Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

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kraemder
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Tue Apr 25, 2017 10:55 am

I just took the first part of a mock N1 exam. I was just going to do the one from the website but then I realized it doesn't have a way to self score so you get a feel for the test but really have no idea if you passed or not. So I bought a book from the same publisher as for the N2 exam. I got a 43 on the grammar/vocab/language knowledge portion and a 21 on the reading comprehension. Yeah, the reading kicked my butt. I read maybe five passages and understood two of them. Or something like that. I didn't have enough time to finish. When I did the mock N2 exam, I finished or came really really close to finishing. I think it's weird that I am struggling on the reading comprehension and yet I don't feel like my vocabulary is holding me back. I might not know every word but I know every kanji anyway and I don't think it's vocabulary. I do read a lot. In fact I was going to post just to say that I finished the first book or first half of 騎士団長殺し. The book gets slow at times so I've gotten distracted and read other books instead (light novels in Japanese). I read a couple novels using Voice Dream where my phone just reads the book to me. As you might imagine, this is a bit easier than reading it to yourself since it marches forward at a steady pace unless you stop it, oblivious to any complicated kanji that might appear.

If I want my reading score to go up I think I'll have to change a few things. I'm pretty happy with the grammar/vocab so I'll cut back on that a bit. Oh, I finished through chapter 20 in 新完全マスター文法N1. I'm really happy with that. I haven't finished the textbook completely but just getting through these chapters was something I always wanted to do with N2 but never achieved. I have the 新完全マスター語彙 book too and just started going through it and adding stuff to Anki. It's full of words I don't know - more than half of each chapter but doing the practice test I don't think you need to know all the vocabulary in this book at all. It's probably good and useful so I'll continue doing it but at a leisurely pace.

読解 will be the focus. I'm going to get through the 新完全マスター読解 next. Just reading for pleasure may not be the best way for me to study for this test.... certainly essays have their own style but any fiction, particularly literature should be useful, except if I'm just skipping the parts that are boring or abstract and not so vital to the plot then I'm skipping the parts that may help me do better on the test. Maybe. Getting a score of 21 is pretty bad on the 読解, you might be wondering just how much do you even know with a score like that. I think I understood maybe three reading passages properly and the rest were too hard. And I went too slow so I ran out of time. You need a 19 minimum to pass the test on each section so I barely got past that. With a 19, I think it shows you understood at least something even if most of it was over your head. Odds are that you won't get a 19 purely guessing... you'll need to correctly answer something right. But not too many questions. When I think about how an N1 is supposed to be the equivalent of a C1, I would feel guilty passing with a 読解 of just 21. Of course I would take it though... but I'd like to get a 28 or higher anyway. If you think about it, anything less than a 33 means your score there isn't pulling its weight and is relying on the other scores to get you to pass. So of course I would like a 33 or higher in 読解, but I don't think that's realistic within a few months. My abstract essay reading comprehension speed isn't going to go up all that much unfortunately. Maybe in a few more years however.. I could retake the test again after I've already passed maybe? Too crazy, right?
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kraemder
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Wed Apr 26, 2017 5:58 pm

Well I didn't exactly listen to my own advice today regarding cutting back on vocabulary. I added tons of vocabulary to my 'random' deck which is just stuff I find. Or it might be from a textbook if I want but it's not a premade deck like core or kanji in context (I have a premade deck for this).

Oh. Incidentally, rikai-sama recently stopped being supported. I use the Mac version and Sanseido mode stopped working and it doesn't import cards into Anki using the plug ins. I can still get it to work with Flashcards Deluxe so I'm switch back to that instead of Anki for my 'random' deck.

Today at the Japanese lesson we only got through one 読解 problem. I got it right. Finally. My teacher got it wrong. I was surprised. I didn't think that natives would get reading comprehension stuff wrong. It's a little bit relieving. Also, we reviewed a bit if the 新完全マスター語彙N1 Book. Obviously she had no problems with that but it was quite hard for me because I hadn't studied these words before.

Having roughly six hours per week of lessons speaking Japanese seems really helpful. If I were lucky enough to continue for say a year, I bet I'd be speaking much better Japanese.

