad for 15 days!
Jouyou levels:

Grade 1: 62 of 80 (77.5%). (58) +4
Grade 2: 108 of 160 (67.5%). (99) +9
Grade 3: 94 of 200 (47.0%). (85) +9
Grade 4: 72 of 200 (36.0%). (67) +5
Grade 5: 48 of 185 (25.9%). (41) +7

I am covering enough Kanji for the test, but probably the wrong ones! Once I get some N3 textbook sentences into Anki, I reckon I'll be fine!


Regarding my 'cheap teacher' on iTalki. Annie is a pretty good teacher, but I can tell she'd rather do conversation practice with me! I have to ask in advance to practice a grammar point or a textbook; otherwise we end up practicing conversation. I found the best way to do this is to ask to do drills/textbook practice and expand upon the questions.

For example, early on in Genki there's a phrase like "You and a friend are in a dark room and it is uncomfortable". The answer expects you to say "Can I switch on the lights", but you can expand on this by asking "Why were they in a dark room together?" and either get a laugh or a 5/10 minute conversation.

This is Annie's iTalki profile.

Well, it's the end of the month. So I thought I'd post an update:

In terms of Anki stats:

Compared to last month:
mature vocab cards: 3,710 (today) - 3,597 (end of March) = +113
mature grammar cards: 315 (today) - 299 (end of march) = +16
mature kanji cards: 446 (today, first time measuring)

Compared to January 20 (my earliest record for 2015):
mature vocab cards: 3,710 (today) - 3,246 (1/20) = +464
mature grammar cards: 315 (today) - 208 (1/20) = +107
kanji: 446 (today) - 478 mature (1/20) = -32

In terms of Anki, my biggest change was switching my kanji deck from keyword->kanji to kanji->definition. That really changed everything for me. I can now quickly go thru the deck each day, and I feel that it is better practice for how I actually use the language. I expect to see a huge spike in mature kanji cards next month. The comparison with January is a bit false, in that back then I was still doing keyword->kanji, and in the intervening months I created a huge backlog for myself.

In terms of classes, I took weekly grammar lessons on JOI, and just signed up for 5 more.

I think it's probably also worth saying where I'm at in my vocab and kanji textbooks:
*N3 vocab So-matome: I finished the first 3 days of the first week.
*N3 kanji shin kanzen master: I finished the first part of the first chapter (kunyomi: nouns).

I also had a lot of fun with Japanese. Talking with friends, sending emails to friends, reading my first manga (doraemon), reading and discussing nhk easy news with friends. My impression is that reading native material is shockingly hard because of how small my vocabulary is. I guess that this is why my vocab is jumping so quickly.

In terms of goals for May:
*Continue taking weekly lessons on JOI and adding grammar cards from the lessons.
*Limit anki time to less than 1 hour a day.
*Continue keeping my kanji deck kanji->definition, and see how that works for me.
*Try to finish the first week of my vocab book
*Try to finish a few more chapters of my kanji book

One lesson I learned this month is to be more strategic about what I add into Anki. I find that if I add all the new words I come across then my reviews take up so much time that I don't have time for other things like reading and emailing friends. My vocabulary is truly tiny in comparison to what is needed to comfortably read easy manga or NHK Easy News without a dictionary. I recently started doing extensive reading after Anki reviews if I feel like doing something more foreign language related. Previously I would just dump more cards into Anki.

Also, I realized that one of the drawbacks of being focused on the N3 means that when it comes to adding new vocab and such, I naturally have to prioritize the words that I come across in my exam-specific textbooks as opposed to my readings and conversations. I guess that this is just one of the tradeoffs that comes with studying for an exam. Time is just finite.

I just want to say Hi to everybody,
adn introduce myself.
Probably from now on I will check this kejiban regularly.
I am going to take this July session of JPN3 in Tokyo, where I live.
Despite this, I am not use anky anymore.
I finished the Heisig book, vol.1, just recently for the first time after a year and half.
I manually wrote the wholebook of cards which was painful...But In that way
I could have the kanjy on my hands during the Yamanote trips to work instead
of a smart phone wich I still do not possess. This freaky japanese windows keyboard impedes me
to write accent and others punctuation stuffｓ. Sometimes I cannot switch to Ｗｅｓｔｅｒｎ keyb properly.
May apologies for that.
So far I have seen many good hints in this site, thanks, I am planning to check them all.
Yesterday, for the first time, I took a mock test for JPN3
and...guess what、 I fall in the 63% or people I would not pass the exam if it was yesterday.
My score went like this'
17/35, 17/39 on the first two parts, and slightly better
19/29 on the listening part which gets me really frustrated as during the listening test
I felt it was quite easy. Truly it was not.
The mock exam took place in a MCDonald 24 hours place.
My weak point are :
Time . Late night
money
random lazyness.
My strong point is : Motivation.
Tomorrow I am going to have my first private lesson of Japanese after attending some japanese volunteer based pubblic schools/ lessons.
I found a couple of teachers through labochi dot com. Let 's see them.
Past resources were Minna no nihongo, easy level, then I studied alone, with much dearth of motivation, the middle level book 1.
Right now I found easier and well made the TRY JPN3, I am still at unit 7 though. Also
the second time I am following the exercises oｆ JLPT Kanji N3 )(it is called `新完全マスターＫＡＮＪＩ　、日本語能力試験Ｎ３
Also I am using this not-free tool, iknow dot jp you probably know better than me. It is powerful, and only recently I re-subscribe it. Currently I am in the japanese core 3000 phase.
I am not a native English and I am a professional Italian teacher.
I am living in Japan for three years now but Only in the last year I had to speak japanese a bit everyday.
I am thinking to start a blog in japanese to helpto figth against my lazyness and keep improving my writing, thus my kanji remembering skills.
See you then

Welcome uaifestival.

