So I was having a look around my local Kinokunia the other day and I came across a series of JLPT study materials called Nihongo So-matome. Normally I dont pay much attention to JLPT textbooks but these particular books were part of a big display and were ranked number one in terms of sales/popularity (you know Japan and their rankings...) Anyways, I thumbed through it and it seemed pretty decent and better organized than most JLPT books. It functions more as a textbook with tons of example sentences but still does offer JLPT style questions to test your comprehension at the end of every chapter. The book is broken up into 8 weeks with each day focusing on a different topic. Needless to say there's a lot of material in there.

http://www.whiterabbitpress.com/product....ctid=16809

I picked up both the N2 grammar book and the vocab book to try and get a head start on the JLPT's. Im slowly going through them adding everything to Anki but it is time consuming and めんどくさい !!

If anyone else has these books or is interested in purchasing them, Id love to get a little collabo project going and get everything in anki format.

Thanks.

I've got the vocab book (N2 and N1), and was not looking forward to entering all the sentences alone. So count me in.

I was thinking of just doing the おぼえましょう sections, japanese sentence (well, sentence fragment) -> english. Is that what you had in mind?

If I understand you correctly you mean adding all of the vocab and sentences but not the test questions right? If so yeah I was thinking the same thing. I'm currently on Day 4 of week 1. My format is pretty straight forward. I keep it as close to the book as possible in terms of bolding and underlining. Sometimes I decide to break up the clustered vocab and sometimes not. My anki tags look like this: 1週_1日 so-matome_vocab

If you have any suggestions Im all ears!

Yeah, that's what i was thinking. Although for the ones where it lists a vocab word and a sentence (eg page 62, random choice), i was just going to do the sentence. Mainly because most of the words don't have an english translation (and for some, it'd be hard to come up with one).

I've never done one of these collaborative things before, how do you want to do it? Also, where do you want me to start? If there's just the two of us, i could start from the end and work backwards.

I have also not done one of these collabos either. One way that comes to mind is that we each make our own anki decks and then swap them and import. I think starting from the back is a good idea. Im aiming for 1 page a day but we'll see how it goes. It's painstakingly boring!

A bunch of people have used Google Documents when doing this type of project btw, so you might want to consider that. That way if more people want in it's easy to just add them. You just make it a spread sheet, then you can easily make them into cards later.

I actually used that book... but then I passed N2, so I'm not interested anymore. Sorry!

If you have access to a scanner and decent OCR software, the process is much easier. You simply scan the page, convert to text and then compare the results with the book, making small corrections as necessary.

@Tzadeck does anki import from spreadsheet files? any particular advice going this route?

@Oniichan i have neither of those things

I agree with the google documents way.
Here I found some sentences from the old 2級 so-matome

http://smart.fm/goals/search?keyword=Jap...8%E3%82%81

dusmar84 Wrote:@Tzadeck does anki import from spreadsheet files? any particular advice going this route?

@Oniichan i have neither of those things

Yes, anki can import from spreadsheets. A user could simply open the googledoc spreadsheet, save it as a csv file, then import it directly into anki. For a good tutorial on how to import files to anki, try http://ankisrs.net/.

I might be up for the collaboration challenge. I haven't seen the books yet but I'll head to the nearest bookstore and check them out. If I like them then I will buy them and help out.

do the google docs thing; it will make thing much easier.

thx bizarrojosh. Theyve got to be at most bookstores in Japan and definitely kinokunia if you got one nearby.

I will set up a google doc this weekend. Am I able to work on google docs offline as well?

In the past there was a "gears" that allowed for offline support, but it was removed and I haven't used it since then. So, I don't know if offline is still supported. But I know that you can save the doc while offline and then update the changes when you get back online.

if you need an intro I found this which may help getting you started.

http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html

In Japan, I've even found this book in bookstores that don't have an English section at all (usually in the section for Japanese learning foreign languages).

Ok, let me know when the googledoc is set up. I'll work on week 8.

OK, Ive got the google doc up and running and days 1 &2 have been inputted so far.

