After getting back from a mandatory study abroad year in Tokyo, I'm about to enter the final year of my degree at university. My Japanese ability is intermediate, by my own assessment. I base this upon scoring 55% on the JLPT level 2 this July, and my own speaking, listening, reading ability. I've studied for three years, but lived in Japan twice now.

Anyway, my topic is smart.fm. I'm going through Core 2000 lessons 1, 2, 3 and 4 right now, simultaneously. I'm trying to improve my vocab, because I think it's a major setback for me right now, for instance, 99% of the time I'm unable to follow a conversation, movie or news bulletin, it'd be because I just don't know enough words. I'd hope to be able to finish Core 6000, if not by the JLPT in December (signed up for level 2 again), then before I graduate in July.

I just hate that each lesson takes so looooooooong. I guess I could have skipped words I already knew, but sometimes the example sentences feature a grammar pattern I'm unaccustomed to, or within the sentence is a word I'm unfamiliar with, so I'm studying the unfamiliar word instead of the indicated word. Going through each lesson's list of vocabulary before starting it, and assessing whether I need to take the lesson or not, seems unfeasibly dull to me, so I just went without.

Only from lesson 4 can I say that the Core 2000 becomes anywhere near challenging for me, although a number of comments gripe over lesson 3's difficulty and praise lesson 4 for it's ease.

On the plus side, I like that they show you the kanji for vocab, where the kanji have fallen out of use in modern Japanese. I'm beginning to read Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, and 1969 by Ryu Murakami, and I feel it'll help me out there.

personally i'ld go the KO2001 sentences on iknow route after the 2000 series versus core 6000... it's a lot easier transition than going from 2000->6000 http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2419

jasdev Wrote:I just hate that each lesson takes so looooooooong. I guess I could have skipped words I already knew, but sometimes the example sentences feature a grammar pattern I'm unaccustomed to, or within the sentence is a word I'm unfamiliar with, so I'm studying the unfamiliar word instead of the indicated word. Going through each lesson's list of vocabulary before starting it, and assessing whether I need to take the lesson or not, seems unfeasibly dull to me, so I just went without.

I think the best solution that I found for this is download every level of the Core 2000 to Anki with the plugin Smart.FM – Improved Importing. You can go in your own pace and the sentences and words are independent.

You can see how it works here: http://wiki.github.com/ridisculous/anki-iknow-importer

thanks a lot for that link pinkyheaven, i needed that

Cool, I downloaded the plug-in and imported Lesson 4.
How many lessons should I import at a time? Should I just complete Lesson 4 entirely before importing Lesson 5?
Also, what about the previous lessons, 1, 2 and 3? I've got to 67%, 29%, and 16% on those in iKnow, should I just import those too?

Also, I really like the pictures that go with iKnow, but they're not showing up in Anki even though I'm online. Is that normal and is there a fix?

Thanks for the tip. And Hashiriya, I'll take a look once I've completed Core 2000 thanks!

You might want to try Iversen's word-list method.

mafried Wrote:You might want to try Iversen's word-list method.

+1 - I've had some good results with this method just for vocab

PS- you shouldn't see any grammar patterns in core 2000 that you're unfamiliar with if you're going for JLPT2... I always skip words I don't know and it's a lot less painful