I’m American, so I won’t be taking the N4 until Dec, but I’m starting my study plan for the yearish (okay 10 months!) to figure out how I’m going to actually do this ! How are you studying for the N4? If I feel confidentially ready I’ll move into N3 stuff prior to Dec, though I’m definitely not taking the N3 until dec 2020 at the earliest, and the jump is going to take me another year to prepare.
-I currently am using a N4 vocab list via SRS
-Doing Wanikani
-Using the japanesetestforyou audio files for focused listening practice (they worked for me and the N5 anyway)
I haven’t decided what I’m going to use for grammar study- I really didn’t want to go buy genki II, and everyone here raves about bunpro, so I may just subscribe to that instead. I’ve been using Tae Kim’s guide here and there and may just start going through that. When I took an actual Japanese class we used Yookoso! but that was a loooong time ago. I still have that book somewhere.
I have no idea how to deal with sentence scrambles. Does anyone have any good resources on that specific thing?
I’m looking for an actual class in my area to work on speaking resources, and just general structured activities but we’ll see what happens there [Chicago area if anyone has recommendations].
What are your plans? Any recommendations? I think until the end of February I’m going to be more focused on Vocab so when I actually move into grammar points I’m not trying to learn both things at once. I already know a decent amount of the N4 vocab, but wanted to round out my knowledge so I could focus more on the grammar part of it.
I have between 10 and 20 hours a week for study (2-3 hours a day 5 days a week, sometimes a bit more) depending on my work schedule and life.
I mostly did previous years’ tests as practice (I don’t know how my teacher got them, I’ll try asking him on Saturday), then searched everything I didn’t know on japanesetest4you, a lot of looking for what I should know on sites like Maggie Sensei, also reading manga helped get my speed up.
I now remembered I also had a book with a lot of vocab/kanji questions and reading exercises.
Stuff like this or this.
Apparently it was this one, but I don’t think that helps. /:
What’s unfortunate is that apparently they’re all pretty old books that my school has had for a long time.
All of this was after finishing both みんなの日本語 books and getting to Wanikani level 21.
a few? I want like a million 0.o Thanks though, I’ve heard good things about 完全マスター, and I think its one of the purchases I’m going to make likely in march.
Does that book have explanations for the answers? I’ve seen some scrambles in which its like nope you are WRONG (which I am, always) and that is not helping me get better at it.
It does not have explanations for the answers though at least it gives the full order rather than just the answer. Usually after staring at it for a while or reviewing grammar points involved I can make a decent guess about why theirs is better than mine. In general I like the book but sometimes the explanations aren’t sufficient. Either the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar or the internet can fill in the missing pieces.
I agree something with a million scrambles would be nice.
