JLPT N5 in One Year

Self-studying Japanese from scratch to take the JLPT N5 exam in 12 months. This is a personal challenge I set before myself simply for the joy of accomplishing it. This tumblr will mark my progress and share the insights into the Japanese language that I pick up along the way!

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Study Break! Replaying the November 19, 1683 game between Honinbo Dosaku and Yasui Shunchi, considered not only the best game of Dosaku's life, but also Shunchi's masterpiece. Now back to grammar...

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They ain't pretty, but here are all the kanji I have learned in the past two months. 209 so far, plus their kunyomi and onyomi readings, and hundreds of vocab with them. It's a start!

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Atmosphere

There are three (and probably more, really...) words that can be translated as "atmosphere" or "air" in Japanese. It is important to distinguish between them! Too often we go to a dictionary to find the word we are looking for, and it's a total fail because we don't realize that our English word has several different meanings, all with their own words (and subtleties) in Japanese. This is one of them.

大気圏 (たいきけん): This means literally earth's atmosphere.

空気 (くうき): This usually means air, as in the air we breathe, but can also sometimes refer to earth's atmosphere. It can also be used to mean the atmosphere in a room, party, etc..., although that role is more commonly taken up by...

雰囲気 (ふんいき): The atmosphere, or general feeling of, a party, room, situation, etc... It can also in some circumstances mean air as in the air we breathe.

So the first word has one exclusive meaning. The second and third can technically be interchanged, but they each have their usual meanings that should be kept to and trusted.

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Japanese Resources

I've been silent on here for a while now. Sorry! I'm about 6 weeks into this beast and between work (I'm a doctor) and studying Japanese and trying to be a normal human being with friends and a family life's a little bit crazy. But it's all good! There will be more posts soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to share the resources I've been using to learn Japanese. I'm trying to get the most value out of my time, so I did a good deal of researching beforehand. I wanted to use the fewest number of resources for maximum results, and here is what I use:

WaniKani: I've already mentioned this and raved about it. This might be the best possible way to learn most of the kanji you will ever need plus a few thousand vocabulary in the meantime. It's based on SRS (Spaced Repetition Software), which is basically designed to hammer information into your long term memory and have you also be able to recall it, which is kind of the point.

KaniWani: WaniKani is great for recognizing kanji and words, but for the other way around—needing to pull the Japanese word out of your butt—it's about useless. That's where KaniWani has been coming in, which is just WaniKani in reverse (as the name implies). This way I am drilling the vocabulary I am already learning from WaniKani, but in an English to Japanese way instead of the other way around.

Genki: Kanji and vocabulary are great, but pretty useless if you can't construct even basic sentences. Genki is one of the best textbooks out there, and I chose it out of the others strictly based on its reputation. There is no getting around grammar. It's the skeleton of any language.

Memrise: Another SRS system, this one has user content to help learn basically anything you can think of. I'm using it to memorize the vocabulary from Genki.

EtoEto: This is another service from the people who make WaniKani. It's not out yet except for alpha testing, so it's pretty brand-spanking new. I'm looking forward to trying it out and seeing what it's like. If it has any of the quality and efficiency of WaniKani, I'm totally adding this to my arsenal.

There you have it. Four, potentially five, resources that have become my arsenal. This combination may not work for everyone, but I designed it to cover the most ground while expending the least energy. Once I have a little more under my belt, you can guarantee that language partners will be added to that list and dominate in importance. After all, what good is learning Japanese if you can't speak it?

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This is the most awesome and addicting site I've ever seen. Wanikani.com is a website for learning kanji and vocabulary. They claim, and several people have proven, that you can learn a couple thousand kanji and several thousand vocabulary words, and really know them, in just over a year. It's currently in closed beta. You should get in on it. Seriously.

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Gosh you guys are awesome!

This tumblr is only one week old and I'm already getting so much love. Thanks for the motivations, everyone!

[happybonez]

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feeling this lately...

yoko meshi [yoh-koh mesh-ee] (noun)

"As an untranslatable, this one ranks high on my list of favorites. I could not improve on the background given by commentator Boye Lafayette de Mente about this beautiful word, yoko meshi. Taken literally, meshi means 'boiled rice' and yoko means 'horizontal,' so combined you get 'a meal eaten sideways.'This is how the Japanese define the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language: yoko is a humorous reference to the fact that Japanese is normally written vertically, whereas most foreign languages are written horizontally. How do English-speakers describe the headache of communicating in an alien tongue? I don't think we can, at least not with as much ease."

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This is about how I feel at this stage of my Japanese learning... whisky is helping, though. Kanpai!

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Welcome! This tumblr is to document my studies for the JLPT N5 exam. My goal is to learn enough Japanese in 12 months of self-study to pass the exam. I will be sharing the insights I learn into the Japanese language as well as discuss my progress or lack thereof. I hope that you enjoy and learn something as well!