Had the urge to make my autumn miserable this summer and relive some of my matriculation examination moments and took the JLPT N4 test today. Anyone else done anything similar? Joking aside I wanted to see where I'm at and I'm rather happy that I did. I'm pretty positive that I didn't bomb this one. Vocabulary and listening weren't difficult. Grammar is my eternal enemy (especially when done like this) and I'm pretty sure I made quite a few mistakes there. Thanks to that I had less time in reading section which wasn't that optimal. About the listening test... It's funny, when there's a clearly wrong option someone just "hmphs" a bit technically giving away what is definitely not a correct choice. When I was in upper secondary school I honestly didn't know what studying actually is. I did the bare minimum (read to test day before). It worked pretty well in for each period but in matriculation examination things backfired badly. I didn't fail but everything else except English was far from perfect results wise. This time things were different and I kinda also wanted to see what I can do with self studying. I consider this a hobby of mine.
Wait, you took a Japanese language test as an hobby of yours? I'm impressed and this is something to raise my hat on. People with learning thirst are a weakness of mine. I salute you, kindred spirit, and may your journey end with full enlightenment. I started A1.1 German as a hobby , too. Now I think I have it easy as baby steps compared to Japanese
Yes, speaking and writing German is my hobby, too. But I cannot imagine to ever be able to speak or read Japanese. Especially as a hobby. Thumbs up!
Just yesterday took my German exams all of them in 3 hours. Hearing, interpretation, text , writing an email and 100 words composition. And of course, best of all German numbers tests. Hope I pass with a good grade.
I would love to learn Japanese, but I profoundly believe I am either too lazy (51%) or too dumb (49%). And no, I don't want to learn from anime...
My Japanese vocabulary from anime is rather weak. Includes few phrases. And that's after decades of preferring original dubbing w/ English subtitles. If I spent time learning actively, I would likely speak by now.
Since here in Finland Swedish is compulsory (never wanted to learn it, never use it), I also wanted to see how what I can do if I do things out of my own free will. English is obviously too but that's another thing entirely. Luckily those two are close enough... So once you know English you can guess a lot once you know the basics. Briefly studied Germany too but my brain couldn't handle three so similar languages at once. For Finns Japanese is actually really straight forward to pronounce (applies both ways actually). I guess it also helps for listening too. It's not too hard to understand what you hear. Unlike Chinese for example - it feels like 95% of stuff you hear are sounds that shouldn't even exist. Also I guess it's a bit refreshing to work with language that has nothing to do with Latin or Germanic languages (since neither does Finnish).
こんにちは! By all means do... NHK's https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ is rather handy too. Good stuff for improving vocabulary and reading. Mmm... I've been hammering kanji an vocabulary quite quite a lot. On top of that I have bunch of partially filled notebooks. But yeah, after all this and countless hours I can definitely say that I remember quite a few stuff. I can play games with Japanese voice and subtitles and understand enough. Obviously it depends on the content but generally speaking not too bad. (Then there are a bunch of partially filled ones.)