Sorry to vent, but this reading quiz took the longest time to pass. Anyone else try this quiz?… - Feed Post by kekkou

• 
  mog86uk

  What do you mean by "longest time to pass"?
  
  I tried that reading quiz because you mentioned it, however I didn't notice anything particularly unique about that one.
  
  Was a fairly interesting story in the article though. I've heard about 110番の日 (Dial 110 Day) before but forgot about it and yesterday being 1月10日.
  
  I don't understand why that reading quiz doesn't test on some of the more important terms in the article, like 番 or better yet explaining that 110番 is Japan's emergency number (like 999 in the UK, or 911 in the US).
  
  Why does it ignore 110番 while instead teaching irrelevant things, like weird uncommon meanings of the kanji 星 (せい) and 蘭 (あららぎ) when those kanji are actually just the girl's first name "Seiran" (星蘭), lol.
  
  Some other terms which would have made the article easier to understand:
  おれおれ詐欺 = fraudulant distress phone calls
  落とし物 = lost property
  
  一日 would have been easier to understand if the furigana wasn't written as ついたち, because it doesn't mean "first day of the month" in this article...
  
  Every time I do a readings quiz, I end up wondering more and more about how the readings feature is designed and how it works. Hard to understand how it can add different furigana to article compared to what it lists in the quiz and still end up with neither being correct...
  
  Even though JCJP often makes it harder rather than easier to understand the story in the articles, I do still like using the readings feature as an interesting way to learn--learning interesting stuff from those mistakes! :D

  January 11, 2015 at 2:02pm
• 
  washoku

  @mog86uk As you can see on my statistics page, which takes about 30 seconds to load :(, I made a ton of mistakes in the Lessons page when I first started JCJP 2 years ago. Also, I never took any Japanese classes and never studied online Japanese. I only know the Japanese from my parents, my 3-month Japan visit in 2009, and online websites and Youtube.
  
  I can guess what the answer is, most of the time, but this reading quiz had a lot of kanji that I never encountered before in my life. But, I did pass the quiz ... eventually. :)

  January 12, 2015 at 2:32am
• 
  washoku

  Just realized I replied via my @washoku test account instead of my @kekkou account. *sigh*

  January 12, 2015 at 2:34am
• 
  mog86uk

  Ah. The only kanji I didn't recognise was 蘭, which apparently means "orchid". I've learnt the meanings of all the other kanji in SFA:
  
  日 "sun", 子 "child", 役 "duty", 星 "star", 警 "warn", 視 "inspect", 庁 "board", 一 "one", 通 "traffic", 信 "believe", 指 "finger", 令 "command", 本 "origin", 部 "department", 長 "long", 報 "report", 緊 "tight", 急 "hurry", 時 "time", 理 "logic", 解 "dissect", 察 "judge", 官 "bureaucrat", 制 "mastery", 服 "outfit", 姿 "figure", 詐 "lie", 欺 "cheat", 相 "together", 談 "discuss", 想 "idea", 定 "determine", 受 "receive".
  
  I think all of the kanji listed above are within the top 1000 most frequently used in newspapers, except 蘭. 蘭 isn't a Jouyou kanji but even this is still the only the 1886th most frequent kanji according to Jisho.org, not all that rare.
  
  As you can see, having learned to recognise all the Jouyou kanji and their rough meanings makes it easy for me to figure out the answers for JCJP readings quizzes. I'm not so good with onyomi yet, however you can get by really well in JCJP readings feature just with knowing the kanji meanings. ^^

  January 12, 2015 at 4:15pm