4️⃣ Quartet 1 and 2 Study Group [Quartet 2 starting April 13th]

You can buy them on Kindle, even the workbooks!

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First of all, thank you for making this thread! :slightly_smiling_face: I’d be interested as well to see if there are a couple of community members who would be up for a Quartet study group of sorts.

In my case, I can’t promise anything because I don’t know if I will be finished with Genki II by the end of August. But I am considering continuing my grammar study with Quartet and only afterwards tackle Tobira as the latter is almost exclusively in Japanese if I remember correctly which seems a bit too difficult for my current level.

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I went through Tobira after Genki II because there was no Quartet, but if I had the choice again I wouldn’t do Tobira. It did get me started reading, but it does a really bad job teaching grammar, vocab, and well… everything. Its more or less a good book to start learning how to read Japanese material, but I would advise against using it as a learning resource.

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I have heard mostly good things about Tobira so far but I’m glad you’ve given me your perspective about its cons too.

As I was planning to do Quartet after Genki, I’ll still have plenty of time to take a quick look at other intermediate/pre-advanced grammar textbooks and decide which one I’ll eventually use after finishing Quartet. I’ll take your insight into consideration when that time comes.

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Yeah Tobira was the closet thing to “Genki III” we had at the time, an Integrated Approach to Japanese was literally Genki III, but people felt it was more dry than Tobira, so for a few years Tobira was the go-to for intermediate Japanese learning. Quartet is definitely THE way to go if you have gone through Genki I and II.

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Well, there are definitely people interested, awesome!! So this will definitely happen \o/

I’ll make in the coming weeks a poll for the start date, and an attempt at a schedule and a structure suggestion, will probably look for inspiration in @taiyousea 's thread :grin:

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Aren’t Quartet intermediate textbooks and not advanced? It even says that in the title.

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I’ll update that :slight_smile: it’s more advanced than Genki for sure. Don’t know if there is anything after that though.

Absolutely, I started quartet a bit ago but parked it for the time being.

I was planning on starting it again so this is perfect timing for me :slight_smile:

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Yay I’m glad more people are going to use Quartet! I picked it up last year and I’ve been pretty satisfied.

In case you didn’t know, I wanted to mention that FYI the chapters are longer in Quartet than in Genki. There are only 6 chapters per book. So, one chapter a week may be too fast for a lot of people.

Tokini Andy gives each chapter in Quartet 1 two videos, whereas it was 1 per chapter in Genki. Also, don’t forget that there are two readings per chapter as well that are worth doing imo.

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Great initiative!
Are you considering creating a Discord group o something like that?

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Yes :grin: I think it would be great if we could have some kind of talking practice, reading, group exercises and so on, so definitely!

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Thanks for chiming in!
Will definitely take a good look at the structure and the size before trying to make a schedule. It confirms my impression that it’s less chapters, but longer. So it will probably be more 2/3 weeks per chapter, so we have time to discuss and practice the different things.

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Probably no way to track this other than for me to check in myself, but I’m only interested in Quartet II since looking through the content of each I feel like I already know all of Quartet I.

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I love the idea of discussion sessions on Discord or Zoom :sob: it’s so helpful to get instant feedback as I speak or brainstorm. I think I have the PDFs but I like to reallyyyyy mark up language books with notes and practices, so I will try to also get the physical texts.

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Yes! I already finished Genki, and i’m almost finish using Tsunagu Nihongo to review. My next step was to jump into Quartet! This is perfect timing!

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They are intermediate textbooks. Quartet 1 is Lower Intermediate (N4 to N3), and 2 is Upper Intermediate (N3 to some N1?).

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Sounds fun! wasn’t familiar with this series before this, but I like the concept. Doing the dictionary of basic japanese grammar with a club has been super fun, and really good motivation.

My schedule would probably be too inconsistent to attend any regular meetings, but I can certainly follow along on the forums

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So now I have opened the books :slight_smile:

According to the Introduction, Quartet 1 is roughly covering N3, and Quartet 2 N2.
Quoting the book: “each lesson focuses on approximately ten grammatical patterns and expressions, around 45 kanji, and one or two reading strategies.”

There are reading, writing, talking and listening exercices.
I really don’t want to rush the books, so I don’t want to have a too ambitious schedule. At the same time, of course I want to finish them one day!

I’m thinking we might need at least 3 to 4 weeks for each chapter.
I would like to set up sessions for each of the four skills (reading, writing, talking and listening). Of course everyone can decide to attend as little or as many as they want, but I want to have space for all of them.

I suggest that we start voting now for the start date. Then, at least one month before the chosen start date, I’ll make a rough schedule and a plan for how to go through the lessons.

Time to vote!

Select your favorite start date(s), pick any number of them:

  • August 19th, 2023
  • September 2nd, 2023
  • September 16th, 2023
  • September 30th, 2023
  • October 14th, 2023

0 voters

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I think that would be a good pace, because when I used this book at my university (chapters 10-12), we scheduled 2 weeks per chapter.

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