Progressing toward the JLPT, an update

A number of folks have been very supportive, both on the blog and off, of my efforts to study for the JLPT certification this coming December. Originally I had stated that I wanted to hedge my bets and focus on the easiest level, level 4, but as I continue to study, I have definitely decided on level 3 instead. The advantage I have right now with the JLPT 3 is that I have a whole year to study, and I have been pretty diligent these last 3 months in studying for it. As a result, the progress has been pretty rapid so far. All in all, I’d say I put in at least 2-3 hours a day, some at home after wife and baby sleep, some on the DART train to and from work, and some at work when I am on break. Like any good skill, the more time you invest in it, the more you get out of it.

To give you an idea of my routine, here are the ways I study for the JLPT daily:

• After painstakingly dumping all the Level 3 and Level 4 vocabulary into Anki a couple months ago, I have a daily reminder to go through the vocabulary, plus other vocabularly I added from JapanesePod101.com and other sources. Anki doesn’t throw it all at me at once, but uses a gradual system that ensures I get a good practice each day without being overwhelmed or underwhelmed, plus it’s customizable.
• Each day, if I am not actively engaged in conversation with my wife’s Japanese friends here in Ireland, I practice listening each day by watching Nihon Terebi News. It’s pretty difficult japanese, and very fast-paced, but after a couple weeks of listening, I can pick out a few words I wouldn’t have recognized before. Add 10 more months of this, and it should help.
• Oftentimes, my daughter likes to watch her favorite Japanese cartoons, like Shimajiro¹ and Anpanman², so I watch with her almost daily, since even “children’s Japanese” is a struggle to follow if you don’t routinely study it. Actually, watching children’s cartoons is surprisingly challenging, even for someone who’s studied for a while, and uses pretty common spoken Japanese (listen to how the adult characters talk), so it’s surprisingly useful.
• I also study grammar from a excellent grammar workbook suggested by Robert. Even if you think you know lots of Japanese, you’d be surprised how many grammar points you need to learn for the JLPT, and how many you understood wrong. I had a big talk with my wife about this recently, and she admitted, that when I talk, I often get things a little bit off. For example I never knew there was a は in the grammar structure: ~なくてはいけない ( have to, must do ~), so I’ve been saying it wrong for years. So, using the grammar book above as a reference, I’ve gone back and been reviewing a section at a time, and then adding the notes to Anki above so I don’t forget.

On top of this, I recently went back and reviewed the mock test (first of two in the book) I took recently and failed. It was refreshing to see what I missed, and carefully analyze what I did wrong. Also, I spent a lot of time on the listening section until I could understand perfectly each dialogue. The dialogues in the real test will be different, but I found that the patterns are similar. JLPT tests intentionally make the dialogues tricky by throwing in unnecessary details, or convoluted explanations, and if you’re listening skills aren’t strong, you have a habit of latching onto the first thing you get confused on, causing you to important points elsewhere. So, I trained myself to relax and try to relax and absorb the entire dialogue before picking out what I need or what I didn’t understand, and that helped. My listening score improved the second time by a noticable margin, though I still got some wrong.

By like Robert said, the most important section of the test was revealed to be grammar and vocab. Because I was impatient and took the test before fully studying for grammar and vocab, I bombed those sections easily, and that hurt me the most. Like it or not, languages involves a lot of rote memorization, and I was hasty. Now that I am actively studying these two things, it does have practical use when talking to my wife and her friends, so there really is a tangible benefit to studying grammar and vocab well enough that it becomes automatic.

So, if I can keep this up for another 9 months, I should be able to pass. The catch though is that I am moving back to the US in mid-September, and as experience showed before, moving is a huge disruption in your life, and even more so when it’s a foreign country. My studying of Japanese last year proceeded well until I moved to Ireland, and I couldn’t pick it back up for almost 4-5 months. Let’s hope I get enough studying this year to be ready for the test, even with this huge impending disruption.³

Namu Amida Butsu

P.S. Wanted to try superscript footnotes today, rather than asterisks. Looks nicer, but takes more effort to type out.

¹ The cartoon is weekday afternoon show she would watch in Japan a few months back, but includes other segments, like good manners, word-play, and arts and crafts. It’s a great little show. For some reason, most people associate Shimajiro with toilet-training videos, and we do have some ourselves, but if you understand the language even a little, it’s a pretty nice family show.

² Another good show. Mainly just a cartoon, with a pretty predictable plot (hint: Baikinman always loses), but it really is pretty entertaining. This show also will challenge Japanese listening skills, especially Baikinman because his voice is hard to understand, but also because he’s so silly and witty. Humor is among the hardest things to learn in any foreign language.

³ Moving back to the US, namely my home in Seattle, will probably be a lot less disruptive, but I still have to buy a new house, new car, and get ready for Q4 Holiday Season at work. Not trivial.