Japanese Progress for March 2010
While my Japanese progress this month has been a little slow, I’ve still been working steadily towards my goal. I’ve made it to sentence number 2440.
I’ve been reading some intermediate grammar books and picking out some good example sentences when I find them. There are some annoying aspects to this book I’m reading which include sentences on what not to do. I recommend not reading sentences like these because they only confuse you and waste time. Focus on the correct sentences only. They also aren’t clearly labeled so be careful of annoying sections like that when harvesting your example Japanese sentences.
I find it encouraging that a lot of grammar entries I’ve been reading, I already know from just doing normal sentence work. Most of the grammar you’ll find in Japanese is simply knowing how to use different particles to change the nuance of the thought. Once you get the hang of this, Japanese grammar isn’t as difficult as people say it is.
I’ve also been working on a project to increase my knowledge of Japanese vocabulary. This is because I think I’m actually over relying on the Kanji to know the meaning of a sentence. Therefore, I’ve been building a spreadsheet with words in hiragana/katakana only, and then on the other side of the paper an example sentence with kanji and everything that I can hide and check to see if I was right. I can also use this to try to remember what the kanji was from memory. I might post a tutorial on how to make a random vocabulary list like this in Excel. I plan to randomize the words every so often and just print out a page to take with me so I can work on it between classes and such.
がんばまりましょう
Wow looks like you are making pretty good progress. I’ve been focusing on vocab mostly lately. I have come across a few “this is what not to do” stuff, and my problem was that it looked “ok” to me, so I just ignored it so I wouldn’t remember it and end up using it.
Interesting idea. I’ll have to star your post on twitter so I’ll look at it again later.
Wow hardcore studying! 10000 sentences…thats A LOT!!! Ganbatte!!!