So I recently inherited the full set of 日本語総まとめ books for N1, and I’d like to put them to good use. I know they’re meant to be done daily, but my question is this:
Are they supposed to be done simultaneously? As in, you do a little of each of the 5 books every day? Or is there a certain order/combination they’re to be done in? They don’t all have the same time-schedule, and I haven’t had any luck searching online for how to use them, outside of the way they’re laid out. If any of you have used them, I’d love some insight!
I want to make sure I’m getting the most out of them, and also using my time wisely once I start to prep for N1 (current plan is to take it July 2020). Thanks in advance for any and all help and information!
So in this case, did you just finish the listening section before the reading?
How manageable did you find that pace in terms of time commitment per day dedicated to Somatome?
Well my strategy of reading through each level’s page, then testing myself on it with self-study quiz seems to be working. I’m in the 90% range on the first try every time, and I just did a combined levels 1-12 test at high speed and 97% accuracy. So I guess I didn’t really forget that much… at the lower levels anyway. I just needed a brief reminder. Which isn’t that surprising since I had a lot of those burned already. It’s going to get harder as I get closer to my “real” level.
I feel guilty doing it this way, since that’s what the SRS is supposed to do, adjust to the ones I know and repeat the ones I don’t. But with 2657 reviews, it just takes soooo loooong to get through the reviews when I fail 70% of them the first time, then have to read the right answer, then do that review again right, only to still be scored as a fail.
I figure this way is like a reset, only I’m doing the lessons as fast as I want.
I actually just didn’t get to listening every day, whereas I generally did with reading. But ideally a section a day in each was the plan. You could also just as easily do one or the other first, depending on your time frame. The more important point, I think, would be doing grammar and vocab prior to the other two. This is going in with the assumption that a section a day in all five is unreasonable time-wise, which it probably is with other study like Wanikani, actual reading and listening with native material, etc.
I think you posted this in the wrong thread? The only worry I have for you is potentially burning some stuff you didn’t rightfully remember, and then never seeing them again.
I was just about to comment something similar, seems like they got lost
@IanD Ahhhh okay. Yea I feel like listening would be the hardest to fit time in for since ideally you would have 0 interruptions and do them straight through. I agree, though, that all 5 every day seems a bit much with other study methods included (and also having a job and hobbies). Probably much more doable in a classroom setting. Thanks for your input! Glad to hear they worked for you. Since I got them gifted to me for free, I was looking forward to not having to pay for another book/service to cover N1, but worried they wouldn’t be quite enough.
I started N2 Soumatome Vocab/grammar sections yesterday, and there is not a lot of explanation on the grammar, it seems. But I bet just seeing the grammar at least once before the test is going to be a plus for me. It is definitely designed to be low threshold, so you don’t feel overwhelmed with having to do this every single day for the next 8 weeks.
I was guessing this went without saying if @Houndstooth was prepping for N1 (since they probably already have some study methodology down), but the other part of my use of the books/why I didn’t tackle all five at once was that I took pretty extensive notes on the grammar and vocab books, entering most of their content and examples into a searchable Word doc, adding my own explanations or translations where they seemed helpful, etc. If you just go through the sections once, a lot probably won’t stick.
That isn’t specific to Sou Matome. I did the same thing with Kanzen Master for N1. (Ultimately I slightly preferred Kanzen Master, but I don’t think there’s a massive difference between the two lines, and there’s a lot of onus on your own study methods either way.)
True. I am terrible at taking notes and cross-referencing and all that stuff, so I usually just read and rely on vague recall. I go to class three times a week, one of which is covering N2 level grammar, so I do see some of this in class as well. I also ask questions occasionally.
