Nine month updateWell, I'm officially three quarters of the way through my originally planned year of Japanese study, so time for a mega update post. Of course, it has become increasingly clear that I'll be studying Japanese for longer than that, but 75% is still a shiny nice round number. It's also amazing to think how much everything has changed in the last nine months. 2020 has certainly been a year to live in infamy.
JLPTI recently took the JLPT practice tests
here to gauge my progress. Of course, the real JLPT is graded on a curve and there's no weighting information available for the practice exams, so there's no way to tell whether I would have passed or not, but I figured that at least taking them provides a quantifiable measure of my progress.
Raw scores (including partial credit for questions left blank):
N5: vocab 32/35, grammar+reading 28.2/32, listening 13.7/24
N4: vocab 28.7/35, grammar+reading 17.2/35, listening 13.4/28
N3: vocab 22/35
On the N5, I aced vocab and did well on the grammar and reading section. Unfortunately, I bombed listening. I got every question in the first listening section (task based comprehension), but did barely better than chance on the rest. Pretty frustrating after all this time, especially since listening has been my main focus!
To be honest, I still can't
really believe that I'm not yet at N5 in listening. I feel like I'm past that if anything. I suspect that I'm just missing some crucial aspect that passively listening to podcasts and anime constantly for months hasn't given me. Maybe I need to specifically practice trying to retrieve information from short dialogues.
Next, I took the N4 practice exam. I still did pretty well on kanji and vocab, though it was a lot harder than N5. The grammar and reading section on the other hand was pure torture. I basically spent the whole time just waiting for time's up to put me out of my misery. And of course, I barely did better than chance on listening, but that wasn't surprising after I failed the N5 listening test.
Lastly, I took the vocab section of the N3 to see how much Wanikani had helped me with advanced kanji (I didn't bother with the grammar and reading or listening sections of N3 for obvious reasons). The N3 test was definitely a lot harder.
I found that I was often able to guess the readings for kanji thanks to Wanikani even when I didn't know and/or couldn't remember what the words actually meant. I had to guess on a bunch, but I ended up getting all but one of the questions on the kanji sections. Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) I did much worse on the vocab sections, having to guess on most of the questions.
AnimeI watched the last episode of Cardcaptor Sakura today. It felt like the end of an era. Coincidently, I started watching the show
exactly four months ago. I'm not actually sure whether I'd recommend it or not. The episodes were often boring and I frequently found myself mentally tuning out despite my best efforts to pay attention. On the other hand, they showed a lot of interesting aspects about life in Japan that I never knew about before. Also, there's a
lot of episodes, so that's a plus, and there's accurate Japanese subtitles on Netflix though I didn't bother with them.
Anyway, it looks like I watched a total of 34 anime episodes last month, up from 28 in August.
Shows watched:Complete:
Cardcaptor Sakura (70 eps)
BNA: Brand New Animal (12 eps)
The Dragon Prince (27 eps)
Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online (12 eps)
Hilda (10 eps)
Carmen Sandiego (19 eps)
Ongoing:
The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. (15 eps)
K-On! (2 eps)
Abandoned:
One Piece (4 eps)
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (1 ep)
WanikaniLevel
41Items Learned (Guru+): 444部首 1347漢字 4335単語
Wanikani continues as always, though sometimes the later levels feel futile since they're both harder and less useful. And in two weeks, I'll be starting the "fast levels", where the maximum speed is twice as fast as normal, meaning it is theoretically possible to complete two levels a week instead of one.
Back when I started Wanikani, I vowed to complete it as fast as possible. I was eager and bored by the slow early levels and met the warnings from experienced users about review load with an attitude of "come at me WK, I can take it." Of course, now I'm in the opposite position, although occasionally feeling burned out and apprehensive about the review load
doubling if I speedrun the fast levels as planned.
I've been pretty conflicted lately and considered abandoning the speedrun, but I've come so far and invested so much time and effort in it, and I just can't give it up now out of pride. Besides, the streak and the plan is a large part of what kept me coming back to Wanikani every morning and evening and night, day after day, through thick and thin. I feel like if I slack off even once and break the streak, I'll have less motivation and start skipping it more and more often.
So I recognize that speedrunning the fast levels may not be optimal from a learning perspective, but plan to do it anyway just for the challenge. I'll probably have a pretty miserable two months ahead of me, but I think I can manage it. I do expect that I may not have much time for alternate study methods during that period though, like Bunpro. Which brings me to...
BunproOver the last month, I did the free trial of Bunpro again, which ended today. I got much farther this time than before (finished N5 and did 73/178 N4 points). Of course, I won't remember it all, but I figure every time I try to learn grammar it sinks in a little bit more. Over the course of the last month, I also read through the majority of Tae Kim's grammar guide, which helped reinforce things a bit as well.
I do plan to actually pay money for Bunpro at some point, since much as I'm annoyed by their terrible web design, I do feel like I've abused their hospitality a bit and it does seem to be helpful for learning grammar. However, I don't think I'll have enough time for both Bunpro and Wanikani, so I plan to start that only in late December after I finish level 60 on Wanikani.