I don't know the required score to pass, but I think that it's close to about 50%. So it sounds like even though you failed, you were close.

This is the first time I heard about http://labochi.com/. But for me, working with a professional teacher has always had the biggest impact on my ability.

Based on your close score, starting to work with a professional teacher, and motivation, I think that you are in a good position to pass the exam.

ariariari, Thanks for making this thread and reminding me of my goal! I'm not sure if I'll make it, but I'd love to pass the N3 in December too. This will be my first jlpt. Here's my stats:

2312 sentences
2329 vocab (some overlap)
448 grammar
366 kanji

Goals:
- listening comprehension (audio only cards - core and nayr's deck)
- 798 kanji (432 more)
- finish tae kim grammar (1/3 left to do)
- make sure everything from this page is learned
- take several practice tests

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This thread is getting busy

I had to remove Anki from my work laptop (moving to a new project, so I get a shiny new laptop later today), so I cannot provide any stats right now. I think I was at ~1800 sentences in total.

This month I spent a lot of time on iTalki practicing conversation and slowly working through Genki in an unusual fashion. I had ~25 hours of hours, which won't be the case next month! I plan reducing my study time on Skype to ~12 hours so that I can save some money for a trip to Japan in September/October.

Quote:17/35, 17/39 on the first two parts, and slightly better
19/29 on the listening part which gets me really frustrated as during the listening test
I felt it was quite easy. Truly it was not.

That's pretty close to passing. If you work hard from now on, you should be able to pass.

@rawtoast Yeah, it is getting busy. I guess it's an indication that there's a market for this sort of thing.

Thanks everyone for posting an update. It really helps me to keep motivated and on track.

I thought I'd pass along an email exchange I just had with one my teachers on JOI. I decided to ask her point blank if she thought I could pass N3 this year. Her answer was really interesting.

She said that she's had 3 students about my level who passed N3. When she asked them about the exam they tended to say:
-JOI helped them with the grammar and listening.
-They studied kanji and vocab by themselves.
-They struggled with the reading section. Their feedback was that the sentences were long, there was a lot of kanji, and that the time constraint made it hard.

Her advice was to continue doing what I'm doing, but to make a point to read a lot. She also recommended reading out loud.

I had a couple of reflections upon reading her email. One was that it's great to work with a professional teacher. Someone who's done this before and seen what works and doesn't and where I fit in with past students who have succeeded and failed.

The other is that, at some point I'll probably need to modify my study habits to focus more on reading. Right now it might still make sense to continue focusing on vocab, grammar and kanji with Anki. But at some point I should consider making reading a bigger portion of my study. That might just happen naturally as my vocab and grammar improve. We'll see. It's definitely something to keep in the back of my mind.

@ariariari
I recently started working through 日本語総まとめN1：読解; while it's still too soon to completely recommend it, it seems like a good way to practice for that portion of the exam. I'm pretty sure they have that book for all levels of the JLPT, if you want to look it up.

As for vocabulary, I think you should keep it up, but definitely put focus on words you'll need for the exam; I've run across several words that were given definitions and readings in my mock exams that I already knew from core, and yet I still come across plenty of words that I don't know that well at all (though most of them I recognize).
That's with 7,340 cards studied in Anki, but I'm working on N1, so you won't need that many.

@sholum. Thatnks for the rec. I actually own that book. I think back in January when I was still toying with whether to take the exam I started working with that one along with the main vocab and kanji books. I found that there were a lot of words I didn't know there (despite having just passed N4, and the book saying that it starts out with easy vocab). So I decided to put the book aside for a while and focus on the "language knowledge" textbooks. My original thinking was to get back to it in the 2nd half of the year.

thank you for the encouragement, I noticed I forgot to mention that my reading part was 30 minutes longer of what is the real time test....thus I am focusing from now on on reading and writing, since I hope writing will reinforce my reading skills also.

Finally finished the second chapter of my N3 kanji book: kunyomi: Verbs (1)

Make that chapters 2 *and* 3

Chapter 4 is the last one in the first chapter ("single kanji that make whole words"). Then there's a monster 4 page review section. Seems like finishing off chapter 1 completely might be a nice goal for the month.

I'm already suffering a bit from kanji fatigue right now though, so we'll see how it goes.

Quick note because I just heard back from my teacher. Regarding reading comprehension, I asked her how NHK Easy News compared to the N3 reading comprehension. And I asked her if it was good practice.

Surprisingly, she said that NHK Easy News is actually a bit easier than the N3 reading comprehension! But she said that it's still good practice and encouraged me to continue reading it.

Just thought I'd share.

Huh, didn't know that. What makes it easier than N3? Furigana aside.

CK_Byuu Wrote:Huh, didn't know that. What makes it easier than N3? Furigana aside.

Honestly, I have no idea. I only take group lessons with her, so I don't get a lot of time to ask her questions.

I'm guesing that she was referring to length, vocabulary, grammar or the types of questions they ask. I'm not a language teacher, so I don't really know how to grade the difficulty of reading comprehension tasks.

FWIW, this book is often recommended as the best preparation for the exam's reading comprehension section.

CK_Byuu Wrote:Huh, didn't know that. What makes it easier than N3? Furigana aside.

The grammar is N4. The vocabulary might be N3, but it's always the same words that come up (like dates, prefecture names; stuff about volcanos, earthquakes, airplanes...) so even the "hard" ones are easy to learn (総理大臣、宇宙航空研究開発機構、文部科学省...). Except for a word here and there, I felt even the grammar kanzen master N3 book had more vocabulary variety than NHK news easy.