September 8, 2008

Super JLPT site

EDIT: Hmm, it looks like there may be a few mistakes on the site I recommend here, so proceed with caution. For instance, I just got:
(2)授業終了のラベルを聞くが___、生徒たちは教室を飛び出して行った。
1.早くて
2.早いが
3.早くも
4.早ければ
Wherein the correct answer is listed as "早いが", but I am pretty sure they mean か, not が. Unless I am mistaken. Also, I think ラベル is supposed to be just ベル. I guess you get what you pay for. And now on with the post that is for some reason still offering the link to this site:
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If you are not subbed to my shared RSS bits, you may have missed this, but it's so impressive thus far that I could not just relegate it to there. Lucky you, Mr. too lazy to sub to my rss bits feed man. So I give those of us slaving away at JLPT studies this link. Seriously, click it.

So far, it serves as a grim confirmation of what I have been predicting. I am not ready. Last night I whittled my Anki deck down to just 1kyu terms (the others still exist somewhere). Anyways, I've improved it quite a bit from when it was simply a list I found on a website and converted it to an Anki deck. I will offer it for download here soon, as I have in the past. My advice to you is never be satisfied with fishy definitions, even from me.

I had more thoughts on the last post, and made a fancy picture-thingy to explain the ideas I had to help fix what I was rambling about, but forgot to bring it with me on the thumb drive. Perhaps next time as well. You might want to consider my RSS feed for this blog for your update needs. In fact, I have tons of RSS feeds for you. But putting the topic back to last post, someone was wondering agog about what the heck I was talking about. The problem is it would take a long time to describe it to you, and to study in the manner I outlined would take a textbook that only exists in my head as a book-amoeba. It may mitosisize soon too. Anyways, my advice at this stage, besides take all my advice with a grain of salt, is to buy (or torrent for the evil among us) the Remembering the Kanji books. Master the first two volumes. Well, actually, I think just getting familiar with volume 2 is enough at first, but master 1. Then read Tae Kim's guide all the way through. That's the best Claytonian system-substitution I can offer at this time. Anyways, I've revised my thoughts into a more holistic, staggered system-amoeba in my head zone. And there is always the approach that people mentioned in the comments last time: All Japanese All the Time. Thing is, there seem to be some gaps in his system I've never gotten to figure out. I am sure the problem lies with me. I just want to know where he got 10,000 example sentences, and how he made sure they are good and full of a variety of words. It sounds intriguing though. Maybe he should make a textbook.

Geeze, another long post about something only a few lingistics nerds care about. And my tone is odd; no doubt because I have been reading John Hodgeman's blog.

9 comments:

  1. Hey,
    I was looking at the Lang-8 link, and wondering what you thought about it. I saw that one of your posts had recieved a lot of feedback/corrections by what I assume are native Japanes speakers. The amount of responses was encouraging. Writing in Japanese is encouraging, but getting feedback is even better. What are your immpression?

    大分県 JET

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  2. yeah it's great! I may do a review soon. Speaking of it, I am going to make an entry there now.

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  3. Oh, the sentence getting for all japanese all the time is real easy. for a start, all the KODANSHA books have lots and lots of great example sentences. Also the Basic/Intermidiate/Advanced Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar have a ridiculous amount of useful sentences. Also, if I find an interesting word that keeps popping up or peeks my interest then my electronic japanese dictionary has a library of example sentences that I can search in japanese or english. As well as that, Jim Breens online dictionary has example sentences for most of the words in there. From all those above places I can find example sentences that are a good level for me. Then, added to that, I watch all the J-drama I can and when I fully grab a sentence or an expression I write it down as best as I can, then have my JTE check it then put it into ANKI. All the j-dramas that i watch are downloaded so they dont have japanese subtitles, only english that I can turn on and off if i want to check my understanding. I am about to join a rental store soon though so I can get the series with the japanese subtitles which should help a lot with getting sentences from those shows.

    One thing about doing it this way is that you aren't going to understand a lot in the J-dramas at the beginning, and there will be large sections that you miss through not understanding. So I recommend doing what one of my cool JTEs did. Watch the episode without subs, then with, then without again. He watched all of Friend's like this. After he was release from the mental hospital for 'clincal Friend's overdose sysndrome' he had great english ;P
    I can be tiring so you have to find something that you are really into/ obessed with :) For me that is currently Hana Yori Dango 1/2 and the Movie. A great show to get you started.

