Share your study highlights

[Jembru]

I got this idea from something I saw on another site and thought it would be a nice idea to do something like this here. At times, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the size of the mountain that stands between you and your language goals. If you are anything like me, you might have a habit of focusing too much on what you can't do, rather than celebrate what you CAN.

No one likes a boaster and it's not very Japanese to big yourself up, but constantly devaluing yourself isn't healthy either. So in order to lift our spirits and learn to look on the bright side of our development, you have my permission, in this thread, to share what you feel you have done well. Go ahead and gloat till your heart's content. After all, you've earned it!

So whether you have finally mastered the te form, got 100% on a kanji app, passed the JLPT or completed a 40 minute job interview in Japanese, completed a textbook, or maybe just finally got the hang of a tricky piece of grammar.  Whatever you have achieved today, big or small, please let us know. I think this will be a great exercise in confidence, and confidence can go a long way towards improving your language skills. 

[魔]

I suppose one of the things I'm proud of is being able to touch type in kana input. I decided to learn it because I was getting sick of typing nn nn and having にねのぬな come up when I wanted an ん. But now I don't have to worry about that and I can type at a semi decent speed, so I am happy.

[Jembru]

Oh I just realised I forgot to put the title in Japanese too. I can't work out how to edit it >.<

Hey that really is cool Demonhead! I tried to memorise where the kana were on the qwerty pad of my phone but I keep forgetting. It would make replying to texts soo much easier than the stupid touch screen panel that pops up. Press 1 three times for う press it 8 times for a little ぅ.. press 4 six times for little っ.. scroll till you find the right kanji.. press enter, move on to the next word.. aaugh, I hate it so much!! the buttons are so small that I keep hitting the one next to it too, and then have to delete and start again. It's not all bad I guess, it at least remembers words you've typed before and it tries to guess what you want to write before you finish the word, which is helpful. All the same, I'm seriously jealous of you D!

You've made me think of something I can write about though. Despite its evilness, I do seem to be getting faster at writing text messages in Japanese. Probably because I do it often enough that the prediction is getting better at guessing what I want to say. I got a text just as I was getting into Newcastle on the bus the other night. I started my reply at the first of the 3 stops (they're less than 2 minutes apart on-foot, but city traffic makes it slow to get around them sometimes), and had sent it by the time I was off the bus at the final stop.. it reads..

そうなの？ 残念！ 会いたかったのに。でも、大丈夫だよ！皆、伝えるよ。今度ね！(^^)/

So not THAT short, and probably managed in under 2 minutes. Oh, yeah, my friend was dotakyaning on us and needed me to let the others know.

I guess another thing to be proud of then, is that I usually don't need to look up kanji when I read texts anymore. Mind you, I often just guess the ones I don't know from the context, or ignore them if I think I can. Like recently my friend text to tell me her mum had been in an accident and broken a bone. She actually said it was a complex fracture, but I didn't know the kanji for 複雑 (I know I use it, but if I'm typing, I can just rikaikun it to make sure I picked the right one, or as I usually do in skype, where rikaikun doesn't work.. guess and hope for the best ^^...I'm so glad I usually only chat on there with people who can read well enough to work out when I meant 'wedding' and not 'blood stain' ^^). I knew 骨折 though, so I was able to reply with the necessary level of concern (I can't think of much worse than breaking a bone), without needing to look anything up!

I think this is something to be proud of considering I probably knew less than 300 kanji just a few months ago! Based on the page I'm up to in the kanji book I'm roughly learning from (I'm going through it in order and ensuring I know every kanji on the page before moving on), and the fact that even when I skip really far ahead into the thousands, I still keep coming across kanji I already know, I can estimate I know at least 500 kanji now! Unfortunately, I've learnt them in such a weird order, that I still couldn't sit the JLPT N3 even if I wanted to!   <- Why do I do this? Boast and then in the next breath belittle the thing I was just boasting about? lol 

[MidoriAbby]

Jembru
What a lovely idea for a thread We all need a boost of confidence sometimes.

Well, I recently got the first two books of a manga series 好きって言いなよ from a Japanese bookstore, and I've managed to read the entire first book in the past two weeks. I used my iPod Jisho app to help me out, and learned a whole bunch of new vocabulary, and I didn't find myself overwhelmed by any grammar or too much new vocabulary. Even the slang was rather easy to understand compared to last time I tried. So even though this isn't a huge accomplishment, like reading a denser novel, I'm still proud of myself for not getting frustrated and giving up halfway through, which is what honestly happens most of the time when I try all Japanese material and go into it with high expectations of comprehension and then encounter new words. I stuck with it and finished it in a timely manner. I think I'll read the second one now

[MidoriAbby]

魔 ah I'm jealous, I can't touch type in kana input yet. Working on it!
Jembru yeah I feel, I just enabled Japanese on my new cell phone and it's taking some getting used to, harder than the luxury of my touch screen iPod touch.

