My journey into Japanese and Russian

[dicentra8]

"I am on the understanding that there's a booklet of the Kanjis included in the Minna no Nihongo. Is it worth buying (if I already have the Hadamitzky)?"

Probably not. I mean, the kanji book is supposed to be a workbook where you train how to read and learn the Kanji. I don't think I missed too much by not going through it while doing the main textbook. Unless you feel the need to have a kanji workbook to practice it.
When I used the Minna no Nihongo main textbook I used a memrise course for each book. I would study the vocabulary before doing the lesson.
- Minna no Nihongo 1 / Minna no Nihongo 2
Those 2 courses, from what I remember, have got all the vocabulary you need to know to go through each lesson. There's 2 types of levels. At the beginning you've got the Kana - English testing (the Kanji appears after you reply). More at the bottom you'll see levels for me same lessons, but instead it's Kana - Kanji testing (the Meaning appears after you reply). At the time I would do, for example, the 2 levels for Lesson 1 and then I would study the lesson. I think there was also a time where I just did the Kana - Kanji testing, and ignored the first levels.

Another great thing about Minna no Nihongo is that it reuses a lot of vocabulary learned in previous lessons! There's this sort of natural repetition with the vocabulary throughout the textbook. At some point you'll barely feel like you need to review the vocabulary on purpose, the textbook already does that for you (sort of).

[zjones]

I've begun reading Glotz & Cohen's Histoire Grecque II. La Grèce au Ve siècle, I have some difficulties because of the time tenses I've not yet mastered, mainly Passé antérieur, Passé simple, Futur Anteriéur, Subjonctif imparfait, Subjonctif perfect, Conditional passé 1 and Conditional passé 2, but that will solve itself as I advance with Jensen. Since I've pretty much reached the level I wanted (and needed) to read things such as that book of Greek history or a novel I will be dedicating considerable less time to French, much to my pain since I wish my written skills could have gotten better than they are.

This is a quote from your first post of the log. How did you like Histoire Grecque II? Was it interesting, or do you think it would be pretty dry for the regular person?

I've been looking for good French books about Greek history, but I need French books to be pretty straightforward (B1/B2 level), so I'm wondering what your experience was with Jensen's book. Thanks!

[indeclinable]

Glotz & Cohen's is in fact very appealing and detailed enough but a bit outdated if you're being strict. For a normal person is should be more than enough.

You can download Jensen's for free. It's a novel that goes from A1 to C2, gradually. The first 15 or 17 chapters might be a bit basic and boring for you. But from then on it's a super interesting and fun novel to read.

[MamaPata]

Out of interest, where did you get the audiobooks for Les Rois Maudits and approximately how much were they? I've got paper copies and am enjoying them a reasonable amount so might be good to consider an audio version.

[indeclinable]

From Amazon, They were about 15€ each.

[indeclinable]

After a very long absence I return in search for advice.

My Japanese has improved considerably, so much that I actually enrolled in a Master's of Japanese Studies, mostly out of boredom (hatred could be an appropriate word) of my job... or any job for that matter. I hope that this spur of the moment decision does not come back to bite me in the ass, but I could not help myself, it seems that I was born to study and not to work.

But back to business. I and some of my new classmates would like to prepare for the JLPT N3 to N1. Kanjis seem to be the problem. Although the Hadamitsky is a very good tool, it's sadly not very student-friendly in regards of providing actual examples in real context of different Kanji readings.

Do you guys know of any Anki deck or similar resource where you get a simple sentence (with one or just a few Kanjis) and have to "read it"? The idea being to memorize the example instead of memorizing lists of readings and then having to guess it when facing a real sentence.

I guess we could try to do one, but since were overwhelmed with readings, tests and papers, we'd rather just use something already made.

[Ezra]

After a very long absence I return in search for advice.

My Japanese has improved considerably, so much that I actually enrolled in a Master's of Japanese Studies, mostly out of boredom (hatred could be an appropriate word) of my job... or any job for that matter. I hope that this spur of the moment decision does not come back to bite me in the ass, but I could not help myself, it seems that I was born to study and not to work.

Ancient Greeks would probably say that you was born a free man and not a slave .

Do you guys know of any Anki deck or similar resource where you get a simple sentence (with one or just a few Kanjis) and have to "read it"? The idea being to memorize the example instead of memorizing lists of readings and then having to guess it when facing a real sentence.

I guess we could try to do one, but since were overwhelmed with readings, tests and papers, we'd rather just use something already made.

The only thing that comes to my mind is Nayr's deck. Not sure is it simple enough but worth a look.

[indeclinable]

So after another very long period of absence I come back for more advise.

With this COVID-19 quarantine I find myself with just a tiny bit of free time (not that much really, since classes are still taking place online and the professors seem to think that it's perfect to shove a ton of books and articles up our behind), so I wanted to spend more time improving my reading skills in Japanese.

I found and excellent book called Japanese Stories for Language Learners that I can't recommend enough and I was wondering if there's anything similar that you could recommend.

I'm looking for short stories, preferably in a bilingual format (it can be Japanese with either English, German, French, Italian, Spanish... or Latin and Greek if there's such a thing ), or at the very least with some vocabulary and explanatory notes and, preferably, recordings. Langenscheidt has the Lektüren and Cornelsen has the DaF-Bibliothek which are series of reading books (mostly short novels) like this or this. Do you know if there's any publishing house that publishes reading material like that?

I'm very well aware of the many News webpages with transcriptions and the Anime sites with subtitles but I'm looking for something that gives me a good base to eventually tackle some literature (Mishima being my ultimate objective for the moment).

[indeclinable]

A few months ago I mentioned the Japanese Stories for Language Learners and sadly received no response to my request for information on similar Japanese readers (specially for low-intermediate and intermediate learners).

I've since run into Murray's Breaking into Japanese Literature and Exploring Japanese Literature. From the same publishing house I found Ashby's Read Real Japanese Essays.

The novel series of Miller's of the Minna no Nihongo series (vol1 and 2) where also interesting and maybe some of you know of them.

I've also become aware of the レベル graded readers. I'll keep looking for this sort of material and post it here in the hopes that fellow Japanese learners find it useful.

Please do tell me if you know of more books like these, I'm particularly interested in short stories and novels that prepare you to read real literature.