Differences

Last Saturday we all met for our weekly Japanese study session. This time, we worked on a test from 1995 that Angeline was kind enough to find online and send to us. While going through the test, I noticed that for the most part, things felt pretty much the same until I got to the word usage part. In the old tests, they provided you with a definition, then you had to find the sentence where the word is used in the same context. In more recent tests, they give you a sentence where you can hopefully infer the meaning of the word and choose the corressponding answer.

I think that this change makes that section a bit harder because if you run into some usage you don’t know, then you don’t have anything to help you out. All you can do is look at the answers and check your gut to see which one feels right. That means that all those past tests will have lists of those alternative word usages making them really nice for studying. They hand everything to you and you don’t have to bother guessing, but you still have to be able to find the right answer.

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More quizzes than you can shake a bokuto at

Now that things are calming down a little, I found some time to post. I wanted to tell everyone about www.manythings.org/japanese.

Here, you can find literally hundreds of quizzes from the basics all the way up to JLPT 1. A few quizzes I found useful: 260 commonly used ii-type adjectives, and Japanese newspaper words that use no kanji (a lot of tricky, grammar point type words pop up). There is also an abundance of straight up kanji practice.

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JLPT Kanji Project

http://www.jlpt-kanji.com/

This is a nice website for learning Japanese kanji according to the JLPT level. One thing that makes this site nice is that once you have logged in, you can save the kanji that you want to study under your user name and print flashcards. Another handy thing is that in the definition, it provides not only the meaning and examples of the kanji where it’s various readings are applied, but also has other characters that are very similar like　先 and 洗, or 未 and 末.

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