• Practice more simple sentences and basic vocabulary. The kind of stuff people usually start off with. I have a tendency to go for more advanced grammar and vocabulary immediately, which isn’t bad in itself but leaves a big hole where elementary expressions and vocabulary should have gone. It’s hard to do conversation when you can’t even introduce yourself…

• Pinyin is essentially bad – so reduce the reliance on pinyin and look at the characters and memorize their pronunciations by itself (by listening to a tape or the teacher, for example). I thought pinyin was a fairly good way of writing Chinese, but I now realize that down to the monkey’s balls it’s essentially the same as romaji is for Japanese – i.e. an unnatural way of expressing the language. Not an incorrect way, but very sub-optimal.
  Kobe Chinatown. Bruce Lee has nothing to do with the content of this post.

• Study hanzi characters and their readings one by one (or short compound words) – starting with simple, frequent characters and moving on from there. Hanzi is how Chinese is written, and as with Japanese, literacy is essential. I have a tendency here too to go for the hard stuff too early, so I need to start over a little and learn from the beginning.

So considering that, the following constitutes my current Chinese study method:

• Using Anki (a spaced repetition system application), I study elementary characters, short words, and simple phrases. With Anki you can download “decks” (sets of “flash cards”) made by other people and provided for free. I found one called Chinese Characters (Level 1 and Level 2) apparently based on the book New Practical Chinese Reader. I don’t use that book but the deck is very useful in itself. The quality is a bit variable though, but I’m adding and changing things as I go along. Considering it’s free and doing it all yourself would take significant time, it’s really good value for time.

• Practice writing hanzi, using some Chinese character writing sheets I found online provided by the University of Vermont (the ones called Practical Chinese Readers Book I and Book II). These are very useful. Again, the quality could be better (readings and stroke orders would be nice, for instance) but for a price of zero, they’re extremely good value. I just write and write the character all over many times, and do the same sheets multiple times. It’s not the most fun activity nor the most fancy kind of study method out there – but actually when I come home from work and I’m tired, that kind of activity is just about what I am able to manage. And I am certainly seeing good progress!
  
  As an aside: I can read about 2,500 Japanese kanji, so most of the elementary/intermediate Chinese is readable for me already, but I never learned to write kanji by hand… I can only write maybe 100-200 characters. Which isn’t a big deal but it’s not very good either. So I’ve decided to use this as an opportunity to learn how to write the simplified Chinese characters, since that will be useful for writing Japanese too (with some exceptions). Since I’m lazy I really prefer the simplified characters. I mean compare 认识 with 認識… I know which one I want to write 100 times on the blackboard.

• Using the books I bought before, keep studying grammar using the grammar book and vocabulary and pronunciation primarily using the other book. Fairly standard. I study grammar before going to sleep (well it makes me go to sleep), and pronunciation/vocabulary some times in the evenings. I am also hoping to use the vocabulary book at the Chinese conversation lessons, since that book has nice, big illustrations accompanying simple words, it should be suitable for learning the correct Mandarin pronunciation.

It’s going well, and it’s fun. It’s great to be able to apply my experience and knowledge of learning from 5+ years of Japanese studies to Chinese. My study methods are incredibly much more efficient now. I will soon have to set some intermediate goal (the current final goal is to be able to read a book in Chinese within two years), such as passing a particular HSK level next year. I’ll have to discuss that with the Chinese school teacher.

You might have noticed that my last couple of blog posts are based around the search queries used to find my site, and so is this post, since I decided to write something about the topics that people are searching for while finding my site but that I haven’t explicitly mentioned. I noticed a lot of search queries such as:

• which book is better for jlpt 2 kanzen or unicom?

• good vocab book jlpt level 2
• jlpt1 book recommendation
• best jlpt books
• kanzen master vs unicom reading

and sure enough I’ve mentioned these terms a lot in my blog, but never really recommended any books. So again utilizing the convenient Squidoo platform, I wrote up a page containing my Japanese learning book recommendations. So from now on I’ll make additions there and reference it from my blog instead of keeping book recommendations spread out over different blog posts without coherence.

Currently, I have organized the page into these categories:

• Recommended beginner level Japanese books

• Kanji study book recommendations

• Advanced beginner, intermediate Japanese, and JLPT 3 level book recommendations

• Advanced Japanese and JLPT 2/1 book recommendations

• Business Japanese book recommendations

and I’ve also written some general ideas I have about studying for each of these levels:

• Just started studying Japanese?

• Learning kanji

• Progressing from beginner to intermediate Japanese

• Taking the step towards Japanese fluency

• Ready to work in Japan?

