This post would be better written on the back of a piece of scrap paper, but what the hell.
Numbercrunchtime:
Numbercrunchtime:
I'm taking the 日本語能力試験N2 on December 1st this year. Google先生 tells me that's 172 days from now.
That's 24 weeks and 4 days. Or to put it another way, 4120-odd hours, give or take. I'm starting to sweat, because I've been spending most of my waking hours studying and immersed in Japanese since the beginning of April, and the time is flying by and I don't feel like I'm learning all that much. I feel like I'm shoveling sand into a jar with a fork.
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| The Grammar One |
I bought this bad boy recently, as well as two more books in the series: the Reading One and the Listening One. The plan so far is to work my way through this guy, then tackle the reading and listening books simultaneously.
On top of this, I recently got a subscription to this online study website called iKnow. It's got a good interface, and it's helping me to fill in the gaping academic holes in my Japanese vocabulary. As it turns out, you don't learn technical or niche words like 管理 (management), 財政 (public finance), or ぞっと (shuddering, trembling) talking to your Japanese friends at 居酒屋 (bars).
On top of that, I'm still using and adding cards to Anki daily, which lets me focus on the tougher grammar bits from the book, review kanji, and would supposedly help me learn difficult sentences I found while reading Japanese for pleasure if I could kick myself back into the habit of reading Japanese for pleasure.
But this is a numbers game, and I'm hesitating to calculate because I'm worried that I'm setting myself up for a scare. But here goes:
- I have roughtly 170 pages left in the grammar book; there are 192 pages and 101 pages to cover in the reading and listening books respectively. The last few days I've had an easy schedule at school and have found out that I can study a grammar chapter, do the accompanying mini-test, and 入力 the questions I got wrong or find difficult into Anki at a rate of about one page every 20 minutes. (A very rough guess, but it'll work for now.)
- If I'm going to stick with iKnow, there are 6000 vocabulary words separated into 6 courses of 10 chapters each. I tested into Core 3000, which means, as of now, I have about 3600 words to go to complete all the courses.
- Anki-wise, I can clear 100 cards in about 40~50 minutes, and I have two decks (grammar and kanji) that I should tackle daily.
- 463 pages (with the grammar book taking another estimated 23 hours+the test at my current speed)
- +3600 words
- +90分minutes of 暗記Anki 勉強study per 日day
- divided by 172 days
- イーコルequals!
=About 3 textbook pages per day (about an hour at the desk/computer);
=About 21 new words per day (about two hours, including new words+review)
Hm. That seems doable. Too doable. I wonder if I'm miscalculated somewhere...
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| Ah... Summer. Beautiful Everything, Nagano. Right. |
