I’m slowly catching up, i have both physical and digital copies which makes it easier to do on the go. I’ll be in India for all of March so it will be impossible to start with everyone, were we to start then. But, I’ll catch up!
I tend to not do the listening sections. However, because I live and work in Japan I have alternatives. I’ll sometimes ask my coworkers for example sentences and for their feelings about nuance uses so I at least get some focused listening. However mostly, I just keep my ears focused for a period of time and see if I can catch it in use. I’ll eventually hear most grammar points in a day.
I’m thinking about getting the digital versions this time instead of the books. Are you able to type into the workbook or highlight the text with the Kindle versions or are they just pdfs?
I’m also considering the digital versions for the same reason but also wondering if it will give me more options in terms of highlighting and looking up text. Did you end up going digital? I like being part of the study group but I think I go a lot slower than the group because I just work on it 1x/ week in prep for my italki lessons rather than using it as a self-study method. My goal is to start Quartet 2 in April.
Thanks for the answers everyone
I will go with the majority, as if doesn’t seem to be too much in conflict with the other votes, so Quartet 2 will start on April 13th!!
I will put up the schedule in the first post at some point, but I think the rhythm we had with Quartet 1 was nice, so it will be 1 week per section = 4 weeks per chapter = 24 weeks for Quartet 2. And if need be we can always slow down.
If you get bored waiting, do some immersion (like playing ISLAND with the VN book club, all in one practice: casual speech + novel reading + listening and all of that on a nice background music ) and of course check out the brush up section of Quartet 1!
now time to catch up on Chapter 6
Hello I’m planning on doing the quartet books myself soon but I’m having trouble deciding what kind of schedule to use. How do you find the distribution of work each week with the schedule you’re using currently? Cause it looks like the writing and listening sections are only two pages each whereas the reading section is 14. Then also the workbook main chapters seem to only correspond to the reading section in the textbook (+ grammar) so I wanted to have them together but then that’s a whole lot of work for one week focused on the reading section then not a lot on the other ones. Then there’s also the brush up section which the books says it recommends doing with certain parts of the lesson which look like they’re also in the reading section, coupled with the same exercises in the workbook it again looks like so much for trying to fit all 読む related stuff into one week
It really depends on the person what skills you want to improve on
During my learning Japanese journey I never focused on the output (talking + writing) so those sections started to feel very fast out of reach for me. I would think 2 hours of how to produce a sentence that would maybe be okay… hm… in those two hours I could have done plenty of reading instead?
So since I realized that, I only just read the talking and writing parts and don’t dwell too much on it.
However I go into more depth with the reading and listening. Sometimes I even try to restranscript the reading texts, which can take me a lot of time, but really makes me practice my kanji readings (there are almost no furigana). And the reading section is quite long with between 7 to 10 grammar points covered. So I can easily spend two weeks on that. Which usually puts me behind on the writing part, but since I just read it, I catch up fine. In general I’ve enjoyed the pace we have chosen (4 weeks for each chapter). Forces me to keep studying instead of being lazy, and it’s not too fast either so there is room for reading other things.
I hope the others will chime in too, some have been doing great with writing so they can offer a very different point of view
It’s roughly the same for me. I also stretch the reading and grammar section out over two weeks, try to finish the workbook exercises for the writing week in one week (skipping the long writing exercise in the textbook) and do the conversation and listening parts in the last week.
I didn’t spend much time on the brushup section for Quartet 1. We had our own dedicated time slot for it after we had finished all the regular chapters, but I just leafed through it and found out that I was still more or less familiar with all the topics it covered. Maybe this time will be different, but I’m still leaving it until the end.
The reading and writing sections are the longest. When I tried to keep up with the weekly schedule, I found it would take 1+ hours per day during reading and writing, then be very slow for speaking and listening. So now I do about half an hour per day, which means it takes me around three weeks total to do the reading and writing sections. Three weeks also gives some leeway to take a day off here and there.
I’m skipping the speaking sections at the moment, but they used to take around one hour total. Then for the (painfully short) listening section, just the listenings and questions take maybe ten minutes. They could definitely be crammed into one week, and I plan to add at least one speaking dialogue back in.
The brush up section is a thing all on it’s own, you can do it either before starting or after finishing. For Quartet 1 I read it before, and it was mostly just review from Genki. I think it compared similar grammar points, like the らしい/みたい bunch. For Quartet 2 I looked at one page and got bored and decided I’ll do it at the end if it’s even still necessary.
So doing one month per chapter is totally doable, you just might find yourself allocating your time differently.
I did get the workbook but ending up not using it. Instead I just use the pdf with the answers (for free from the website, here) and read the questions and the answers in one go (only for the reading comprehension I hide the answers and try to answer by myself first)
) and of course check out the brush up section of Quartet 1!
