New Title, New Goals, New Ideas, Fresh Start

Hello All,

For those of you that read my blog regularly will have noticed, it has all now changed. I decided this last night after a lot of consideration of what to do with my blog to make it more appealing to other people, and more interesting to myself to make me want to post even more regularly. The decision I made was to focus on my favourite past-time of all, Japan!

In this rebooted blog I will be talking about anime, manga, computer games, music, otaku culture and all things Japan inbetween. All of the above, I realised recently, are things I interact with everyday which is where my decision for change came from, as I do study everyday but sometimes not enough to make a decent blog post from (who wants to hear about revision?!?!?!).

I already have plans for quite a few posts, and will be sharing them in the next few days. In the meantime, the site design is still a work-in-progress and will hopefully be complete by christmas.

Thanks for joining me,

That Brit Otaku (previously paulp1988)

JLPT N5 done

Hello All,

Just thought I would update my blog whilst waiting for my train (just missed one by about 30seconds and now have to wait 30mins for the next one due to Sunday service...). As the title of this blog suggests, I have just come out from my JLPT N5 examination and I feel slightly positive about it.

For those that don't know, the JLPT is an examination on your understanding of the Japanese language. There are 3 sections to this test, vocabulary, grammar, and listening.
The first section I found really easy, as it was effectively just a test of your kanji knowledge, which I have gotten really good at.
The second section tested your knowledge of Japanese sentence structure and particles. This onee I found a bit more difficult than the first section and by the end I was almost guessing the ones I weren't sure on (it's a multiple choice examination with generally 4 choices per question, had a good chance of getting it right lol).
The last section was a whole lot harder than I had anticipated. The language used seemed higher than JLPT N5 to me, but I may be wrong. There were a few easy questions there, and then I just tried my hardest to have an educated guess at the rest lol.

Unfortunately I won't find out until March 2012 if I passed, and I'm hoping the questions I was confident on are enough to get me through. Either way I'm going to take a few well deserved days off from studying and then prepare for JLPT N4 next year.

JLPT5 booked!!

おひさしぶりですね！

I can't believe I haven't posted in so long, I really should get better at that.

If any of you don't know what the phrase at the top means it is "it's been a while" (ohisashiburi desu ne). And obviously it has been too long!

I have now booked my JLPT5 examination. This will take place in December in the London SOAS university. I am already really nervous, and am slightly expecting to fail, but I am going to try my hardest and I will be happy no matter what.

The reason I am expecting to fail is that, although I know the majority of the JLPT5 vocabulary and kanji, I have never really tested my Japanese with anyone else as there is only one other person I know who is studying Japanese but she is at a LOT higher level than me, so I cannot understand the majority of it yet.

Another reason I feel like I may fail are that recently I seem to be forgetting some of the easier words, so am having to revise twice as hard as I used to. Maybe the adrenaline will kick in when I get in the exam and I will remember everything, but its really not helping my nerves at the moment.

As negative as I sound, I am sure I will do well, and I am normally a positive person so hopefully I will get that back before the exam.

My study routine has been taken up a notch aswell. Previously I would study the vocabulary and kanji maybe once a day, but now I am trying to do both of these multiple times a day so that I cram everything in by the exam. Actually, as I type this blog post, I am listening to a japanesepod101 lesson (it may be about culture, but there a few words in the lesson that I thought I had forgotten but I recognised them and knew what they meant!)

I will be posting a large, photo based, blog post hopefully later today or in the next few days of some of the studying I have been doing.

Thanks for reading!

Japanese and Taekwondo studies - Day one

Hello all,
Apologies for not posting for a little while, seems like i'm having trouble updating my blog as often as I would like.
Although I don't have a lot of picture evidence, which is something I always like to do when studying, I have been studying quite a bit recently but mostly revising. However, in the last couple of days I have been learning some new vocabulary and kanji.
The first pictures I took yesterday are the new vocabulary that I learnt, once again from a Japanesepod101.com Beginner lesson. The last picture is of my studies tonight, being literally surrounded by kanji study material and notebooks.
I learnt 10 new kanji tonight, which is the most I have learnt in one sitting as I tend to only learn them in blocks of 5. I am slowly getting closer to my goal of knowing 100 kanji, as only once I know that many will I even consider applying to take my JLPT5 examination.
The other part of my studying is for my next Tae Kwon Do grading, which is in around 4 weeks time. For this I only really need to study the theory, along with the Korean terms as I know the practical side pretty well. Fingers crossed I pass!
All of this studying has taken it out of me, so I am off to bed, night all!

Time to get back in to the swing of things

Hello all,

As the title of this blog states, it's about time I got back in to the swing of things with my studies. I gave myself a week off due to some issues at home that were making it very hard, nigh on impossible, to concentrate on anything at all, and most of all my japanese studies. Now that my week is up I thought it would be best to start over.

My studies for this morning was more of a revision class. I decided to read over all the notes I have with me before I go in to the office (i tend to get to work around 30mins early, so I sit in my car and study before work). Unfortunately for me it was only half of the notes that I had with me, so I am going to revise some more later with the remainder of my notes.

I cannot believe just how much I had retained in having a week away from my studies. In the past if I had not been studying everyday I would tend to forget most things straight away, but at least my memory has decided to lend me a hand with this and made things easier. I did however forget a few words, but ones that won't tend to come up in conversation very often...i hope... (let's face it, who uses 'economics' or 'psychology' in everyday conversations?)

Time for work now, but I shall study some more later.