Summary: I have finally given in to doing a little bit of studying for the N1. I've started to try to absorb as much of the vocabulary I can on a daily basis. I know that is going to be the most time consuming part of the whole studying process, so I want to get started early, working my way through the vocabulary list for that level, especially, if it suppose to be somewhere around 18,000 words. That's still pretty hard to believe though! I am at about page 115 of the Itoi book. I seem to be averaging about 50/50 with it. That is, about 50% of the articles I can understand fairly well, the other 50% I really struggle to make heads or tails of. I usually have to look up a lot of words, and even then I'll usually end up asking a native for clarification. I am already at about 7% of the N1 list on Sticky Study for iPhone. I really like the look and feel of the app, but there are a few features of it that I'm not a huge fan of. I'm also starting to distrust their N1 list a little. It only contains about 3300 words, but I think the N1 test has a lot more than that. I'm definitely supplementing this with a lot of reading and plugging words I don't know into memrise.com One last really big personal announcement is that I'm going to be a father soon. In about a month from when this podcast is published, I'll be a proud father. That's why I've been a bit non-committal with my study goals recently. I know that as soon as the baby comes my schedule is going to be turned upside down, so for the moment I'm playing it a little cool. But, I will try my best to get a respectable score this December though! Going on Man Dates So, if you've been following the podcast recently, you know that I've been on the hunt for a good conversation partner. Mostly I want to be able to practice Japanese conversation, so that I can get my fluency up. I also wanted to be able to talk to a male speaker, because it seems like I get plenty of exposure to female speakers of Japanese at work and with my wife. This seemed a little awkward at first to tell you the truth. I felt like I was going on a man date, but after the first couple initial meetings with a few nice folks, I've gotten more and more comfortable, and the whole conversation practice thing is getting a lot smoother. My advice is, if you are going to try this at home, by all means start small. Start with a few short meetings where you just introduce yourself to each other and consider a success. This is especially true if you are at the N5/N4 level I think. At this level, it might be pretty difficult to keep a conversation up for more than a few minutes, so take baby steps before going overboard. Am I 'learning' anything? I think one concern that was brought up by a few commentors when I first started talking about this was that they felt like they didn't really learn all that much. This is true to a certain extent. You aren't really going to be able to take home something really tangible from these chats. Chances are pretty good that your chat partner doesn't have a list of vocabulary handy that they want to go over with you. But, you are practicing the basic, but essential skill of speaking. One misconception that I had of language learning (and a lot of people make this mistake) is that I thought if I learned a word, I could use it. So if I read it, put down on a flashcard and drilled to death, I could use it; it was mine. However, that really isn't completely correct. You have to practice speaking the word in order to be able to say the word. That may seem like common sense to some (or most?) people, but it wasn't completely evident to me, and I often see students make the same mistake. So, I wanted to start practicing the skill of speaking and using the language. My main goal behind all of this is to be understood. Not be super ultra correct; not have perfect pronunciation; not drop that bomb 四字熟語 (yojijukugo) or four kanji compounds.