A few things about the format. It currently runs
"Sentence Reading Translation Notes"

In the notes I have put the week and day from which the word comes from. Currently if I have extra information to help me learn a word, like an extra sentence or definition or something I included it in the "translation" field separated by a semicolon. I could make an extra field called "Extra" or something if you think it's better. Also, I stopped bolding the keywords like the book does because the google doc only lets you bold the whole field and not just part of the field, not a major thing though. Beside some of the words I have included brackets like (n) (vi) (vt) which is standard WWWJDIC formatting for "noun" "intransitive verb" and "transitive verb".

Anyways, send me on over your email and Ill invite you. Let's get this thing done!

Ok, i've got access to the spreadsheet. I've added week8 day1 to a separate sheet so we don't tread on each other. We can merge them at the end. I basically just copied it as it was written in the textbook.

Btw, not that it's a big deal, but with day1, what's up with stuff being out of order?

Edit: Oh, and it would be nice to put extra stuff in an extra column, that way it's easier to remove if you don't want it.

Sorry about the out of order stuff, since I had days 1-3 already inputted in anki I just copied and pasted into the spreadsheet without realizing the my anki wasnt set to display cards in the order they were added. Anyways, I will be adding straight out of the book from now on out so it should all be in order.

In regard to the "extra" column, I realized since I will just be focusing on inputting into the spreadsheet before I actually get around to reviewing the cards, I will skip on adding anything extra now and wait until the deck is complete and make the changes on my own personal deck.

Happy inputting!

Hi,

I just saw this thread. I have the N1 vocabulary book and have already started inputting the days into an excel spreadsheet. Is it too late to join this team?

Hey kaiten1, not too late. Im personally only doing the N2 vocab but zigmonty seemed interested in doing the N1 as well. Maybe you guys could start a new google doc or something.

so I went to all 4 of the Japanse bookstores in my town and none of them had the goddamned books. So I'll be ordering them from Amazon and get on this group project with others.

I'll only be getting the grammar portion as I don't really care about the vocabulary too much (I'm just using the old JLPT vocab deck and adding other words as I come accross them). Hopefully the book will be here within the week!

edit: and currently amazon is sold out of the grammar book...

@bizarrojosh are you doing the N2? If so I would like to work with you on the grammar deck since Im currently only working on the vocab deck. No rush though, Ill need time to get through the vocab book before I can sink my teeth into the grammar book anyways.

@zigmonty Ive just finished week one but before I go any further I want to get your input on something. To be honest I hate seeing long strings of hiragana with no kanji to separate it. When inputting vocab where the kanji has been omitted in favour of hiragana I have been checking it in the dictionary and if the kanji is on the jyouyou list I have been adding it. I hope this doesnt bug you too much and if you'd like I can stop doing it or add it in brackets or something. It just that my brain tends to cramp when there's too much hiragana/katakana.

PS Just to state the obvious but if you are using anki to generate the readings make sure you check because they're not always accurate. Of course you know this though

dusmar84 Wrote:@bizarrojosh are you doing the N2? If so I would like to work with you on the grammar deck since Im currently only working on the vocab deck. No rush though, Ill need time to get through the vocab book before I can sink my teeth into the grammar book anyways.

yeah, I'll only be doing he grammar as I don't really care about the official vocabulary that much. I mean, I do, but the test is really just to test myself at this point (maybe when the time comes to apply to grad schools I'll be saying something different).

don't rush yourself to start the grammar portions though unless you really want to. it might take a while before I get the books if I can't find them at the big book store this weekend. But I would love to split some of the work!

dusmar84 Wrote:@zigmonty Ive just finished week one but before I go any further I want to get your input on something. To be honest I hate seeing long strings of hiragana with no kanji to separate it. When inputting vocab where the kanji has been omitted in favour of hiragana I have been checking it in the dictionary and if the kanji is on the jyouyou list I have been adding it. I hope this doesnt bug you too much and if you'd like I can stop doing it or add it in brackets or something. It just that my brain tends to cramp when there's too much hiragana/katakana.

I was wondering about that too actually. I'm an RTK man, i like kanji. My preference is for words to be written in kanji. I was just copying exactly as the book has them, but i'm happy to switch to upgrading the kanji (stuff like うわさ→噂, although that's not 常用...). Really, if the IME converts to kanji (ie it thinks the kanji form is most common), then it's dumb to convert back to hiragana (something i did a couple of times). As long as we are confident the kanji are correct!