- look up the link of resources on http://www.tofugu.com they always list interesting stuffs
- make friends! need to speak! so many people who’ve passed JLPT can read but feel so unconfident about speaking…

my own agenda is to….read more magazines hahahah and use those NDS kanji training games.

Don’t feel disappointed by it thought. JLPT is never a really good measure of true language ability. Multiple choice allows for guessing and with a written test like this, if you’re Chinese literate you usually make better guesses (which is what I did).

Honestly i wanted to go home and sleep mid-way through the exam because I was just guessing my way through. I never feel as if I know the language much better even if i pass the JLPTs anyway! What matters is REAL ability!

So don’t worry try again this year! I know I will since the cert is still a nice piece of paper to have hahaha.

P.S. : Go read Shugo Chara chapter 38 now !!!! You’re gonna scream fangirl scream like no tomorrow !!!!

@Diego: reading light novels is still not a breeze for me! I can only handle slice-of-life ones kthx

I do find games to be a lot of help, especially the full-voiced visual novels, whose dialogues you can repeat over and over till you get what’s being said, while seeing the actual text on the screen. And yess, great excuse for justifying this hobby!

Besides, you’ve already passed L2 and can read light novels on a regular basis. To a low-level life form like me, you’re practically an Olympian.

I intend to make good use of your Plan of Action for my L2 prep work, not least because it gives me a great excuse to watch and read more of the good stuff. (”Mum, for the last time I’m not wasting my money on comic books and cartoons. These are all ‘educational materials’.” ~cue winking~)

@animekritik: Ah, Yamada Naito. I knew her name sounded familiar. Well, truth to be told, I flipped through her titles when I was in Paris last year and from what I can see, unfortunately, it’s totally not my style. She has a very chaotic-looking drawing style and loves to use these very artificial screen tones and backgrounds, which is a no-go for me. But good luck for finding scans for the series, I believe it’s going to be difficult indeed.

Guess I’ll go around scouting the Chinese forums for ??????? papers then!

I find chinese subs helpful in deciphering which particular kanji matches the words you simply hear in animes/jdrama, like some sort of secondary reference? It helps better my understanding, having to rely on both Japanese and Chinese knowledge (and what little of it)

I don’t think watching with Chinese subs to learn Kanji is a good idea because a good number of characters are used differently. For example, ?? is only used to refer to factors in maths whereas in Chinese, it is used to refer to factors as in reasons too. If you used the latter the Japanese way, it wouldn’t work. Learned this the hard way when I was chatting with a Japanese penpal.

Not to mention you’ll be looking at Traditional (??? or “???” as the Japanese call it? and Simplified Hanzi ?????, not Japanese Kanji.