Good look with the test Kai.
I already lost my streak after just 30 days but I think I’ll be happy if I do six days a week. You guys getting on for a year streak are an inspiration.
I haven’t added any new grammar for a bit as there were too many ghosts stacking up. I have put some full sentences into quizlet. I’m working on faster output and I find learning the whole sentence with the grammar point in it improves that.
I still find myself rehearsing conversations but it does help. I’m trying to keep a Japanese diary but that’s not going too well…
Disabled vacation mode after like three months. Coming back is rough. My accuracy is in the 30s Hopefully the grammar points will start to come back slowly. Probably going to keep to reviews only until I get them under control. Thinking If I should unlearn some of the N2 points I did because I’ve completely forgotten those…
Wrote the JLPT N4 on Sunday! Fairly confident about Vocab and Grammar thanks to Anki and Bunpro, so as long as I can squeak by the listening I think I’ll pass.
Taking things a bit slower to recover, and because I miss my other hobbies. I’m back to following the Tobira path, but I’m just going to do 1 grammar point a day for a while. Even with that pace, I should still have all the N3 points covered in time for next year.
At 334 streak, I’m a month away from a year!
I took the N1 on Sunday and I feel like I have a good chance of passing, but I’m not completely confident. Right now I’m acting as if I failed it and I have to retake it in July. Meaning I’m working through the Sou Matome Vocab book (only got to the 4th week before the test) and going through my BP reviews like normal.
In the case that I passed N1, not exactly sure what I should do next in terms of study routine. I am working on my speaking, which is what I want to focus on going forward.
I’ve cracked open my Shadowing Japanese book and got my bum handed to me on some of the easiest sentences. They’re super simple to understand by reading or listening, but trying to match the speed of a native is so much harder in regards to speaking. But it’s a challenge I’m ready to take. I also like that it’s still a structured thing. I can go through the units and individual lessons one-by-one which takes out the thinking part.
Other than that, I’m going to go to my city’s Japanese lessons which are kind of glorified Japanese conversation nights. But for a 100円 for 90 minutes, they beat out all the other “language exchanges” which seem to always gravitate back to English.
And of course I’m still reading books and playing games in Japanese. I sure hope I passed because it’s nice to actually be able to enjoy the language properly instead of feeling like it’s a alternative study source for a test.
Yes, I have indeed done my review (singular) today!
Gotta keep that streak alive.
明日から頑張りましょうね
Finally made it a whole year today!!
I haven’t even managed this on WK yet… (currently at 140 there)
I’m sooo ready for N1 now
I remember I used to be proud of my online stats in Halo 2 like this, or min/maxing a character in MMO’s… now I get to gamify learning Japanese instead
@Kai Nicely done!
As for me, I hit one year on BP about a month ago, but I just today finished the last lesson of N4. But I’ve been studying N3 for 3 months with Japanese class and will finished N3 with class in another 3 months. (This school do N5 in 3 months, N4 in three months, and N3 in 6 months.)
It is just hard to keep up with BP and the grammar in class since we go through it quickly and I prefer to do BP in the order BP has put things, otherwise I’d already have done late parts of N3 on BP, because my books don’t order things the same BP does.
I have a holiday break from school starting next Saturday and I hope to do extra BP lessons during the holiday, especially since I have already gone through most of lesson 1 of N3 in class already. Should be easy to just add it in quickly.
I also need to get back on top of WK. hehe…
I’ve had から quizzed like 1000 times… and I’ve gotten it wrong like 999 times.
I don’t think I’ll ever remember to add だ before nouns and such :’)
put a sticker on your monitor edge that just says “review だから” or something.
you can pull it off when you’ve mastered the item
in turkey, some shops have a singboard written “bugün allah için ne yaptın?” on it (may be translated as, what did you do today for allah, what good deeds etc.)
this thread reminded me that sings for no reason at all =)
This was one of my big problems too when I was a beginner in Japanese. Just keep doing it and it’ll become natural after a while, to the point where it will feel strange not to have だ.
Also, you mean after nouns and na adjectives right?
先生だからやさしい (noun)
パリは綺麗だから行きたい (na adjective)
頑張れよ~
Something important to note is that い-adjectives never need a copula, because the “is” part of the sentence is intrinsic to them. In other words, you can think of 青い as “is blue,” or 可愛い as “is cute.” So, 青いだ or 可愛いだ would sound like “is is blue” or “is is cute.” You can, of course, still add です as a politeness marker for い-adjectives, but it (です) does not actually serve as a grammatical copula in these cases.
To add to this, から (when being used as “because”/“so”) needs to follow either a verb, or an い-adjective (because い-adjectives have a frequent tendency to behave as verbs). だ fills this role too, so although it’s technically a copula, it might help to think of it (だ) as a “verb” that means “is.”
You can use から directly after nouns, but then it no longer means “because”/“so” and instead means “from” or “since:” ここから, ずっと前から, 田中さんから, etc.
Good point about い-adjectives. The reason is - they are essentially verbs
Similarly, な-adjectives are essentially nouns.
One of the fun parts of being new is that my mind is being blown every day, the adjectives are all super interesting. Kai, thanks for that insight!
Yeah, I remember the line between verbs and adjectives being surprisingly blurry! I think the biggest struggle was when I first learned すぎる, an auxiliary verb that essentially means “too much” of whatever it’s attached to. 食べる means “to eat,” so 食べすぎる means “to eat too much.”
That’s simple enough, but you can also attach すぎる to adjectives!! 多い means “many,” and to say “too many,” it becomes 多すぎる. To say that something is excessively beautiful, you’d say きれいすぎる. (Which reminds me; きれい is classified as a “な-adjective” because when it’s written with kanji, 綺麗, the reading of 麗 is れい. We can’t conjugate that い like an い-adjective because it’s part of the kanji’s reading!)
Anyway, all this is to say it took me a good while to get used to the fact that we can turn adjectives into verbs just by throwing すぎる on the end of them. This is the kind of stuff I wish was explained more thoroughly to me when I was a beginner
(Likewise, as @Kuromaku mentioned, な-adjectives and nouns also behave extremely similarly in most grammar points. Given this and the い-adjective/verb similarities, some people have argued that Japanese has no “true” adjectives at all)
Fairly impressive! I’ve been gamifying Japanese learning for a few months… hope to be in your position by next year.
Very well done!
Since I missed in October (I think it was or November), I haven’t been so consistent with BP, but I managed to hit level 50. ^^ I also finished of N4 a while back if I didn’t say. I meant to do extra lessons during my holiday break, but it seems I wanted a true break. ^____^ (Considering this was my first break where I didn’t have to try and keep my BP streak going, perhaps it was needed.)
finished learning about all the N5 items and adding them to my reviews
overall accuracy 94% (i knew about half of the N5 stuff already quite well).
main troubles are
- mixing up vocabulary i learned together. there’s no good reason why i would confuse things like “intend to” with “decide on” (にする / つもりだ)
- conjugation of casual past tense verbs. of course. even though i know this terribly sung song from the japanese from zero course (link). sorry sensei
- not paying attention what is asked for (want to to do / politeness / tense / etc …)
nothing that can’t be fixed with practice! anyways, i feel like my japanese skills skyrocketed this month and i find myself always building random sentences in my head during the day, trying to incorporate newly learned grammar
Congrats! What’s the green badge though?