Mostly looking for some encouragement.
I’m 3 chapters in Tobira (after finishing Genki 1 and 2) and I really like it. However I find myself often times struggling to completely translate the yomimono and kawiabun, even though I study their vocab and grammar beforehand. I try to read and translate the passages one sentence at a time and can understand(mostly) the overall concept of them, but I find it hard to make a clear translation, even though I know the grammar and vocab that goes in said sentence.
Do I need to do some different studying before, or is this one of the things that will get better as I go on?
4 comments
It’ll definitely get better as you proceed because N3 level has only so many words, but when I went off Genki II to Tobira I had the same feeling. For my taste, Tobira feels aged and very dense – especially when it comes to the topics for reading practices (I remember the first one being about Japanese geography which was extraordinarily boring). I switched to Quartet after a while and been very happy with it. I’m halfway through Try! N3 now to check missing grammar points, I found it to be a great addition since it’s very brief and offers lots of practice material.
EDIT: also, sorry for not being very encouraging here 🙂
Tobira has not aged well and is quite dense compared to the newer options available. I personally think Quartet is a much better (and more modern) option.
I started reading easy manga before starting with tobira and it really helped
Have u done any anki core decks before? I’ve finished Genki 2 last year as well, and as someone that has been struggling a lot on trying to translate the meaning of what I’m reading, I also help myself with many tools ( like deepL ) even tho It’s not perfect at all it helps me.
I mainly use yomichan to read the words and try my hardest to figure it out in my mind before looking it up; and when I get stuck, I paste the sentence on deepL, chatgpt or google to try to get more clues, or ask here.
What helped me after Genki 2 was, immersion and taking a break from grammar.
I started with a core deck of 2.3k words on Anki and started reading, and now I’ve been mining words while immersing and reading different medias like VNs and Anime.
I also try to let go sometimes if I can’t fully translate ( as much as I really don’t want to and I waste too much time on it often ) , as long as I’m understanding the context and mining those new words , which I will then study on Anki afterwards.
If you are not doing it already, although it’s not necessary cause some people might not need it, I’d recommend to add to your routine some Anki session, where u spend like 1 hour a day on it going through it and then immerse, read, or study grammar.
If you want to try with the stuff u mentioned I can link you some.