Core2000 step 3 finished

Okay I finished the beastly Core2000 step 3 and wanted to offer some thoughts on the process.

#1. It isn’t as difficult as it might seem if you are using a streamlined system. I was using a mess of different decks at first and that alone was stressful. Once I figure out I needed a :

A.Vocabularly deck

B. Sentence deck ( listening and reading sentences to show understanding of entire sentence)

C. production deck (production meaning reading from Kanji words only )

So some of the terms I know that I might forget in the future, because I am not sure how often I will speak about 方針（policy) or 結果（the result of something). But since i should be doing SRS most days, I will see them every now and then. So what can I say?

Core2000 step 3 deals with a lot of company/government based Kanji. You learn stuff about systems, organizations, presidents, building stuff, regions, you name it. Are these words worth learning? I think so. Some are a bit dense but definitely its good to know stuff like research, stocks, feature, system, software and so on. As tough as some of these words were, I found when I was doing “prodcution” I was able to read most of them without too much trouble. I might need to find some news reports to really read more of these words, but I am not going to sweat that just yet. I will let Anki be my main source of sentences for boring, government-based sentences for now. As I said before, some of the sentences are very dense, and not all the sentence vocabularly is introduced in Step 3.

Meaning, there are sentences with vocabulary that are possibly introduced in later steps, but not in Step3 (or so I assume). Despite this, most of the sentences I can now read, which I couldn’t read a week ago. I find this to be a good thing.

So yes, Core2000 step 3 is pretty tough, but you can get through it if you use a proper system that allows you to ease into speaking, reading and writing the new words. I’m probably going to make sure I practice writing some of the more difficult and obscure terms a few times. Stuff like 検討（consideration?) and 特徴（distinct feature)

can I say “yikes!” at those last two words? I mean when will I used that word… probably I could say something like..

BMWの特徴の一つは、良好な光です。

“One of the features of BMW is a good light.” (: p lame I know )  or maybe

BMWの買いて前には、BMWの特徴を検討してください。

Where i’m saying “Before you buy a BMW, please consider its features/characteristics”.

Now of course, unless i’m a  salesman I won’t be using these terms, but at least its a way for me to just fiddle with the vocabulary. Also, writing these example sentences also shows me how weak my grammar is, and i’m working on that. But all in all, Core2000 step three teaches a lot of “dense” Japanese words that are included with the most common 2000 words for regular reading. I’m doing step 4 now and approaching Step 5 (which means I will be at a nicely coveted understanding of 1000 words and sentences) and I will keep posting observations, reading abilty and so on as time passes.