[Jembru]

Yeah, it's not so bad on my android tablet too. Just slow in a different way.. like I press the key and there's a delay before the character appears. This happens with English too though, so it's not the fault of the input.

It will get easier the more you use it though. It does seem to just know what you're going to say after a while!

[Bokusenou]

I learned today that I passed level N1 of the JLPT. YES!! I'm done with the JLPT!!

Jembru On N3: Don't feel bad! The JLPT is more a test of endurance, and I'm sure I made mistakes on it that I wouldn't have made outside the test room. It's good if you want to take it to put on your resume, or to get a certain job, but it makes a bad skill benchmark because it tires you out so much during those three hours, that your level tends to drop below what it is normally. Understanding more of what you read/listen to normally, or speaking/writing better than before is a better benchmark I think, and I say this as someone who spent years studying for N2 & N1 and passed both.

[Jembru]

Bokusenou: That's awesome! Congratulations Rin! So what's your next step after this?

Yeah, I've heard that about the JLPT. It seems quite typical of Japanese-syle testing. I almost died when I read how many questions there were in each section. The scoring system confuses me though. Like, they change the score you need to pass depending on the average score? So whether the test was easier than usual, or inhumanely tough, the same percentage of candidates will pass each time. That seems a bit unfair, but maybe I just don't quite understand how it works. I used to think I wanted to take it, but I decided it would be an uneccessary amount of stress considering I don't have plans to use Japanese as part of my career. I don't work well under pressure! I'm the kind of person who would wait until they were near fluent then take N3 just so it felt easy.

I don't really have any study highlights this week. I've mainly been taking a breather and reviewing stuff.

[chocopie]

Bokusenou Congratulations! Finishing JLPT is a relief!

Jembru The idea behind adjusting the scoring is that with such a huge number of people taking the test, you can assume that the spread of abilities is going to remain the same. Therefore any significant change in pass rate is most likely due to a change in difficulty of the test.

[Bokusenou]

Jembru Thanks! I'm not sure yet, but I'm probably going to try to beat level 4 or 3 on the Kanji Kentei quiz game I have. The test locations are too far away for me to take the real thing, since I'm not going to be a translator or anything, but the quiz game is a nice challenge. If you (or anyone else) has any other ideas though, I'm all ears.

I'm pretty sure the vocabulary/grammar section is based on how many you got right, while the reading and listening sections are graded on a curve.

Ah yeah, I hear you. I like to challenge myself, but doing the test when it's easy level-wise would make sense. I might not have done it myself if it wasn't fairly close to go to. The weird thing is that even when I was applying for web design/dev internships, which had absolutely nothing to do with Japanese, they were all really impressed that I had Japanese (N2) listed on my resume. It might be partly because the US is an unfortunately very monolingual country though.

chocopie Oh, have you done it as well? さすがchocopieさん！

[chocopie]

Bokusenou
Yeah I was so glad to finish JLPT. It really is part Japanese test, part endurance test. I remember zoning out during the listening section and then panicking as I tried to work out which question we were on!

[Bokusenou]

chocopie Yeah, me too! During N2 especially. When it got to the listening section the ceiling lights had been on for a while and the whole place was like a sauna. I kept zoning out during the short listening questions. (^^ Thankfully, the long questions at the end saved me.

What Japanese related goals did you work toward after N1? I'm trying to decide what to aim for next.

[chocopie]

Bokusenou
I started going through the Kanji in Context books to widen my vocab. If you don't know the books, they go through all the 常用漢字 but with an intermediate-advanced learner in mind so you learn more complex vocab even for more simple kanji, e.g. 南北問題、生い立ち. Basically vocab no one would expect you to learn the first time you learn the kanji.

Other than that I read more within topics that I'm interested in, particularly science, detective novels and watch drama without worrying if the vocab I'm learning is too 'niche' to be useful for JLPT.

[Bokusenou]

chocopie
Thanks, I'll have to check out Kanji in Context now.^^
I've heard of it, but I avoided it because I thought it was another beginner level kanji learning book.
I've been reading and watching things I enjoy and adding new words from those into Anki, but I kind of miss the structure the JLPT gave, as a way to take my japanese to the next level in between reading and watching stuff. I guess that's why I'm looking into things like the kanji kentei, and now Kanji in Context, because it's something to aim for.

[魔]

I'm going to try and clear some of these today.



I'll post another at the end of the day to show how much I've done.