    Anyway, thats my two bits :)

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  4. Strident, when you anki your sentences, do you make both recognition and production (terminology?) sides?

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  5. I only do a recognition card, not a production card. Mainly because the production aspect of the learning comes from making sure you follow the AJATT guidelines on whether you know the sentence completely. Which includes

    Recognition: 1. Recognising and knowing every words fucnction 2. Understanding the sentence as a whole.

    Production: 3. Saying the sentence out loud (i cant remember if he mentions this on the site but i do this without looking back at the sentence plus imagining myself in a situation where i might actually use the sentence) and 4. Being able to produce the sentence in written form, kanji and all (You dont have to do this for every single sentence as can get boring but i try and do it every 5-10 or so. When I study using my phone on the move I always make sure to have a little gridline notebook with me)

    And thats it :) If I really wanted to make a production side then I think ANKI has a function that can automatically do that for me. But AJATT doesnt recommend it. He goes into detail about why on the site. This method is working great for me so I've no reason to question it yet :)

    p.s Phone ANKI = addiction to studying ;D!!

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  6. Bingo! Bell を聞くが早いか。Actually, the instant I saw this, I couldn't figure out which was a right answer and this expression I was shaky about. Away from Japanese speaking environments, natives lose quite a bit of sense of word, without doubt.
    BTW, currently I'm in Nagoya for a week. I was completely dead because of the blistering sticky weather though yesterday I've come to. Back in Europe, it's already like an Autumn!

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  7. Talking about Japanese, do you know ことばおじさんのナットク日本語塾 on NHK? Yesterday I watched it on おいしいいでした。What do you say to it? My immediate reaction was that it's definitely wrong. But according to the おじさん, in Japnese we have a convention to put tense after a respectful word. Then おいしいいでした must be correct. That's floored me. I've never said it nor heard it except from a mouth of a very uneducated junior high student. How do I say or do I think Japanese say? It's
    おいしかったです。

    He says, there's no clear cut answer to which is correct おいしいいでした and おいしかったです
    because the said rule exists. But even before the war, the latter seems pretty wide spread and the kokugo shingikai(language committee) accepted it as a kind of exception. How come this happened? Well, traditionally, an adjectif could not be coupled with です。One wouldn't say おいしいいです. He says, we said with respect something like おいしゅうございました but it sounded too polite already at that time. I've never said this either. It sounds like a royal family.

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  8. I think my book talked about something similar, but when I typed it, it looked strange, so I will go back and check again.

    In any case おいしいです sounds okay to me, but おいしかたです sounds odd because I always expect the tense (conjugated part) to show up last in a sentence, but I am not a native like you...

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  9. The whole point of the All japanese all the time thing isn't really about having these 10,000 sentences or whatever. You're just supposed to use real sentences taken from real japanese sources, and use them to help you to learn new grammar, vocab, etc. Taking sentences out of textbooks or whatever isn't necessarily the best way to go about, nor out of sources that hold no interest for you.
    Also in regards to your proposed way of learning the language - I don't think that that sounds like any kind of fun at all, or like it would make that much sense to a beginnner. I think that doing the heisig method first would be extremely useful (I wish that I had done it then/could be bothered to do it now), but I think that telling a beginner that they have to do that is just going to wipe out any enthusiasm they might have had for the language at the start.
    I think the important thing is, if you're going to do that, to also learn some Japanese at the same time. How to make simple sentences, some basic vocab, etc. For me, part of the whole point of learning Japanese is to actually be able to communicate with other people. Once you realise how useful it would be to learn Heisig, that would be a good time to start! I think that if I had done Heisig at the start I would have given up almost straight away and definitely not have the level of fluency that I have now.

    The way that I was taught had an extremely heavy focus on grammar straight off, which I think is definitely the way to go. Focus on grammar, study it intensively, and then when you are looking at material that interests you, then you will actually be able to understand more of it. Grammar comes first, lots of vocabulary comes later. I have to say that one of the things that really surprised me when I first came to Japan was how much I could actually say without knowing that much vocabulary at all!

    This has become quite a rambly comment, sorry! haha.

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