Test Prep

[owlectomy]

I am now all the way through my prep books for kanji, vocab, grammar, and reading comprehension (that's all of them). Have no confidence at all in the kanji, but I think I can probably grope out a 70% or so.

Other supplies acquired:
Test voucher (got it in the mail today)
Six Hello Kitty pencils
Hello Kitty pencil sharpener

I'm pleased, because most of the time when I say "Okay, I am going to study some Japanese now!" I only last for two or three weeks before I find something more interesting, and I've been working through these test prep books since July. And also because I had a good excuse to get Hello Kitty school supplies, not that I need an excuse.

Pleased -- and very, VERY impatient. Though there's still plenty of work needing to get done, past exams to work through, mistakes to correct. And I need to do a bunch more SSR crawling in bed with a good book.

Immersion works. I believe in immersion. But I also think it was a good thing to study some of the words I normally don't encounter to round out my knowledge. I suspect that if I take seriously the idea that proficiency tests are not things you should study for, I'm a little below level 1; I also suspect that I wouldn't get to level 1 without reading a lot of newspapers. That is not a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Comments

[littlebutfierce]

I'm pleased, because most of the time when I say "Okay, I am going to study some Japanese now!" I only last for two or three weeks before I find something more interesting

I am v. impressed, & jealous! I've been saying for months that I need to sit down & study Finnish again (I'd been taking a community-run course, but it's @ an inconvenient time/day & plus it's not super super rigorous), & I have a zillion texts & fun magazines & stuff, but I haven't been able to make myself do much of anything. *sigh*

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think one of the problems that I've been having with formal study is that the more I learn the more I realize I will never ever be all the way there. Actually, that seems a little extreme, because I'm still young and who knows what I'll do with the next 40 years? But it's discouraging that I've been at it ten years and I still need to sit down with my dictionary to read a fantasy novel. This time I was actually able to break it down like NaNoWriMo, with a little chart of how much I had to do every day, and how much I had left, and a place to mark off my progress every day, so - it made it seem like I would someday just be DONE, which was a huge motivator.

Finnish is one of those (many) languages I'd like to learn someday. Someone once told me that it was ridiculously hard, but I don't know if that's true, or it's just outside the usual Latin-based frame of reference. Good luck with it!

[littlebutfierce]

Well, Finnish does have 15 case endings. But it also happens to use the same alphabet as English, so to me it sort of balances out.

A couple of summers ago Phredd & I took a short Finnish course in Finland. Most of the other students were international grad students (b/c tuition is free, even for them) whose courses were taught in English but needed Finnish to get around (& the language of instruction was English, so they were learning Finnish in a not-native-language course, which made me feel ashamed as an American w/not great language skills). One Japanese woman, when I asked her why she chose to study Finnish (I think she was a Nordic Studies major in Japan), said it was easier than Japanese! Which kind of bowled me over, heh.