julianjalapeno wrote:

I got my sakubun back from the practice test last month. Pretty nice all the trouble they went to grading the errors and then writing a little bit about the good points and what I need to do to improve. If they add a sakubun and a mensetsu or kaiwa section to the test I think it would be a big improvement over the purely passive skills test that it is now.

Also interesting that they were able to edit this by hand and get it back to me in a few weeks, yet the scantron test takes 2-3 months.

It's all about volume. There's thousands of people taking the test all around the world on the ordinary test days, but for the focus group you sat there was probably only a hundred. I guarantee that if/when they do roll in a sakubun section to the JLPT they'll most likely still take 2-3 months to grade.

I always thought it was obvious.

After the tests are done they immediately start a bar crawl, and the tests only get put into the machines once the hangovers subside.

Kanji, vocabulary, grammar. Those were the three things I kept repeating to myself as I worked my way through JLPT2 this month. "If only I had done more kanji, vocab, grammar!" I found myself wondering :-P

Seriously, my approach to learning kanji and vocabulary were one and the same, Kanji in Context via Anki, so if I had kept to my schedule I would have got those hands down. You have just under 5 months to cover the two KiC volumes or another set of material of your choosing, so assuming you're taking N1 or N2 and you're currently at N3 or better, it should be doable maybe?

And grammar is tricky. Not everything comes up but anything CAN come up in the exam so it's important to find an approach that works for you. I still haven't figured out whether using an SRS to study grammar works for me, but I keep trying new approaches to it so hopefully one will stick.

I guess listening is easiest to study for, because you can just listen to Japanese news, TV, podcasts, whatever and repeat it as you learn more words from the rest of your studies, increasing your overall understanding as you go.

But basically just get a move on and start now! It's like compound interest, starting sooner will pay off far more in the long run!

To me vocab was the easiest part of the test (N2 last winter), its really easy to study (SRS&lists) and very "synthetic". Grammar is more tricky but I think its possible to make a good deck for each N/JLPT grammar point with examples. Listening is much harder since you either "hear it" or you don't and to get good at that you need tons of practice, but still I felt that listening section used simpler vocab & grammar than the rest of the test. Reading was by far the hardest part of the test in my opinion, it was easily at the level of a regular newspaper 社説 and there were absolutely TONS of text to go through.

So when I'll be preparing for my 2nd try I'll read, read & read. After that I'll probably read some more Reading helps all the other skills as well (you check/update/review vocab, look up new grammar and familiarize yourself with sentence structure for listening) and they really aren't that hard anyway.

jasdev wrote:

Kanji, vocabulary, grammar. Those were the three things I kept repeating to myself as I worked my way through JLPT2 this month. "If only I had done more kanji, vocab, grammar!" I found myself wondering :-P

Seriously, my approach to learning kanji and vocabulary were one and the same, Kanji in Context via Anki, so if I had kept to my schedule I would have got those hands down. You have just under 5 months to cover the two KiC volumes or another set of material of your choosing, so assuming you're taking N1 or N2 and you're currently at N3 or better, it should be doable maybe?

And grammar is tricky. Not everything comes up but anything CAN come up in the exam so it's important to find an approach that works for you. I still haven't figured out whether using an SRS to study grammar works for me, but I keep trying new approaches to it so hopefully one will stick.

I guess listening is easiest to study for, because you can just listen to Japanese news, TV, podcasts, whatever and repeat it as you learn more words from the rest of your studies, increasing your overall understanding as you go.

But basically just get a move on and start now! It's like compound interest, starting sooner will pay off far more in the long run!

Sounds like what I've been doing everyday. Srsing,listening,reading and continuous learning.

thurd wrote:

To me vocab was the easiest part of the test (N2 last winter), its really easy to study (SRS&lists) and very "synthetic". Grammar is more tricky but I think its possible to make a good deck for each N/JLPT grammar point with examples. Listening is much harder since you either "hear it" or you don't and to get good at that you need tons of practice, but still I felt that listening section used simpler vocab & grammar than the rest of the test. Reading was by far the hardest part of the test in my opinion, it was easily at the level of a regular newspaper 社説 and there were absolutely TONS of text to go through.

