shanshan310 said:
You are my new idol. Really, congrats.
I'm definitely not worthy of idolatry, but I appreciate the sentiment! ;D
Zoe said:
Studying specifically for the test or in general?
Cause WOW if the former.
Oh my god, I would kill myself if I had been studying for JLPT for that long. One semester was more than enough, thankyouverymuch. :lol
Shirokun said:
That's nuts. Care to shed some light on your apparently God-like study habits?
Let's see... I was transferring to a new school, so the summer before my sophomore year, I started about a month-and-a-half of self-study using Genki I and Basic Kanji Book Vol.1. (IIRC I started using Anki to reinforce the kanji that I was doing with BKB.)
I finished that up and tested into 201 for the fall semester, and thus started using Genki II in class. I did a lot of the textbook's aural exercises and continued working on the rest of BKB in my spare time, along with absorbing whatever other Japanese sources I could find. I translated song lyrics, read Itoi Shigesato's blog, listened to news broadcasts, etc. (I remember falling in love with the announcer's inflection when he said 東京からニュースをお伝えします :lol)
I completed the BKB Vol.2 over Winter Term and continued similar study habits throughout the second semester.
I was set to go abroad to Kyoto for a year starting that next fall, so I took the summer as an opportunity to go through the Intermediate Kanji Book Vol.1 and do any other sort of Japanese-related work that I could get my hands on. (I also started IKB Vol.2, but I never got around to finishing it... I have about 3-4 more lessons, I think.) I then spent a year studying at Doshisha in Kyoto while living with a family in Shiga. The youngest of their kids--a year older than I--was the only one who spoke any English, but he was rarely around, so I had little choice but to converse in Japanese. :lol I still have all of my notebooks from my Japanese classes last year: I would look up any and all new words in both English and Japanese, and I would approach all new kanji with a similar technique to how they are presented in the BKB/IKB series.
My study abroad finished up in May, so I came back to the U.S. for a little bit, and then returned to Japan for about a month-and-a-half to do an internship with a company in Saitama. Again, very few people that I encountered were conversant in English, so I was speaking Japanese almost all of the time, including the members of the three(!) host families that I had. (Even the woman with whom I lived first--who is absolutely one of the most wonderful people that I've met--is proficient in English, but she decided not to bother because she wanted to help me improve by speaking Japanese. <3)
I came back to the U.S. (again :lol) and enrolled in 451 just so that I could still take a Japanese class of some kind. It wasn't very fulfilling because people's respective levels were so disparate, but it was nice to have some Japanese in my life. As for JLPT, I made meticulous notes on the grammar patterns in the N1 and N2 editions of 総まとめ by listing their explanations and examples, and cross-referencing them with examples from the three 日本語文法辞典 by Makino-sensei, 日本語文型辞典, 完全マスター, and the grammar book from some ancient series called 日本語能力試験に出る. Essentially, I was developing some sort of grammar compendium... :lol I didn't really study a lot of kanji because I felt like I was already pretty comfortable in that regard. (I could read all of the words that I encountered, and I had a pretty good sense of the meanings of any words that I didn't understand.) As for vocab, I didn't start worrying about it until about a month before the test, so I just started lifting the words that I got wrong on the practice tests from 日本語能力試験直前対策文字・語彙1級―模擬テスト全15回 and getting them in my notebook. I also went through the reading comprehension book from the 日本語能力試験に出る series just to get some basic test-taking techniques under my belt as well.
I dunno if that is of any use, and I apologize for blabbering, but that just about summarizes my dealings with Japanese up until now. :O
Evening Musuko said:
Are you Khatzumoto by any chance?
Congrats BTW!
No, I'm just me. :lol I think he's been studying for a while now. But thank you!
Zefah said:
Nice! I had been studying Japanese for just over 3 years when I passed 1-kyuu back in 2005. Very impressive, and congratulations again! Do you plan to study or work in Japan at all?
Oh, awesome--and thank you very much!
I actually have a two-year job set, so I will be leading the Eigo Core curriculum (first-year English classes) at J.F.Oberlin (桜美林
in Machida. Beyond that, though, I have a not-so-secret desire to work for GameFreak/TPC... or ほぼ日刊イトイ新聞 :lol