Hi everyone! I’m looking for some information about the Nihongo So-Matome books. I’m taking the N4 in December and I’m pretty covered for grammar, I believe, using both Genki II and TRY N4. Vocab is seeerrrriously my weak point and I have a rocky (at best) relationship with SRS vocab decks, so I wanna try the textbook approach because textbooks work super well for me generally (I really love my grammar textbooks).
I’m looking at getting the N4 1500 Essential Vocab book (I know it’s not actually 1500 words, that’s okay) and the Nihongo So-matome JLPT N4: Kanji and Words book. Have any of you used these before? Thoughts on them? Would you say it’s worth getting the Kanji and Words book even as a level 20+ WK user? Do you think it’s worth getting both of these books together, or one over the other?
I haaaaave I am afraid to say. I really do like Kitsun but just haven’t found a way to make it work for me yet. It’s DEFINITELY like a billion times better than using Anki and like five billion times better than staring desperately at Genki willing the words to stick, but something about it just doesn’t fully mesh with me? Maybe I need to try harder. Maybe it’s that having two WKs to worry about every day is too much (I can’t seem to stick to Kamesame either). I think I wish that the deck had furigana (so that I’m not learning new kanji on top of a new word) and that Genki itself grouped words a little but more thematically overall to help them stick.
Since we’re talking about SRS, I have totally tried 5k/10k decks many times as well, always with the best intentions, but I think the fact that they use kanji w/o furigana and that they’re utterly random thematically is just something I can’t get past.
Thank you! I’m gonna… try it again. I think the last time I abandoned Kitsun I was trying to make it do furigana? I forget.
I used the Nihongo Sou Matome N4 book, and while the explanations are short, it works well as a general revision. The book is half kanji (with vocab that uses that kanji) and half vocab. It teaches a lot of important words that aren’t on wanikani, but if you’ve been learning your vocab from Genki too (which I also used), then you should already know a good deal of it.
I haven’t used the 1500 Words, but from what I saw, the vocab is divided by themes, and the translations can be obscured by using a red card so you can test yourself. You can see some examples here.
Because of wanikani I actually breezed through the kanji part of the Nihongo Sou Matome, so at your level you should also be covered for that part. I’m also taking the N4 on december, so good luck for both of us
Thanks for the info!!
It sounds like getting it for the exercises and review is probably more worth it than not, especially since it’s not very expensive…
