Reading gets easier and easier the farther you get in the course. It’s recommend to make reading and watching Japanese material a part of your daily routine. Yeah, you’re having to look up a lot, but you’re also making use of the language. It’ll likely never be the case where you know 100% in a manga without a bit of study, but by then it’ll be manageable and still fun.
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Thanks for the info, I suppose that’s true!. Maybe I’ll start looking into it more around 06 or something so I have at least a little grammar and vocab base.
What sort of material do you recommend watching? I already watch plenty of anime and I know there’s a Japanese immersion course later on, but anything in the meantime?
Do you have any suggestions of where to look up grammar points? I finished the Tae Kim Basic 01 course but found that his explanations were a bit difficult to understand. Googling a grammar point only yields me to tae-kim or a reddit post directed to him, and is not exactly useful.
It’s good to go to the subreddit /r/LearnJapanese and ask in the “Shitsumonday” thread. Another option is get the “Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar” as that’s meant as a reference book.
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Original test post deleted as first post can now be edited. Please ignore.
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SGJL Completion Rate
As of July 10, 2017 here are the approximate number of user completions per course (assumes 500 points per question on average).
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Hey Nukemarine, I’ve just started using your course after seeing it recommended several times, but I had a few questions? I skipped the first two SGJL courses as I’m quite familiar with Hiragana and Katakana since I’ve been juggling different Japanese learning apps to find the ones I like. So anyway, I started the SGJL 03 course to jump straight into the kanji, which I have some experience as well. I love the organization and completeness of the material, but there doesn’t seem to be any audio available on this course for me? I was wondering if this course just doesn’t have audio directly in the lessons (aside from the videos obviously) or if it is just not working/ showing up for me?
There’s no audio for the Kanji courses or the SGJL Bonus course for Shinkanzen Master N4 Grammar.
Thank you so much for replying so quickly! I also wanted to thank you for making such a thorough course! All of the extra information you provide in your course really helps me to connect all the disjoint material I’ve learned from other popular language programs. I’m one of the people whose memory is really dependent on making such connections, and I find your material by far one of the easiest to both remember and fully understand. Keep up the amazing work! 
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So I just started the grammar course after completing the kanji course (though there’s about 10-15% I can’t remember without looking at the answers that I mark wrong in the reviews so hopefully daily exposure will help) and reading the introduction it seems like it cuts off twice towards the end?
Hi @Nukemarine, these are a fantastic sequence of courses, they are really giving me a feel for how japanese works in a way that the previous memrise courses that I’ve studied didn’t.
I have one small(ish) feature request. In the kanji courses (I’ve only done the first one so far, now up to SGJL05) you are testing keyword to kanji. I seem to be getting close to 100% on my reviews there, but then I notice that when I’m doing other courses (e.g. I’m also doing JLPTN4/5) I quite often am in the situation where I know that I’ve met that kanji before, but can’t remember which one it is.
Would it be possible to also add levels (or courses?) where you test kanji to keyword? I’d be happy to help make it if you like the idea but are busy. Presumably since they’re all in the database already it wouldn’t be all that time-consuming.
Thanks again for all your efforts, these courses are incredible.
Huh, I forgot about writing those. I’ll check it out in a bit and correct it as necessary. The first cut-off is likely meant to be “as you wish.” The second seems to be about covering Tae Kim’s basic lessons. Hopefully I’ll be able to find where I copied that from instead of making something else.
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I usually don’t recommend going Kanji -> Keyword for a number of reasons, chief of which is that Keywords are at times just one meaning among a small number of others valid meanings. There are lots of kanji that refer to “Me” and they’re all valid, but only one is given that keyword while “I, myself, self, oneself, etc” get spread out among the other “Me” kanji. Another reason is you want to get in the habit of seeing kanji and thinking the Japanese word (as you get with vocabulary). So you see 私 by itself you need to think わたし and not “private” (the kanji means private in specific compound words).
Just remember that RTK is a tool to get you to reading faster. You know these kanji, can recognize them, so now here’s words that use them and how to pronounce them. That’s what’s going to happen in the vocabulary course.
If it helps, do what I do with reviews and cover up the answers, try to write out the kanji by hand, then look for the correct answer. If you’re wrong (but know the correct kanji when you see it), just rewrite it a couple more times correctly thinking for the story again. That should help out a lot, lot more passive recall and noticing the parts that make up kanji.
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Is the sentence portion of the core decks necessary? I love the vocabulary learning, but the sentence learning is so boring to me. I understand that the point of the sentences is to see the word in use, however, I end up skimming through those sections just to get them out of the way. Would it be a bad idea to skip the sentence sections?
If you set it to typing only, being able to rattle out a variety of sentences with little to no thinking is great.
The sentences are basically improving your listening/reading at a sentence level. This prepares for more intensive course like Japanese Drama Immersion where the sentences leads to paragraphs and chapters and lengths of spoken dialogue. In addition, I recommend repeating the sentences out loud to get used to speaking correctly at a native pace.
That said, it’s simple enough to suspend or not do the sentence sections. Not recommended, but you’re the one making the decisions.
Are the abbreviations in the kanji courses, for example “Bldg.” instead of building, intentional or mistakes?
Intentional. Basically making it an “office building” instead of a generic building that could be anything. There are other times like with Dr. and Doctor.
Ok, thanks.
@Nukemarine Are there any updates on this course? I especially love the Core 2k/6k decks and if there’s anything I could do to help finish those let me know.
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