(I feel like I've asked a similar question before or seen the question before on this topic, but a search found nothing really)

I've been meeting with this small group of people that are really meant to help people that don't know any Japanese at all, but they let advanced people in. Mostly just a group of Japanese that wants to help people learn Japanese, no formal training in language teaching either. They have a N2/N1 study book, but I'm finding that boring right now and I still think normal stuff is better.

I've been trying to think up good ways to make use of a native speaker with reading. I read light novels now on occasion and its fun. I get 70-80% of it one way or another, but the vocab is eccentric in it and not the best for pushing your vocab further in the sense of "stuff people might use or you might see printed." (When a literate Japanese person has to check a dictionary on a word meaning, you know its not super common). I'm thinking of bringing newspapers with me when I meet but don't know what to do really. So far my ideas have been.

1) Summarize sections/Articles
2) Create questions concerning the article and answer them.

Both of these exercises require you to understand the material and exercise what you know.

Anything else that would be worthwhile?

Get them to help you with your accent/intonation. Bring a novel, manga, newspaper, and basically shadow them as they read it. Have them correct you if you say something that doesn't sound like how a native would say it.

I find this is fun and helpful. You can also ask stuff about the plot, words you don't know, etc, along the way.

Do what partner55 said, but also have a conversation about the article. Instead of making it like a quiz just ask questions about things you don't understand. Understanding Japanese newspapers is about quite a lot more than just understanding the words on the page. There's a lot of back story to a lot of the things that happen that you might never know about unless you investigated them. All the recent news about Ozawa went right over my head until I did some digging into why people cared so much about him in the first place.

You're bound to have questions about things you read. Ask those questions.

I work with a tutor, and we spend a lot of time with me reading a novel aloud, and then doing a quick translation of what I've read. She can correct me as I go. It's fun, for me, anyway, and seems to be helping. We do other drills, too.

vix86 Wrote:I've been meeting with this small group of people that are really meant to help people that don't know any Japanese at all, but they let advanced people in. Mostly just a group of Japanese that wants to help people learn Japanese, no formal training in language teaching either.

It would be interesting to hear who these people are and how you found them. Maybe others can benefit from this too?

Today my teacher and I did a bit of accent training and 発音練習 in general. She read the sentence first and then I did. I had to pay attention to the pitch (e.g. 七時), otherwise I would be totally bucked up. Here you go:

坂でサッカーはできない。
ここは高校です。
この靴下好きじゃない。
明日、追試験を実施します。
毎日3円、3年貯めたらいくらになる？
鈴木（すずき）さんも都築（つづき）さんも月が好きだ。
最終バスはもうすぐ着く。
彼女は自分の美しさを意識している。
父の知人に詩人がいます。
それは歴史の基礎知識です。
一日に一時間、腹式呼吸をしてごらん。
七時に執事が羊を喫茶室に連れてくる。
最近は、臼を使わず餅つき機で餅をつきます。

And?

shinsen Wrote:It would be interesting to hear who these people are and how you found them. Maybe others can benefit from this too?

I live in Japan so natives are...easy to find. These are just some ladies that are helping out teachers here . If you asked around at other ALTs in an area, I'm sure someone could find something similar in a town around them.

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These ladies are no good enough to do translation into English, and I'm not even sure why anyone would bother with something like that really unless they were interested in getting into translation. It'd be better to simply try and re-explain the passage in different words in Japanese.

Accent training is also something I could do. Didn't think about that, but accent doesn't interest me much unfortunately.

I didn't end up doing the newspaper thing yesterday. I actually couldn't find a newspaper at any of the conbinis in the area. Absolutely ridiculous.
Instead I went through my 見出しメモ entries I had noted down from my book readings; in my electronic dictionary. Basically whether they used this or that, how often they hear it.

Also picked their brain on usage of some words, trying to get a good pragmatic sense of how the word is used compared to how the dictionary was using it. This was surprisingly more interesting than I thought it would especially over some words like 罵倒、もてあそぶ〈弄ぶ）、素養, and 「見て見ぬ振りをする」. The last one especially made me realize I can bring my 慣用句 dictionary I have next time and go through that looking for useful idioms that are used.