Today opens the registration for the upcoming JLPT on December and I have officially decided tot take the N4 level exam. It's going to be a daunting four months from now on so I have to take every opportunity to cover more Japanese grammar review, as I also have decided not to enroll on a class anymore. As I reviewed on my previous post, that was P35,000 and countless after-work hours down the drain with Unmei Nihongo Center. The JLPT registration process seems simple enough—we register online, we pay in person a month later, and on the day of the exam, we fall in line (together with a thousand others) at the DLSU Manila campus.
The Plan
As preparation, I plan on dusting up my old handwritten notes (which I think are infinitely more comprehensive than Genki) and collate lessons into reasonable categories on separate blogs:
grammatical patterns
kanji
conjugations (~te, ~ta, ~nai)
adjectives
nouns (sub-categorized by context.
I realize that I as a visual person, I must plan on utilizing tables as much as possible, though I should note that Wix does not support tables in blog entries as of writing, but allows HTML tags. Surprisingly, after a number of tries to memorize vocabularies, I still find that I learn faster and tend to remember better using romaji. It's a pretty risky, seeing previous students have advised against prolonged dependency on romaji, but I guess it's different for me.
The Resources
A number of helpful online resources provide complete N5 and N4 reviewers, thankfully, so I must have the patience to go through each of them, such as https://jlptstudy.net/, https://jlptsensei.com/ and the Tokyo-based Meguro Language Center site.
The Future
Once I've passed N4, N3 will be right around the corner, and then I can finally gain the confidence to apply for a tutoring job teaching English to Japanese online through Bibo. It is not mandatory for tutors to achieve N3 but not only is it a fantastic way to practice my receptive skills, I think teaching and learning a new tongue will be much more smoother if the teacher and the student have a "base language" to communicate in. Plus, I think Japanese clients will learn better knowing they are being taught by someone who took the effort to actually learn their language. I'm setting my focus on passing the N1 certification by the end of 2021, so losing the drive this early is simply not an option (cue Joanna Pacitti's Watch Me Shine).
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