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cjet79  2mo ago (text post)   2810 thread views

Maker's Monday

Trying out a new weekly thread idea.

This would be a thread for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers. We can coordinate weekly standup type meetings if their is interest.

@ArjinFerman, @Turniper, and myself all had some initial interest.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

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On my own using Renshuu, reading manga, listening to japanese youtubers, and (recently) reading web serials. The reading is slow going, but I like to think I can get 60-80% of the meaning before looking things up.

I do have an ace up my sleeve though, I was an exchange student to Japan over a decade ago so I have a lot of memories of how things are supposed to be pronounced or the contexts they are said in. Learning the actual reading/writing/kanji has had a lot of "oh, that's where that word comes from".

Have you tried any of the practice exams yet? I took a practice N4 a couple months ago and it ended up being both easier in the multiple choice and harder during the listening section than I expected.

I know what you mean. The last time I was there it was mind blowing to see various kanji I’d learned in a vacuum in use. Helped so much with meaning.

I haven’t taken any practice exams yet, I am just doing what my tutor tells me. I am practicing reading more with examples from Genki which is nice. We still have some grammar to get through I think from Genki 2.

Amazon has practice tests for the various levels that I found really helpful to focus in on the types of questions that will be asked. The one I used came with a CD for the audio portion, so you may need to get a USB-CD drive if you PC doesn't have one. They're shorter versions, so they take about an hour or so to do, but doing the N5 and N4 tests at the start of this year is why I had the confidence to push myself for the N3.

What does your tutoring entail?

Oh nice, I’ll take a look at those.

We’re making our way through Genki but each session is usually 30-40 minutes of conversation with occasional grammar discussion, then 20 minutes working on a textbook section.

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