You may have heard this before: "You don't learn a foreign language, you get used to it." I've been thinking about this a lot. Aside from just studying language, I think I need to work on my social skills for when I'm speaking a foreign language with groups of people. Right now I generally just listen a bit but I'm mostly just a spectator. This is much less stressful than actively participating where I'm afraid not so much of making a mistake speaking as making a mistake understanding what's being said and saying by a completely nonsensical response that has nothing to do with what's being talked about. The only real way to avoid this aside from being quiet is to be the center of attention so that although it's a group discussion, it's like everyone is talking to you and never each other. If they're talking to you then they're much more likely to speak at your level and avoid cultural references that would be over your head. I'm not generally the center of attention in a group however, nevermind controlling the discussion from start to finish. I've noticed people who are naturally the center of attention give a better impression of their language skills. I don't do it naturally myself. I'm gonna look for tips for this kind of thing.
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kraemder
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Mon May 01, 2017 3:53 am

Just a random tip if you're going to japan for the first time and are hoping your beginner/intermediate Japanese will be useful. At restaurants, they will ask you おめしあがりますか? Which is the formal (hard way) to say are you eating? They drop the 'here' part more often than not although you may here it too. こちらへおめしあがりまづか? Of course if they include he here part it makes more sense (at least to me). I don't know how often I heard them say this and I kept waiting for them to say something else... to finish the thought so to speak. Am I eating? Yes, I came here to buy food. I'm eating haha. Took a while to get used to. It does make sense if you think of it as eating versus carrying it (take out).
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kraemder
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Sat May 06, 2017 4:09 pm

I don't know if other people subscribe to Luca from LinguaCore's mailing list. He writes short articles on language learning from time to time and posts them. He allegedly speaks 13 languages although if you read his article you see that not all of his languages are equal. His most recent article was about maintaining his languages even when he's studying a new language. This is something I haven't done at all. None. Almost. I read a book in German a few years ago while studying Japanese when I took a German course at at a local community college. At that time I was able to read the book over the weekend. I think I started it Friday evening and finished it Saturday evening but I'm not positive. It was an ebook so I don't know the page count but maybe 300ish. I was happy that I could read it so quickly but also depressed when I compared it to my ability to read Japanese despite all the effort I was putting into Japanese. German was hard at first. Very hard. But it got so much easier over time. Japanese is getting easier over time but not so much easier. No spaces between words and lots of kanji definitely slows you down compared to a language that uses the Roman alphabet. Lots and lots. I kind of wonder just how native speakers read their own language - do they sight read everything? Do they hear the language in their head as they read? What do they do when they encounter a kanji they don't know? In a Roman alphabet language, be it English or German, I tend to just read whole sentences and not even focus on individual words and then just picture the meaning of the sentence in my head. If I come up with nothing, then I go back and look at the words more carefully. Maybe think about it or look something up. Or just move on. This creates a really nice flow where I'm reading at a good pace. It's stimulating and interesting. Japanese is such a freaking pain because I can't find this pace - a relaxed state of mind. My eyes even start to hurt or get tired. It stinks. This happens often with just a couple words (or kanji) I don't know. Reading a book or the newspaper takes a lot out of me mentally. Of course, some books are easier than others. I wonder if reading Japanese will ever get as easy and pleasurable for me as reading a language with the Roman alphabet. I doubt it. However, listening to books on my iPhone using text to speech is showing more promise. Of course, the app doesn't always get the kanji readings right but you can create a dictionary of pronunciation corrections and my dictionary is getting pretty good.

Anyway, the point of this entry was that I'm going to make an attempt to maintain German like Luca does. From what he describes, I think the difference with maintaining is that you don't study the language actively - textbooks or vocabulary lists. Just read, watch TV, or maybe speak it if you have that opportunity. Strangely he didn't actually address he difference between actively studying and maintaining a language. So I'm making it up myself. No German Anki. Haha. I wonder if I could read one book a week in german (light reading). It would be sad if I'm able to out read my maintenance language over my actively studying language that I've been slaving away at for over five years but Japanese is just evil like that I guess.
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby AndyMeg » Sat May 06, 2017 10:20 pm

kraemder wrote: I was happy that I could read it so quickly but also depressed when I compared it to my ability to read Japanese despite all the effort I was putting into Japanese. German was hard at first. Very hard. But it got so much easier over time. Japanese is getting easier over time but not so much easier. No spaces between words and lots of kanji definitely slows you down compared to a language that uses the Roman alphabet. Lots and lots. I kind of wonder just how native speakers read their own language - do they sight read everything? Do they hear the language in their head as they read? What do they do when they encounter a kanji they don't know? In a Roman alphabet language, be it English or German, I tend to just read whole sentences and not even focus on individual words and then just picture the meaning of the sentence in my head. If I come up with nothing, then I go back and look at the words more carefully. Maybe think about it or look something up. Or just move on. This creates a really nice flow where I'm reading at a good pace. It's stimulating and interesting. Japanese is such a freaking pain because I can't find this pace - a relaxed state of mind. My eyes even start to hurt or get tired. It stinks. This happens often with just a couple words (or kanji) I don't know. Reading a book or the newspaper takes a lot out of me mentally. Of course, some books are easier than others. I wonder if reading Japanese will ever get as easy and pleasurable for me as reading a language with the Roman alphabet.


