Well a lot of us followers of the AJATT way of learning Japanese seem to swear against doing tests like JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) which personally I cannot see why, its a great measure of progress, not really expensive and also great for us wanting to live and work in Japan to stand out from the crowd of CV's. I don't know about you but aiming for a test keeps me motivated and to work on my weak areas much more than if I was just studying because I'm interested in learning Japanese which is great but means I take my time much more than I would like. Obviously I'll always be using the AJATT method but also I'll be studying the specific things I need to know for the JLPT especially grammar! so both methods combined it should be pretty easy. So I've decided to finally get my ass into gear and get the test booked which I'm going to keep my progress logged here as always. Now I seem to have hit one snag I've done a few past papers and a couple of online JLPT graded tests and it seem I can do JLPT 4 easy with only struggling on a little grammar which I can easy brush up on, but I seem to be quite far behind on the JLPT 3 in both vocab and grammar now the question is can I Learn enough to pass the JLPT 3 before the exam date which is December this year or do I just do JLPT 4 as a guaranteed pass and aim for JLPT 2 next year? So recommendations do I push for JLPT 3 or breeze the JLPT 4?

From My Yaruki I've read and seen many ways that people do there reviews for there sentences, people recommend different things like "you only should pass a sentence if you can read everything" and "you should click hard for every review unless you can read it instantly". I've adapted many of the principles and completely thrown some out depending on what I thought suited and worked best for me. Now the way I review goes like this, 1) I first look and see if I can read the main word of the sentence (the part I'm wanting to learn) which I usually bold for emphasis. 2) If I can read the word I go onto trying to read the rest of the sentence and try to understand how the word is used in context. 3) If I can read it quickly without much thought it gets an "easy". 4) If I can only read the word I'm trying to learn and maybe some other bits of the sentence it gets a "Good". 5) If I struggle to read the word but manage it after some thought it gets a "hard". 6) Obviously if I don't understand anything its an "again" Now here is were I may differ to other people, if I can read the sentence and the word but mispronounce or just miss out on the exact reading and go "haha damn I new it was that" I give it a hard. Really doesn't help me to fail every card just because of a little mistake if anything it makes me feel down and have less urge to get more done but meh people might disagree and say we should understand it 100% or we might make future errors when speaking etc. But this is were I disagree again who can speak, read, write there native language 100% without any areas or without picking up bad habbits? So look at it this way if you cant be 100% perfect in your own language how can people expect this from a foreign language? The advantage is even though you may make little mistakes here and there think how easy it will be to correct this when you have the general knowledge of how something is read/spoken, much better than not knowing the word at all or getting so frustrated that you cant learn it perfectly that it effects your learning in general. It will correct itself in time either via somebody pointing out your mistake or your mind working a way in the background clicks when it realizes its wrong and sticks much more easily than repeated 'again, again, again" in an SRS.

Another to start the day, Aya Matsuura has some great songs which I'm sure you can find more via youtube or itunes.In other news moving to my new web host is almost sorted and I've selected a new theme that should hopefully look pretty nice.

Following on with the trend here is another great J band I recently had the joy of being recommended by Squintox on Twitter.Keep the recommendations coming

Well on my quest to find more Japanese music to my liking I came across the above named band かりゆし58 think there excellent. I've included one of there songs below many more on You Tube, now just to get there album.Anybody else have recommendations?

Well not done one of these in a while a quick update on my current sentence stats.The 1799 seen cards in this deck contain:873 total unique kanji.Old Jouyou: 843 of 1945 (43.3%).New Jouyou: 16 of 191 (8.4%).Jinmeiyou (reg): 7 of 645 (1.1%).Jinmeiyou (var): 0 of 145 (0.0%).7 non-jouyou kanji.Jouyou levels:Grade 1: 80 of 80 (100.0%).Grade 2: 160 of 160 (100.0%).Grade 3: 165 of 200 (82.5%).Grade 4: 126 of 200 (63.0%).Grade 5: 89 of 185 (48.1%).Grade 6: 71 of 181 (39.2%).JuniorHS: 152 of 939 (16.2%).Deck created: 7.5 months agoTotal number of cards: 1799Total number of facts: 1799Card MaturityMature cards: 1241 (69.0%)Young cards: 558 (31.0%)Unseen cards: 0 (0.0%)Average interval: 81.5 daysCard StateActive cards: 1798 (99.9%)Inactive cards: 0 (0.0%)Suspended cards: 1 (0.1%)Correct AnswersMature cards: 90.4% (2074 of 2295)Young cards: 87.3% (15622 of 17889)First-seen cards: 91.5% (1744 of 1906)Trying to fill all of the grades of the Jouyou list is proving to be difficult ^^

Recently I've been trying to find way to increase my productivity when it comes to mining sentences or mining words that I'm yet able to read. It's not always the most productive way to go around reading random Japanese text from what ever the source may be and then collecting sentences for the bits you don't know, if your like me you prefer to actually read what you can then later come back and mine what you don't understand although in practice this isn't always the case, as we forget/misplace the source of the material.This spurred me on to find some software to record what I was interested in and wanted to mine but that also takes up very little time and allows me to get on with what I'm doing at the same time, less distractions is always a good thing especially when learning a language.The software that I found that had all the features I wanted and more was Evernote basically its a piece of software that allows you to take notes either by manually writing a note into the software or selecting what it is your wanting to remember and clicking save, the great thing about it is you can quickly tag notes with "Japanese" for example and then you can easily go back and find all the notes you've taken with Japanese as the tag. It also has a huge range of features which include.- Syncing across many platforms including the IPhone- can be used directly in your browser by just selecting text and clicking the little applet in your bookmarks bar- will save anything from entire web pages and single text and it doesn't save as an image it saves exactly how the page would be so you can select text from within the software excellent when getting round to mining the sentences- Can take screen shot's of whatever your viewing great for when reading a Manga offline- and much more!Below I've created a quick video on how I often use Evernote to collect sentences/vocab for later mining, what I didn't record was the screen capture facility that takes a snapshot of your entire screen as a note great for when working with PDF's etc.For the full size video click here One other great thing I forgot to mention is that if you have an IPhone with the Evernote software installed you can take a picture of a sign say a Japanese one while your walking about, which then automatically syncs with your notes on your laptop, so you can quickly collect notes of signs that your yet able to read.