So when I'll be preparing for my 2nd try I'll read, read & read. After that I'll probably read some more Reading helps all the other skills as well (you check/update/review vocab, look up new grammar and familiarize yourself with sentence structure for listening) and they really aren't that hard anyway.

what I like to do nowadays is: articles and break them down piece by piece in context(sentences) and srs all of them. Plus add them to my vocab deck and srs them(separate vocab with the add rikaichan)
It seriously does wonders. Plus thanks to a certain plugin(I can have audio) and practice reading it out-loud. Gotta love anki, without out I'd fail a long time ago

Last edited by ta12121 (2011 July 12, 4:15 pm)

thurd wrote:

ta12121 wrote:

what I like to do nowadays is: articles and break them down piece by piece in context(sentences) and srs all of them. Plus add them to my vocab deck and srs them(separate vocab with the add rikaichan)
It seriously does wonders. Plus thanks to a certain plugin(I can have audio) and practice reading it out-loud. Gotta love anki, without out I'd fail a long time ago

You SRS whole articles? How do you do it? I remember you've had a completely different approach to SRS than most of us but it seems to be working very well for you. I wonder how do you approach that, do you review those sentences continuously (forever) or just SRS the crap out of them in a few days and later delete?

I srs them "forever" basically. To the point where it becomes mature to at least 1 year or so. I usual don't like to delete but since I actively deleted my past decks(I still have them but I restarted my sentence/production/vocab decks). I basically srs words even if I already know them. It's because I'm trying to get an honest retention rating on certain things(vocab,sentences and so forth). My srs is selective nowadays but I still have that urge to just srs the whole article(in pieces of course)

I basically get the article on word. And every sentences, small or long. I put them into my srs and auto-generate readings. And I add meanings to the meanings section if I don't understand the particle vocab. I'm trying to find ways of making monolingual look ups easier. But for now, Jp-eng vocab works well. I srs things I like(it allows me to put in the time and that urge to keep going and going)

Don't worry, I fail cards now. So it really comes down to being honest on the reps. But it also shows me that I still have much to learn(but it's just a matter of time). I like to build up my decks to huge numbers. I figure that once I reach around 15,000-20,000 per deck, I'll be set. But once I reach 30,000-40,000. I'll be completely there(obviously numbers mean nothing, it's what you can do that determines ability)(

Last edited by ta12121 (2011 July 12, 4:33 pm)

Ta, me too, I too add news articles with audio. I think I already said this here a few months ago.

After adding 2kyuu vocab (will finish this week!) I'll start studying vocab from the news (and also from 1kyuu lists but at a slower pace) exclusively, in order to get vocab of course and to practise reading. Do you guys know f any other website other than yahoo video news with, hum, video news?

I think all the news sites do. Try NHK and TBS too; they usually have transcriptions.

CarolinaCG wrote:

Ta, me too, I too add news articles with audio. I think I already said this here a few months ago.

After adding 2kyuu vocab (will finish this week!) I'll start studying vocab from the news (and also from 1kyuu lists but at a slower pace) exclusively, in order to get vocab of course and to practice reading. Do you guys know f any other website other than yahoo video news with, hum, video news?

It really helps a lot, don't you agree? What I do personally is srs from anime episodes(summary of the next episode or the current episode). I get the info from the company's main site. So it's differently correct. So I copy/past it onto word or I just take each sentence and add them to my srs. Break it down/add definitions and srs them all. So far it makes srs more fun because the material is interesting.

pudding cat wrote:

I couldn't stop laughing at this article this morning http://www.fnn-news.com/news/headlines/ … 03311.html

.... You've got to admire anyone who can attempt such a crazy money making scheme.

I think it'd be interesting if you'd upload one/some of your decks to megaupload or something. You've always seem to have had an eccentric way of doing things, and even from your descriptions, it's a little difficult to understand what actually goes into your decks.

Actually...that might not be a bad idea -- having people uploading their decks (or at least screenshots of question/answer) as opposed to rough explanations.

One thing I noticed about adding multiple choice questions to my deck was that I wound up memorizing the answers to the questions, and not so much the concepts. I would know the answers, but not always *why* they were correct, so it didn't really help me on the July N2.

I think in the future I'm going to convert multiple-choice questions into fill-in-the-blank questions, because those don't lend themselves as easily to memorization, and they force me to work them out on my own. I'll use minimal cues, too, so I don't have anything to use as a memory hook.

Rather than picking out the right answer from a list of 4 possible answers, it makes more sense to me to figure out the right answer on my own, and then look down and see which number it is on the 4 answers given, if that makes any sense. At least that's what I'm shooting for now, because I think it will make my Japanese better, and it will also make the test go a lot smoother.