Summary: I recently went through teaching an intensive program with some students. It involved a few 12 hour days with me being the classroom for about 10 hours. Needless to say it was exhausting and I didn't get that much studying done during that time. I did, however, get a lot of Game of Thrones reading done. Unfortunately that does nothing to improve my Japanese skills. I did manage to recover from all that mess though. I slowly eased myself back on schedule and I'm back at it. It was definitely a bit hard at first to get myself started again, but after a did my routine for a few days it all came back to me, thank goodness. Lately, I've still been busying myself with the old kanzen master N2 grammar. I just finished it and now I'll probably do a practice test next weekend and see where am at. I hope to be able to do an old pre-2010 practice test and a new post-2010 practice test to see how big of a difference there is in levels. A suspect there will be a bit of a contrast. Using Dictionaries Using a language dictionary is a fact-of-life for those learning a language. No matter what you do when learning a language you will inevitably have to look a word up. You will probably have to look up several hundred or thousand words over the course of your language learning. So language dictionaries are a vital tool for language learning. You may probably think that you are already have the fine art of dictionary looking-up down pat, but there are a few things to keep in mind when you look a word up in the dictionary. Things that totally slipped by me, my first couple of years of language study. Make Sure the Word you Look Up is the Word you Think it is Usually, over the course of natural language studying, you come across words you don't know. They might be in some reading you are doing or something that you are listening to. You may also want to express something, but don't have the words to do so yet, and want to know how to say something in Japanese. In all of these cases you need a language dictionary. And, typically, you look up the words in the dictionary, take a few brief moments to read the word in English and then go about your day. It's fairly straight forward process, or at least I used to think it was. Now, for common words, like 'blue' and 'car', this is a perfectly fine way of doing things. But, if you look up something with a slightly more abstract meaning you are going to start to run into trouble. Take a word like 'demand' for example. The noun form of 'demand' has at least 3 common words in Japanese: 要請 (yousei), a request or demand, 要求 (youkyuu), a strong demand, and 需要 (jyuyou), economic demand. That's just for the nouns. There are other words used for the verbs. How to Combat the Problem First, be sure to check out the sample sentences if your dictionary has them. If you are still using a paper dictionary you are a bit out of luck here, but almost any kind of electronic dictionary (on the web or otherwise) have a plethora of example sentences for you to read through. Reading through these example sentences briefly can help you see how it is used. You may also want to do a reverse look up of the word. You can do this by look the word up in reverse to see what other meanings that same word has. For example, if you don't know the word for blue you can look it up and discover that blue in Japanese is 青い. But, if you look up 青い you'll find that it means both green and blue. So, the next time someone says 青い in conversation you know that they either mean green or blue (and not just blue). Lastly, you can ask a native speaker about it. You can try out a few sentences using the word and see if you are using correctly. Usage is important when you learn a word. To truly know a word you must know its meaning and usage. Also, the vocabulary usage section of the JLPT is one of the more difficult sections of the test, so it pays to be prepared for it. What has tripped you up?
