JLPT

I'm interested in doing JLPT next year. But I wanna go straight to lvl 2. I should be doing it this year, but I'm a bit lazy and I'm a bit scared of it.

This are the stats that anki gives to me:

Kanji statistics

The 1082 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 849 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 807 of 1945 (41.5%).
• Jinmeiyou: 13 of 287 (4.5%).
• 29 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 73 of 80 (91.3%).
• Grade 2: 151 of 160 (94.4%).
• Grade 3: 142 of 200 (71.0%).
• Grade 4: 119 of 200 (59.5%).
• Grade 5: 78 of 185 (42.2%).
• Grade 6: 73 of 181 (40.3%).
• JuniorHS: 171 of 939 (18.2%).

I'm searching for past tests for JLPT but I only found this page: http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/LevelCheck/PT/01.htm

If I follow it, I'd pass lvl 3 for sure and would only get 40-50% in lvl 2. The passing mark of lvl 2 is 60%. That is making me wonder if I'm just being a chicken.

The 40-50% mark looked too close to the 41.5% mark of anki to be a lie. I'll redo this test in a month to see if I get a better score.

Anime sentences, the final bout.

Hello,

I've done some more sentence mining from lyrics. They have a great thing about them. They are "free". They were already memorized. They are nice to repeat - as long you like the song.

But they are few and they are skinny.

Same for anime sentences. They are too skinny. By skinny I say: Short, few kanji, hard to know how to write, etc.

But that lead me to another way of doing the sentences. What I'm doing now:
When I hear a new word, I put it in Yahoo和英辞書 and mine sentences for it.
Then I do the repetitions.
If I find a word that I'm not confortable with, I put it in Yahoo和英辞書 again and I get some more sentences.
I do that until I'm tired.

It is working fine. I already told why I like Yahoo dict sentences, but I'll say it again. They are thick, they are heavy, they have the exact amount of kanji, the have the exact amount of new words, a certain degree of irony and a lot of culture.

First impressions on extracting sentenes from anime.

Yesterday I started mining sentences from anime karaoke openings. It was very fun.

It was very easy to pick the animes to check the openings. I already had a few favorites of myself, but it would not bother to check for some more. One thing is that anime fans are usualy not quiet people, well, at least not quiet in the internet. They like to discuss what is the best of any category of anything that has a thing to do to anime. And they have built various lists of top anime openings.

I already had Macross Frontier. Today I got three more: Chobits, Oruchuban Ebichu and Ouran High School Host Club.

My first impression on lyrics, and one thing a friend also commented with me is that they are partly nonsense. So here is my balance of sentences, for now:

Macross frontier: 14 sentences.
Chobits: 5 sentences.
Oruchuban Ebichu: 5 sentences.
Ouran: 15 sentences, but most from the ending, not the opening.

Macross has many many songs. I only collected sentences from only one, the first opening. But for the other three I pretty much exausted them.

This raises a problem. Tought sentences from openings are valid and mining them is fun, they are few. Gladly I have a hundred more series to check out!

Answers + about learning the readings of kanji from the sentences

Yo, folks. This post is for a few answers from commentaries.

The link for the yahoo dictionary is http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/
Beware. It was 4 search options. The one you are looking for when you search for sentences is 和英, that is, japanese -> english.

About the number of sentences, counting only the sentences I kept in the SRS, I have 232 sentences. The tae kim pack had about 800 sentences and I already had gone trought 60% of them.

About on how to learn the readings, I believe there are now 2 choices.

1) Learn it from the sentences, and doing rote memorization for the readings.

2) Learn it from the sentences, but use some kind of mnemonic for the readings.

I'm tending to pick the number 2 because the success of RTK.
The method I plan to use is the DrMovie method. Or better said, a variation of it,
because I already did RTK and because I know a lot of japanese already from previous studies.

I'm already adding places for the readings I already know. From that little I've noticed that:

1) Adding a very familiar place for a familiar reading makes that place very strong.

2) Recognizing a learnt word from a sentence while watching anime/doramas makes that word really hard to forget.

3) For familiar words relearnt in the sentences is very easy to put the readings in their respective places.

So, operationaly speaking, these 3 things make mining sentences from anime scripts a nice option.

Now, alyks pointed me this post:
http://blog.feedmejapanese.com/2008/07/08/collecting-sentences-or-learning-japanese/

The sentences from yahoo are awesome, they are very rich, but they are not familiar, and they are not fun. They have no context.

There is one more thing I noticed while watching Macross Frontier. The series is great but there is an special point about it. It has many songs. And fansubbers are getting crazy lately and putting karaoke subtitles in everyone of them.

So, my next try on mining sentences will be on these karaoke subtitles.

The dr movie method.

RevTK forums are a great resource for the japanese learner. Not only for its site review the kanji, but for the people that frequent it.

This week some guy with the handle alyks came up with a method called Mr Movie Method. He used it to go trought RTK and the on yomi simultaneously at a 50 kanji/day pace. Quite impressive.

Here is his blog:
http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com/

I intend to use it for the on yomi while doing the sentences.

Tae Kim's japanese grammar

If you are living on planet earth and have been trying to study japanese trought the internet, you must've already checked Tae Kim's guide to japanese grammar. It is very comprehensible, with great examples, and with a nice coverage.

So last week I got a pack of sentences from Tae Kim's guide and imported to anki. There were about 800 sentences. It made me see that these would do great good to my japanese. And the were very easy to read. Why 'were'? Because the pack had a few mistakes and I got afraid of picking something wrong in such a crucial stage that is the beggining so I trew them off my SRS. Too bad. The sentences were great.

One week has passed.

Yo,
It's been one week since I started doing sentences. I have not done it yesterday and before yesterday for lazyness reasons, but I did it today.

And I'm still reviewing about 90 kanjis /day from RTK.

The things I have to remark for now are:

1. Kanjis in RTK from the sentences stick better than superglue. Transfering the kanjis from RTK to sentences reduces RTK review workload.
2. Well connected sentences are much more enjoyable. I mean, pack of sentences about the same subect. Not only in the sense that it is more fun to dig them, but the japanese you learn from them is better and it gets inside of your mind with less effort.
   
3. I discarded from the SRS the most boring sentences.
   

So for the next week, I'll try to follow a novel.