Hello! I recently found out about the 4500 Japanese Sentences PDF, and I want to know if there’s anyone that did it that would recommend it! As someone who wants to get into translating as a hobby, I think it may be worth my while to practice. I don’t think I’m at an intermediate level–the level the PDF recommends you to be at–but I think it will also be beneficial to see sentences using newly learned grammar and attempt (and probably fail, which is okay ) to understand it.
The description for the PDF confidently states, “you are guaranteed to make a leap in ability level with your Japanese”, which sounds great, but I want to know if anyone who did took the challenge feels that it was worth the time, not to mention the money.
As a side note, any advice for getting into hobbyist translating is also welcome.
I did see that! And I saw some other forum posts too What I’m really after though is if someone here completed it and could tell me what they thought about the challenge and what improved for them. I think I should change the title to reflect that…
I purchased them a while back. My Japanese skills weren’t that good at the time, which made it very difficult to go through the sentences. And since there’s no answer key I was concerned about whether I was doing them correctly. In the end I didn’t complete them. Since that time I’ve improved in my skills, but I haven’t really had the itch to go back through because I often have to translate things into English for work.
With that being said, my experience isn’t indicative of the purchase being a “waste” of money or time, it has the potential to expose you to a variety of ways to express things in Japanese. In addition to that, it requires the user to think conceptually rather than formulaically. What I am saying is that some Japanese learners have this line of thinking, “X grammar = Y meaning in my native language” which results in unnatural, stiff, or wrong results. Rather than, “X form can express Y concept” this encourages thinking of the concepts holistically. I believe these sentences has a potential to help that line of thinking.
I haven’t heard of this yet. I might look it up
I’m still at an early level, still have a way to go before even being at a N5 level but if it contains some simple sentences then I may look into it. If its aimed for more advance readers, then I may have to wait off little. I do need some reading practice. I’m learning some new vocab words daily but my grammar is limited to really the stuff ive leaned in lingo deer so far which isn’t much yet.
I heard this from one of tofugu social media. I can’t remember which one; it could be from Tofugu Twitter, Tofugu YouTube, or Tofugu Blog. I’m interested in purchasing it and doing all exercises but I’ll wait for its discount on December, because I’m still below level 20 and I don’t have the budget right now (I plan to get WK lifetime and other tofugu downloadble too actually, anyway). In regards to grammar, I’m not waiting for WK level 20 to get serious about this, although I sometimes get demoralized by intimidating kanji without furigana I don’t know when I read any Japanese grammar resources. In my opinion, grammar tutorial with furigana is better than no furigana even though I already know the kanji. So I use BunPro to practise Japanese grammar twice to three times a day.
Right, it seems like a great idea to discuss stealing Tofugu’s resources on the forums of another Tofugu product. I’d recommend deleting this comment before a moderator sees it. PMs aren’t enabled anymore anyway.
I’m afraid I can’t give any insight into whether they’re worth the time or money, because I haven’t had a chance to tackle them yet (I’ve been super busy; it’s not that I gave up on them). To add to what nanda19 said though, I got them in the Christmas sale for way less than they’re going for right now, so if you’re willing to wait you may (may!) be able to get them for a lot less.
That’s okay thanks for taking the time to comment. I didn’t know about the sale, so I look forward to that and hopefully someone who’s completed the 4500 will comment by then.
Yeah, any copyright infringement discussion is discouraged here, but this is Tofugu’s own product, so it seems especially brazen to talk about distributing it on their forums
I bought that and the particle book Tofugu do (full price, I should have waited for the sale!) and I agree with @LucasDesu’s first point: I think they’re really good, but at the moment a lot of it, even the start, is out of my skill level (I’m at N5, treading into N4)
That being said just completing the first two pages taught me a lot, I believe just on the first one there’s an idiomatic phrase that is used a lot that I would never have been able to piece together without searching it up haha.
I do recommend it, but yeah, you might have to use a dictionary and a lot of perseverance. Also yeah, try and pick it up on a sale!
I was doing these sentences and have found at least one sentence that does not represent the kanji. The sentence itself is okay, but it uses the vocab 先頭 (せんとう) instead of 戦闘 (せんとう). Or maybe it’s the other way around. Anyway, I thought that @anon20839864 might be interested in a “bug report”.
) to understand it.
