Japanese Language Learning: What I'm Doing to Pass the JLPT N3

I am well aware that I haven’t made a blog post on this blog in the (over!) six months I’ve been in Japan. I have several posts in my drafts, and I had planned to draw some stuff to go along with them. That obviously didn't happen. We’re just gonna jump right into something here anyway.



My Japanese Language Background

I’ve been trying to study Japanese for many years. However, we’re gonna start from when I first started taking classes, which was September of 2016. I studied at the Toronto Japanese Language School (TJLS) for two years. The schedule was one class a week on Saturday mornings, September through June (following the Canadian school calendar). Over these two years, we wen’t through the Genki 1 textbook.

(I highly recommend TJLS if you're looking to study Japanese in Toronto!)

I also took the beginner Japanese course offered through the JET Programme prior to arriving in Japan. It was too low a level for me after taking the two years of TJLS Japanese courses, but I’m glad I took it anyway to reinforce that I knew the basics. I also got to meet a lot of the Toronto JETs!

So, when I arrived in Japan in August 2018, I was at about the N5 level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). I could read and write hiragana and katakana, identify about 100 kanji, had a small vocabulary of about 500 + words, and could form very basic sentences.

Since I only needed a little bit of study to be able to pass the N5, I decided to challenge myself and take the N4. I signed up around the middle of September, and the test was on December 2. That gave me just over 2 months to go from N5 level (~150 kanji/~750 vocab) to N4 (~300 kanji/~1500 vocab).

I obviously failed spectacularly.

Even though I studied every day, and crammed often, I just didn’t have the time or the energy to move up an entire level in the JLPT. I was still getting used to a brand new job, living in a new foreign country, living on my own for the first time in years, being away from all of my friends and meeting tons of new people… it was a lot. It is still a lot, and I’ve been here for 6 months.

As soon as I took the test, I took a break from studying for basically the rest of the December. I took some of this time to make a solid study plan for the JLPT N3.

Goal: Pass the JLPT N3 in December 2019

Schedule: Learn all new material by September 2019, review and practice tests from September to December.


What I need to know (cumulative):

• About 600 kanji 
• About 3000 vocabulary
• 950~1700 study hours

Kanji


Kanji is always scary for people learning Japanese. Many of the Japanese people I’ve talked to don’t like kanji. Now that I’m nearing the intermediate stage of my Japanese learning, I’m actually starting to really love kanji.

For kanji, I’ve decided to use Wanikani. I started using it a few years ago, but it never really stuck with me. At the time, I thought the weird made-up radical names and odd stories weren’t the way I should be seriously learning Japanese.

I’m only level 5 in Wanikani as of March 2019, but I really love the program. I’m hoping to do about half of the Wanikani levels before the JLPT in December, which would be level 30. You can definitely do all 60 levels in about a year, but I have too many other aspects of Japanese to learn to dedicate that much time to Wanikani. I try to do my Wanikani reviews once a day, and the new lessons on the day they pop up. If I make it to level 30, there will still be some kanji required for the JLPT N3, so I'll just need to make sure I get to them through my other study methods.

Wanikani Crabigator and friends

Vocabulary


I spent most of January fiddling around with Anki. I ended up using the Nukemarine 10k with Word and Sentence Audio. Obviously I’m not learning 10 000 words before December, but this deck is incredibly useful. I would recommend it for the audio alone, but there’s tons of information for each word, like columns for furigana, multiple word frequency columns, and even a column for Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji”. I went in and removed the columns I didn’t need but you could easily just import the whole thing, assign each column a name, and then pick and choose which ones will appear on your note when you’re formatting your cards.

It took me a long time to tweak my deck until it was easy and enjoyable for me to use. At first, my cards were ‘English vocab > Japanese vocab’ on one side and ‘Japanese sentence > English vocab/sentence’ on the other. I tried this method since I know that leaning vocabulary in context, ie in a sentence, is a better way to learn vocabulary than just translating a word back and forth between languages. Even though I know this, it absolutely did not work for me at my current level. I ended up avoiding my Anki deck for almost a month since it was too difficult to work with.

So, I changed my cards to ‘English > Japanese’ on one side and ‘Japanese > kana + English’ on the other.

English to Japanese
Side 1

English to Japanese
Side 2

Japanese to Kana + English
Side 1

Japanese to Kana + English
Side 2

I've been working with this deck for about a month and I like it!

One thing though: don't just jump in and study from the 10k deck. That makes no sense. I went in made another deck called Current, which only has cards which I have encountered before. That way, the focus is only on vocab that I need to learn (JLPT) and want to learn (like vocab from manga and other hobbies), that I've already encountered in some capacity. I have all my new cards in my current deck set to "new cards in random order" so that I can encounter very easy vocab alongside brand new vocab.


Reading

I plan to add more reading as I progress with Wanikani and my vocabulary deck, but for now I'm going through a couple of easy manga. One of them is Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Arc and the other is とつくにの少女 (The Girl from the Other Side). Both of these manga are great because they both have furigana beside every kanji! I'm finding とつくにの少女 especially useful because of the way the main characters speak: the main guy speaks using kanji and in a formal way, while the little girl's dialogue is written only in kana and she speaks in a more informal (and, of course, childish) way.

とつくにの少女Girl from the Other Side

Speaking/Listening


For listening, I've started to listen to Japanese Pod 101 again. They have a ton of audio you can listen to, and they're organized by level. The even have some JLPT specific lessons where they go over the question formats and how to answer them.

Speaking is by far the my biggest weakness in Japanese. I'm really, really bad at speaking. I don't like making mistakes, and to get better at speaking you have to constantly make mistakes. It's how you learn. Even in my second language, French, I still get scared to speak it! Can I speak French? Yes. Will people understand me? Mostly, yes. Do I speak it? Nope, too scared to make mistakes. I try to encourage my students to be exactly the opposite of me and speak even if they're saying things wrong. That's how we can identify mistakes and how we can fix them!

So, to make up for me being terrified of speaking, I've started going to a local language exchange meetup.Generally, it's 15 minutes English only, 15 minutes Japanese only, 15 minutes English only, and so on. It's not always as structured as this because people are having genuine conversations so sometimes you're not paying attention to the time for each language. For me, this is an ideal way to get some speaking practice in. There are Japanese people practicing their English, and all sorts of other people practicing their Japanese. Everyone's learning, and lots of people make mistakes. Plus, you don't have the pressure of one on one instruction or online conversations like most places you can get speaking practice.





That's what I'm doing for my Japanese study at the moment! Let me know how you study and what you're study plans are!