Reading is my biggest struggle with japanese. With english I adquired lots and lots of vocabulary just by reading, and I would like to do the same with japanese, but it's been really hard so far. I don't care about going slow at the beginning, but with japanese it just seems to be too slow. It is hard trying to read even light novels because they don't have furigana for most of the words and I constantly get stuck looking for one kanji at a time until I complete a word and then looking for the word on the dictionary.

I've tried learning the on-yomi and kun-yomi for kanjis, but it is just too boring for me and I can't keep up.

What I'm planning to do now is reading dorama transcripts while watching the episodes, so that at least I can hear the sounds and look for the words faster in the dictionary.

You have made HUGE progress so far. Keep at it and don't give up!

がんばれ!
Last edited by AndyMeg on Sun May 07, 2017 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby Aozora » Sun May 07, 2017 12:22 am

kraemder wrote:I was happy that I could read it so quickly but also depressed when I compared it to my ability to read Japanese despite all the effort I was putting into Japanese. German was hard at first. Very hard. But it got so much easier over time. Japanese is getting easier over time but not so much easier. No spaces between words and lots of kanji definitely slows you down compared to a language that uses the Roman alphabet. Lots and lots. I kind of wonder just how native speakers read their own language - do they sight read everything? Do they hear the language in their head as they read? What do they do when they encounter a kanji they don't know? In a Roman alphabet language, be it English or German, I tend to just read whole sentences and not even focus on individual words and then just picture the meaning of the sentence in my head. If I come up with nothing, then I go back and look at the words more carefully. Maybe think about it or look something up. Or just move on. This creates a really nice flow where I'm reading at a good pace. It's stimulating and interesting. Japanese is such a freaking pain because I can't find this pace - a relaxed state of mind. My eyes even start to hurt or get tired. It stinks. This happens often with just a couple words (or kanji) I don't know. Reading a book or the newspaper takes a lot out of me mentally. Of course, some books are easier than others. I wonder if reading Japanese will ever get as easy and pleasurable for me as reading a language with the Roman alphabet. I doubt it. However, listening to books on my iPhone using text to speech is showing more promise. Of course, the app doesn't always get the kanji readings right but you can create a dictionary of pronunciation corrections and my dictionary is getting pretty good.


I don't sight read in English, I pretty much sub-vocalize everything while reading anything complex. Same with Japanese. With reading Japanese, there's basically three things that make it comfortable for me. First, the text has to be at my reading level. If it's too hard, it's slow and frustrating. Two, I have to read a lot, so my brain is used to the activity. And three, I have to be in the mood to read. If I don't actually want to sit down and focus on the text, my mind just doesn't want to follow the text. If there's a good novel or manga, I really enjoy reading Japanese. Newspapers or technical stuff, not so much. Can I ask how much reading you do in Japanese?
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby Sayonaroo » Sun May 07, 2017 1:45 am

I can assure you that anything easy if you do it a lot. I've read 130 books in Japanese (most of my time doing stuff in Japanese is talk/variety shows than reading anyway... i read over 130 books the course of 8 years) and it is enjoyable. What I love about reading in Japanese is how it can effortless with the kanji. For phonetic alphabets you have actually read it but for Chinese characters you just recognize it "effortlessly/automatically" Of course I find reading in English easy too since that's probably the language I've read the most since it's my native language.

Maybe you should focus on stuff with audio like song lyrics or talk variety shows or audiobooks with the book.

And as much of a pain it is to learn to read Japanese there's a lot of fantastic tools. I didn't read all your posts but I will mention them in case somehow you don't know about them.

rikaisama ( you can switch between japanese and english definitions and it generates a .txt file you can import into anki )
yomichan
cb's OCR Manga Reader
plugin tools for anki that add in furigana (of course it's not 100% accurate)
tss (text to speech) for anki (never used it for japanese personally myself)
capture2text (ocr program)
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kraemder
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Sun May 07, 2017 6:00 am

Sayonaroo wrote:I can assure you that anything easy if you do it a lot. I've read 130 books in Japanese (most of my time doing stuff in Japanese is talk/variety shows than reading anyway... i read over 130 books the course of 8 years) and it is enjoyable. What I love about reading in Japanese is how it can effortless with the kanji. For phonetic alphabets you have actually read it but for Chinese characters you just recognize it "effortlessly/automatically" Of course I find reading in English easy too since that's probably the language I've read the most since it's my native language.

Maybe you should focus on stuff with audio like song lyrics or talk variety shows or audiobooks with the book.

