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Exam Diary - Tom Law

June 2006

I have decided to take sit the JF grade 4 exam this coming December.

The reason for this is that I feel it would focus my studies and give me something to work for.
Another good reason is that I now have no excuse for putting off learning Kanji! I originally wanted to learn only to speak Japanese, so when I had memorised all the Katana and Hiragana I thought it would be enough to get by.

Udagawa-sensei recently told me that if I ever wanted to get past the reading standard of a 5 year old I should begin to learn Kanji - this really put it into perspective for me!

There are 77 characters to learn for the exam and the plan is to learn 3 a day and hopefully get them done by halfway through August.
Ifve also got to make a start on the vocabulary. I worked out I know only about half of the recommended 667 words required, so there will be a lot of memorising to do.

As for the grammar and listening, this should hopefully be something I can work on in my lessons. I could also get my partner Naoko to only speak Japanese to me but I think that may get a bit boring for her. Wefll see how it goes!