dampingwire wrote:For German I'm working through a graded reader ("Lea? Nein danke!") with my son. Hopefully we'll get to the end before it has to go back to the library.
Well it went back to the library before it was finished. In its place I now have a a new graded reader from the library:
Man Kann Ruhig Darüber Sprechen. I also picked up Hammer's German Grammar and Usage. It has much more than I need right now, but it looks like it can usefully answer a few bits and pieces I'd like to clear up.
As for Japanese, I've signed up for the December N2 in London, so I've started to prepare for that.
The grammar/vocab section has always been OK so far, so I've decided to focus the bulk of my time elsewhere. I'm keeping the sentences and vocab decks going but I'm no longer activating new sentences and I'm not adding much new vocabulary.
To help with 聴解 I've started to use subs2srs. Actually I started using subs2srs some time ago, feeding it a few episodes from ミス・パイロット and 地味にスゴイ! 校閲ガール. I've since let those decks lie fallow and instead I've added most of JPOD101's Advanced Audio Blog Season 2. I've since added an N2 聴解 test. I'm going to see if I can do something with 新完全マスター N2 聴解. I'll be sitting a few more practice 聴解 exams, so (time permitting) I'll add more to my subs2srs decks.
読解 is probably my most poorly performing part of the test. So I'm now pushing hard in that area. I have a bunch of old-style test past papers. The format is not quite right but there are plenty of reading passages, so that covers quite a bit of the more modern exam style. I also have the 日本語総まとめ N2 読解 book. It's nowhere near as comprehensive 新完全マスター N2 読解 but it is much quicker to work through. Over the last few weeks I've pretty much done that, so now I need to find some time to grade it and analyse it properly. I've also found that 日本語の森 do a decent set of all-Japanese N2 読解 youtube videos. I can only find the first 7 or so but that's still nearly 20 short reading passages, which is a useful addition to my stack of materials. I'll also work through the remainder or 新完全マスター N2 読解 (which is about 30 pages or so).
If I still don't pass this time around, I'll only have N1 practice material left to train with