Anyway, all the books I recommend there are ones that I own or have owned (and sold) and have found useful. I’ve probably bought way more books than necessary over the years, but I find buying books for myself keeps me motivated to study, so it has probably been worth it in the end, even if some of those books sucked. I’ll add more books to that page over the coming weeks as I find the time to think up what actually made them good and write a review.

I’ve now done a mock test, using the Unicom book that contains two mock tests, to get a grasp of where I’m at and what I need to focus on. I can highly recommend that book, by the way. I used it for level 2 as well. Besides the tests, it assists in analyzing your weaknesses and tips on what you need to study.

Anyway, here’s a breakdown of my scores:

• Kanji: 82%
• Vocabulary: 64%
• Listening: 72%
• Reading: 68%
• Grammar: 78%

Interestingly, that means the average score for each of the three sections (kanji/vocabulary, listening, and reading/grammar) is 72% – quite a coincidence.

So what to make of this? First: it’s a pass, with a 288 p/72% score. That also means I’m on track for my goal to pass with more than 80%. When I do the mock test at home I’m more strict than at the real thing in that I don’t choose randomly when I don’t have a clue, and I try to finish it as fast as possible – I don’t stop to think and I don’t use spare time for reviewing.

I do that because I want data on how much time I actually need so that I can plan how much time to spend on the different parts during the real test – potential points vs time. For the reading section I had more than 15 min to spare, so I think this affects the end result by a few percentage points. Also, when I did the same thing for 2-kyu two years ago at this time, my score was barely above 60%, but on the real thing I scored 81%, so I think my score on the mock test is lower because I don’t concentrate as much as on the real test as well.

Second, the surprises: grammar score is high, reading is a bit low, and listening is lower than expected. I haven’t studied grammar really, but my studies consist mostly of reading, so I would have expected reading to be higher and grammar much lower. I felt very uncertain when answering many of the grammar problems even though I passed them. The only reason I can think of is that my book reading and radio listening have made me grasp grammar intuitively, much like a native speaker would.

The low reading score might be caused by me doing that section after coming home from work. I felt very tired by the end… And as I mentioned above I didn’t do any reviewing using spare time. After all, I read normal (actually, some of them are probably more academic than most people prefer to read) books written for native readers pretty much every day, and I don’t feel I’m missing out on the content of those books, so I don’t think my reading skill is bad. And time is definitely not a problem – my Japanese reading speed is good.

Low score on listening, despite listening to the radio for a few hours every day, I think was mostly caused by me not being up to date on the vocabulary used. Describing how people look and asking strangers for directions might be very common textbook examples, but it’s not something you do very often in real life… I am going to go through the Unicom listening comprehension book for 1-kyu as well, which contains the equivalent of about 4 tests’ worth of exercises, and that should be enough to easily get me above 80%.

Third, as expected: kanji is my strongest point and vocabulary is my weakest. Kanji are natural for me now, although recently I’ve been working on improving my kanji skills even more (I’ll write about my study methods some other day). But acquiring vocabulary is tough! I don’t really like repeating words or sentences or anything like that – I’m lazy – but I just hope to pick things up after seeing them enough times in books and news articles, and from hearing. The vocabulary used in JLPT is somewhat specific and specialized, albeit limited, and I have not been reading material specifically targeted at the test. Here as well, I am going to rely on the Unicom, namely reading comprehension book. But I’ll probably hold off on that until right before the test and keep reading normal literature that I enjoy reading for now.

Lastly for this post, I’d like to mention one more ingenious scheme I’ve come up with to extract more data from doing mock tests: marking certainty of the answers. I mark them essentially in 4 degrees, although I only make physical marks for 2: feel quite certain (no mark), feel a bit hesitant (one dot), feel like I’m mostly guessing (two dots), and don’t have a clue (no answer). Afterwards, I compile the percentage of correct answers for each certainty level (last level is obviously 0%). A stimulating paper exercise if there ever was one! But this time it also told me one thing: if I feel certain or hesitant doesn’t impact the score. But for the two-dot level the probability of a correct answer is halved. In other words I can go ahead and use my intuition even if I feel a bit hesitant, which saves time, and focus my reviewing (using time left after answering all questions) on a few questions that I felt very uncertain about.

Anyhow I’m interested in hearing about other’s progress on the JLPT and if you’re blogging about it, please post a link in a comment. Please also post comments on your own findings regarding the test. I’m quite exited about the test itself, besides becoming fluent in Japanese!

In the near future I also intent to write something about what I’ve learned about learning – because I feel I’m really getting into that now, and I’m already looking forward to the next language learning adventure – and also about my own study methods targeting JLPT1, and something about learning Japanese vs passing the JLPT.

Don’t forget to apply!