And as much of a pain it is to learn to read Japanese there's a lot of fantastic tools. I didn't read all your posts but I will mention them in case somehow you don't know about them.

rikaisama ( you can switch between japanese and english definitions and it generates a .txt file you can import into anki )
yomichan
cb's OCR Manga Reader
plugin tools for anki that add in furigana (of course it's not 100% accurate)
tss (text to speech) for anki (never used it for japanese personally myself)
capture2text (ocr program)


Thanks for the comment. It's encouraging to hear from someone who's read a ton of books and reached a point where it's consistently enjoyable. If you read my posts, you'll see that occasionally I'll read Japanese and be surprised that it's enjoyable for me. However, when I read German just last night, I saw that I found Japanese enjoyable relative to reading Japanese before. It's not on a level with a language with an alphabet. It's not pleasure reading - it's work. The key to reading for me is to have a consistent pace and I struggle to do that with Japanese. It sounds like you don't read Japanese out lout to yourself when you read - I do read it out loud to myself. Maybe I need to stop that if I'm going to really enjoy reading Japanese novels or anything of substantial length. Text messages in Japanese don't tax me in the least - short posts in Facebook are ok but sometimes take a little effort, and reading something professionally written is definitely taxing. I'm probably going to alternate between reading printed matter and listening to books on the app. Strangely, I prefer the text to speech app on my phone over audio books - I can tweak the reading speed just how I want it and there's a lot more variety of material to choose from. And of course, if I want to look a word up in the dictionary, I can pause the reading and scroll up and check the word. I don't do that too much though when listening - I just let it go and do it's thing.

If you have a tip for developing sight reading in Japanese, please let me know. I get the impression that it's something you don't force but rather it happens over time. Some people sight read English - I don't. I tried to develop that skill in college to increase my reading speed but had to give up.
Last edited by kraemder on Mon May 08, 2017 6:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Sayonaroo
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby Sayonaroo » Sun May 07, 2017 7:03 am

Sometimes I read out loud and I have no problem keeping up a consistent pace. I usually read it aloud at the fastest pace I can since it is still slower than when I am not reading out loud and I'm so used to Japanese so naturally I feel inclined to read fast. All I can say is you have to read a lot. If by sight reading you can skimming you gotta read. a lot.

Also don't forget to blame the material for your lack of enjoyment rather than your skills. Not all Japanese books are equal. Some authors make Japanese so effortless to read and others make it feel so tedious. It's just my personal taste. Don't feel pressured to like something or force yourself read or watch something just because it's popular. For example higashino Keigo is a popular, famous novel writer who is famous for his easy to read writing style. I found his book boring and tedious and his writing style was actually laborious to read for me because I didn't like it (yes technically it's easy to read but it's not easy to read for me because that writing style is lacking). It just didn't reasonatw with me. I'm picky with writers who write in English. Just because you understand only 50% let's say doesn't mean you can't tell whether or not something is compatible with you.
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kraemder
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Mon May 08, 2017 7:22 am

AndyMeg wrote:
Reading is my biggest struggle with japanese. With english I adquired lots and lots of vocabulary just by reading, and I would like to do the same with japanese, but it's been really hard so far. I don't care about going slow at the beginning, but with japanese it just seems to be too slow. It is hard trying to read even light novels because they don't have furigana for most of the words and I constantly get stuck looking for one kanji at a time until I complete a word and then looking for the word on the dictionary.

I've tried learning the on-yomi and kun-yomi for kanjis, but it is just too boring for me and I can't keep up.

What I'm planning to do now is reading dorama transcripts while watching the episodes, so that at least I can hear the sounds and look for the words faster in the dictionary.

You have made HUGE progress so far. Keep at it and don't give up!

がんばれ!


Thanks for the reply. I can we that we have a lot in common in that we're both stubbornly trying to bring Japanese to the next level even after we've tried the proven methods for other languages and found them to be far less effective. I've used SRS flashcards on my phone for about five years almost every day and it's a slow but steady way to make progress. Thanks to the tedious flashcards, I'm really very good at kanji for a westerner. Furigana isn't a substitute for an alphabet with spaces between the words although it does help. I think you can attest to that as well. I have to say that the more common 日常 kanji really do repeat in new words so often that it will probably surprise you. In my reading I will see kanji I know in words I don't know and more often than not, the common ON yomi, what pops into my head first, is correct. Often enough that I think a big trick is just having the courage to plow through Japanese text without worrying so much about the correct reading for each kanji. This is something I kind of realized before already but I needed the reminder (hence my post here just now!) - it can feel a bit unnatural especially when you're reading with the goal of increasing your vocabulary and language ability.

Since I posted about how awful reading Japanese is when compared to German I started reading Sword Art Online and it's going better than some of my other recent novels have gone. Just a bit of encouragement in the forums helped and also I think I like the story more than whatever I was reading before. I was thinking I needed more furigana so I got a book that looked good (and may be good just not for me right now) for kids maybe 4th grade to 7th grade ish. There's furigana on just about -every- kanji. But the story wasn't engaging me and I was falling asleep reading it.

If I could turn off the internal monologue in my head and just 'read', that would be something! But I'll just try to focus on finding books I want to read. It's still more work than a German novel but Sword Art Online is at least holding my attention and that makes the additional mental work needed a lot more bearable.
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