Summary: It's been another fine week studying for the N1 test. I was still slowly working my way through ほぼ日刊イトイ新聞の本. So far, it is pretty good. It is a basically story about how he setup his website and how it became really popular and some musings on that. The reading is getting easier and easier. For vocabulary, I've been sticking with StickyStudy (haha). They did a major update to the app that makes it even more beautiful than before and makes the interface a lot slicker and faster. One thing I started doing this week is slowly putting in N1 grammar points. I just picked up So-Matome N1 Grammar book and I'm starting through it slowly. I'm going to try to put in all the grammar points to StickyStudy for study mostly because I want something more portable and easy to just whip out and start studying with. Other big event that happened recently is the release of Japanese support for Siri. If you not familiar with Siri, she is the new virtual assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Overall, Siri isn't the best thing in the world. She is still pretty basic, but with the addition of voice support for Japanese, it has become an incredibly useful tool to check my pronunciation with, which is pretty bad to tell you the truth. I've been doing a lot of speaking in Japanese lately and it has started to improve, but I can honestly say my reading and listening skills are a lot better. :) The Japanese Particle Kurai/Gurai For this podcast, I'm going to try to do something a little different, so bear with me. I'm going to give the Japanese lesson thing one more try, but this time it is going to be a little different. In the podcast, I go over the grammar particle kurai/gurai and its uses. For those of you that are signed up for the newsletter, you'll get a handy little pdf that has all the information I went over in the podcast as well as some extra sample sentences and information. As always, I'd like to hear your feedback on the new format and if it is helpful for you or not. What I'll probably do is cycle through the levels each week with a different topic. Is this a Clever Ploy to Get Us to Sign Up for your Newsletter? Well, kind of, I wanted to give something a little extra to those that have signed up for my newsletter. So, now the newsletter will have a few extra goodies that you can't get anywhere else. And just as before, I'll never spam you with unwanted offers and general junk. Just the good stuff. Can you use kurai/gurai? Give this grammar point a try in the comments and I'll give it a look. Hope to hear from you soon! Music by Kevin MacLeod
