しあわせ

日本語能力試験　直前対策　文字・語彙 ３級 (国書刊行会）

I decided that 直前対策 translates best as “cram session”.

This is another interesting little A5 sized book for JLPT3. It covers the first paper that tests vocabulary and kanji. It does this by giving you 15 mock tests. Intersperesed among these tests are vocabulary lists. No english. No explanations. But lot’s of practice. Lot’s of exposure to the words you need to know.

The tests are standard stuff.
The only slightly dissapointing note is they seem to be modelled on the test before the changes made 2 years ago. This means that there could be about 20 or so kanji omitted and the form of the questions in the end sections are slightly different.

In the actual test there are 5 questions in section IV where you are given a sentence then have to choose a sentence with a similar meaning from the four presented. In section V there are 5 questions where you are given a word and have to pick the sentence where that word is used correctly.
In this book there are 10 questions of the type found in Section IV and no section V.

That said this is still a useful book so you can concentrate on a particular part of the test. The word lists are useful as they are broken down by type and grouped by theme. This is much easier to memorise than a list of unrelated words.

As usual try to do these tests against the clock. 35 mins each. Then check your wrong and guessed answers. Check unknown words. Check what the sentences mean.

This is a small shareware program that allows you to make flashcard sets, organise them and run them on your Mac. It’s based around the concept of cards that have a question on one side and answer on the other that you use to quiz yourself on vocabulary. (Something that I don’t remember from school but it’s better than reading and trying to memorise whole lists.).

One of the advantages of a computer based system is you can have more than two sides to a card and can keep track of the ones you know more easily. You can print out your cards if you want and can also export them to an iPod. (But large text files don’t seem to work well on my first generation iPod and are very slow to load and scroll). Another good feature of iflash is that the author keeps a site where he encourages users to upload and download card sets and there are a number of good Japanese sets.

iFlash only costs $15 and I think it’s well worth it.

JEDict is my new favorite mac-based dictionary reader.
Again it uses data from the EDICT project like WordLookup, but it’s searches are much more powerful and speedy. It doesn’t only search on the first character. It has single kanji searches so you can find the meaning of individual components. It has a built in user dictionary so you can collect word lists. You can search for kanji you don’t know the reading of by using a radical index. It has a built in web browser that allows you to click on a word and get a translation!!! I liked it so much I upgraded my OS version to 10.4 in order to use it.
On the down side it isn’t as well designed as Word Lookup and I find it a bit cluttered and hard to read sometimes. However I think this will improve. The changes between 4.0 and 4.0.1 addressed a lot of things I found difficult.
It is shareware at a very reasonable $25. The unregistered version is completly usable but doesn’t allow you extra dictionaries.
Version 4 needs OSX 10.4 but version 3.8 will run on OS8 and above. (version 3 isn’t as full featured however)

Hiroko Fukuda (Kondansha International)

Another book in Kondansha’s series of grammer titles. This time it’s all about 擬音語　（ぎおんご）　and 擬態語　（ぎたいご）. These are those words like べろべろ　(a state of total inebriation) and たっぷり　(replete). This little book explains the system behind Japanese onomatopoeia; how い sound are light and お sounds are heavy for instance. Then the words are introduced through 11 conversations followed by a complete glossary and extra usuage examples and a quiz to check your progress. For day to day natural usuage this is one of the best books in the series. The only drawback I can see is you might want to overuse these expressions!

R. Lampkin, (Contemporary Books)

This is an inexpensive book of 47 crosswords. 24 are Japanese to English and the remainder are English to Japanese. If you already have some vocabulary they are are a fun to revise and figure out new words by trying to fill in the blanks.

If you haven’t managed to master kana a romaji version is also available. One note though the book uses American spelling so it’s color not colour. etc.