Download: Anki Grammar Deck for 1kyu Study

Okay, after threatening to unleash a new anki Japanese grammar deck upon the world for a while, I have finally done it. I've learned a lot since the days when I wrote out those grammar lists that I put up on Google Docs. Every day we have quizzes at my language school and I take notes on usage and such. This deck is the culmination of that.

There are some things you need to know to understand how to use these cards though.

"f." stands for both "front" and "follows" For instance, "f.　あげく" means "what goes in front of あげく?"

"nu." stands for nuance. Questions where I wanted to remind myself of how a grammar is used. It sometimes gets paired with "essay."

"essay" means, how is this used in the reading section of the test. Often, words direct you to look forward or back.

"_＿" means "fill in the blank". For instance in "noun＿＿のに" the answer that anki is looking for is "な".

nouns and other parts of speech are sometime abbreviated (like "n"), and sometimes romajied from their Japanese words. Other times I wrote the Japanese linguistic terms, so you might want to already know what a 形容動詞 or a 修飾型 is.

Some of the questions are really simple things that I keep forgetting, sometimes the question and answer may be too mystifying. So feel free to delete cards you don't get or like.

if there are no special symbols or abbreviations in the question, you just need to give the meaning like a normal anki card.

Some cards ask you an actual question. ex: "Who do you usually talk about when you use ときたら?"

EDIT: I forgot about "=" signs. Those are looking for equivalent Japanese expressions, not English.

I'd like feedback on any mistakes in the cards, via comments to this post, where others using the deck can see them. This is not a perfect deck; I may upgrade it a bit in the future.
You may find a good grammar reference book handy while studying. I recommend this one:

It has English, Chinese, and Korean explanations for all levels of the test. And it's an ALC product, so you know it's pretty quality.

And here be the link to download the deck!

　
EDIT: Or if you are savvy enough to sync with a shared deck, the ID seems to be a74a8f213db81f5d

Super JLPT site

EDIT: Hmm, it looks like there may be a few mistakes on the site I recommend here, so proceed with caution. For instance, I just got:

(2)授業終了のラベルを聞くが＿＿＿、生徒たちは教室を飛び出して行った。
1.早くて
2.早いが
3.早くも
4.早ければ

Wherein the correct answer is listed as "早いが", but I am pretty sure they mean か, not が. Unless I am mistaken. Also, I think ラベル is supposed to be just ベル. I guess you get what you pay for. And now on with the post that is for some reason still offering the link to this site:
--

If you are not subbed to my shared RSS bits, you may have missed this, but it's so impressive thus far that I could not just relegate it to there. Lucky you, Mr. too lazy to sub to my rss bits feed man. So I give those of us slaving away at JLPT studies this link. Seriously, click it.

So far, it serves as a grim confirmation of what I have been predicting. I am not ready. Last night I whittled my Anki deck down to just 1kyu terms (the others still exist somewhere). Anyways, I've improved it quite a bit from when it was simply a list I found on a website and converted it to an Anki deck. I will offer it for download here soon, as I have in the past. My advice to you is never be satisfied with fishy definitions, even from me.

I had more thoughts on the last post, and made a fancy picture-thingy to explain the ideas I had to help fix what I was rambling about, but forgot to bring it with me on the thumb drive. Perhaps next time as well. You might want to consider my RSS feed for this blog for your update needs. In fact, I have tons of RSS feeds for you. But putting the topic back to last post, someone was wondering agog about what the heck I was talking about. The problem is it would take a long time to describe it to you, and to study in the manner I outlined would take a textbook that only exists in my head as a book-amoeba. It may mitosisize soon too. Anyways, my advice at this stage, besides take all my advice with a grain of salt, is to buy (or torrent for the evil among us) the Remembering the Kanji books. Master the first two volumes. Well, actually, I think just getting familiar with volume 2 is enough at first, but master 1. Then read Tae Kim's guide all the way through. That's the best Claytonian system-substitution I can offer at this time. Anyways, I've revised my thoughts into a more holistic, staggered system-amoeba in my head zone. And there is always the approach that people mentioned in the comments last time: All Japanese All the Time. Thing is, there seem to be some gaps in his system I've never gotten to figure out. I am sure the problem lies with me. I just want to know where he got 10,000 example sentences, and how he made sure they are good and full of a variety of words. It sounds intriguing though. Maybe he should make a textbook.

Geeze, another long post about something only a few lingistics nerds care about. And my tone is odd; no doubt because I have been reading John Hodgeman's blog.

1kyu grammar explanations done

I finally finished translating my big book of grammar. You may have previously seen it in a blog post, and that post is completely updated, but you can just view the full list here. If someone really wants to, I can create a duplicate list and put them on as an author so that they can add corrections and example sentences. But I am moving on; this list is gonna be copy-pasted into my Anki deck, and I am going to take Alex's wife's advice and memorize the original book (plus do all the workbook problems).
日本語は大変な試しでなくてなんだろう！See, you would already know what that means if you were reading the list right now.
Edit: Slightly edited it a little to make some things clearer.
Also: I did this for a few 2kyu grammar things too last year, but that list is incomplete and likely won't be completed (I know the grammar, so don't want to back-track).

More test stuff

Chinese pirates are awesome. They get all the best stuff online these days. Okay, maybe the questions from previous years' JLPT tests isn't outright piracy, but it is on a Chinese website. Yes, this is in my shared items right now; I hope people look at that thing.

Anyhoo, it helped me fine-tune my studying a bit. A while back, Alex introduced me to the program Anki, which has improved my vocabulary tons. Well, I am currently deleting the English (production) side of most of the cards; only grammar points have been deemed important enough to keep bilingual. Also, I am not worrying about simpler words; I don't even have to really comprehend what I am reading, but rather I have to know how to read my 2kyu kanji and the words they make (lower vocab won't be tested outright). Besides, at this point I can guess pretty accurately/already know about the lower vocabulary. Finally, I'm not so sure the lists at renshuu.org are complete, so I will be perusing my other resources.

If you are interested in taking the JLPT, get Anki and go look through my links on the far right column of this blog. Good luck to us all.