Practice
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
Hopefully you’re starting to get into the swing of things. All your Anki decks have been established (at least for a while) and all you have to do is keep up with them while learning new things (and importing those new things). You’ve started your kanji. You’ve learned the 1 and 2 stroke radicals, and you’re doing quite swell, I’m sure. The next few chapters are all kind of on the same subject too, so hopefully it feels like those are moving along as well.
Sentences
We’re going to start this practice off like we start most practice sections off… with sentences. Go through the sentences and make sure you can say and read them all. Use the audio to get good at saying the following sentences. In theory, you should know a lot of the meanings of these sentences already, though you’ll really learn that later on in your Sentences Anki deck.
a ともだち でした
a みず でした
a でんしゃ でした
a せんせい でした
a ねこ でした
a しんぶん でした
a りんご でした
a でんしゃ でした か？
a 一人 でした
a 二人 でしたか？
a 二つ ですか？
a 七人 じゃありません
a 九 ですか？
When you’ve gone through them all, and can say and read them all (up to speed), move on to the Anki deck where we’ll import and learn the meanings of these sentences. It may seem like we’re beating these sentences into a pulp by how much you’re practicing them, but after a while you’ll start to notice things add up. And when they add up… well… good things happen (i.e. when they add up enough, you start getting fluent and the grammar you’ve learned starts coming to you very naturally).
Anki Sentences
You’re going to need to import the following deck into your “TextFugu Sentences” deck. If you need a refresher on how to do that, you can find one here.
Download: Sentences 4
When you’ve imported the new deck, get started on it. Finish your reviews and learn as many new sentences as you can. There’s some kanji in there now, so it’s starting to get interesting (and will only get more interesting as time goes by, trust me!).
Passion List でした Practice
Time to crack out that passion list. Find all the nouns on it and write your own sentences using those nouns. Add a few more nouns if you’re feeling like there isn’t enough. Here are some options for that:
- Past tense でした
- Past tense question でしたか
- Asking and answering questions, i.e. “___でしたか？”・”はい、＿＿でした！”
Things are simple now, it is nice :)
Before You Move On
Before you move on, there’s a few things you’ll want to make sure you’ve done. There were lots of new things to keep track of introduced in this chapter, so here’s a roundup:
- Make sure you can use and understand でした, でしたか, and the previous grammar you’ve learned
- Make sure you know the 1-2 stroke radicals
- Make sure you know the 1-2 stroke kanji from group 1 (there were four of them).
- Make sure you know the vocab from the 1-2 stroke kanji you learned.
- Make sure you know how to say and read the above sentences in this practice section.
- Make sure you’ve imported your sentences, kanji vocab, and kanji decks to the right places (or in some cases, just downloaded them for the first time) and have gone through them and studied them so you don’t fall behind as you move forward.
- Make sure you’ve done the passion list exercise (should be quick).
When you’re all ready to head out, head out to the next chapter. You’re getting close to finishing out the basic nouns grammar!