Jul
5
So, I use textbooks. Yeah, I said the dirty word. I agree wholeheartedly with the camp that believes we actually learn grammar by example, not by studying rules. It is true we cannot parse rules like a computer as we read, listen, speak or write. Textbooks often have stiff, boring, unnatural examples. They can sometimes succeed at leaving us even more confused about the language than we were before we consulted them. And most importantly, in general, it isn’t much fun to use them.
And yet I do, nearly daily. I manage to avoid all the above pitfalls (I even enjoy working with them), and I get a lot out of it. First, I have three simple rules that I use when selecting a textbook:
1. All example sentences in the book must be written by a native speaker, preferably taken from native media.
2. All grammar explanations in the book must be clear, concise and accurate (I specifically mention “accurate” because many books are not. For example, some textbooks, when trying to explain the difference between “Wa” and “Ga” come up with the most ridiculous and esoteric theories, when it’s actually relatively simple and requires exposure to get a feel for it more than anything else).
3. It must be interesting (the writing style, the examples chosen and the explanations themselves). Challenging enough that I don’t feel like I’m not just reviewing material I already know but not so far beyond my current level that I’m hopelessly lost. And systematically work through any aspect of the language it tackles, even if it covers a random selection of material, it should work through each of those selections thoroughly and in logical order.
So far, I’ve found three books which meet those criteria and my current needs. Mangajin’s Basic Japanese Through Comics Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. Drawn from a column that ran in the magazine Mangajin, each chapter of this two volume book covers a specific word, phrase or grammatical concept that is usually elusive to Japanese learners. Starting from its most basic, generic usage, it branches out to work through all the nuances and variations that show up in native speech and media. Each point is accompanied by a panel from real native manga. While the topics explored in this book are somewhat random, it more than makes up for it by how thoroughly it explores each topic.
Inspired by Mangajin, Japanese the Manga Way follows the exact same format, uses the same kinds of real manga examples, and is written and edited by one of the staff from Mangajin but provides a structured and thorough (if fairly basic) guide to the grammar and structure of the Japanese Language. While the examples at the beginning of the book are really basic, by the end of the book it is covering fairly in-depth aspects of the language.
Finally, my favorite book of all, Basic Connections: Making Your Japanese Flow. Basic Connections is anything but basic. This slim book covers how Japanese brings words, phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs together. It is written by a native speaker who has taught Japanese at the University of Hawaii for many years. Her example sentences, though not drawn from actual media, are realistic, natural, dynamic and most importantly interesting. Her explanations make sense of some of the most difficult aspects of the language learners grapple with. The kinds of things native speakers use intuitively and have difficulty explaining how or why, the author of this book manages to make sense of. When I first bought the book several years ago, it was way over my head, but I just kept picking it up every so often, as my skill progressed, and recently I was at a level sufficient to understand it and stretch just ever so slightly beyond my comfort zone.
I use these three books in three ways. First, I use them as reference books. When I encounter a word, phrase or sentence that I’m having trouble understanding I look to the indexes of these books and try to find an explanation. The examples and clear explanations help me make better sense of that all-important exposure to native sources. We definitely require exposure to truly understand how to parse and use grammar, but if we can’t understand what we are being exposed to, and can’t figure it out, it is definitely going to take longer, be more frustrating, and generally be less fun than if we quickly look to the proper resource for help.
Second, I mine these books for sentences to study in my SRS. All three books come with wonderful example sentences, complete with pronunciation/readings, and translations. These make SRS fodder that is extremely easy to input and learn from. The trick is to not attempt to mine the books systematically or completely thoroughly but to skim, pick and choose sentences that attract us to them because we desire to learn something from them, be it a grammatical concept, a vocabulary word, or an interesting turn of phrase.
Finally, I have to admit something else. Some of you know this, but I am a smoker. Yes, yes, it’s a dirty, filthy nasty habit. If you come preach at me on my blog about it, your comment will die a slow and painful death. Anyways, because it is a dirty, filthy habit, I smoke outside. When I am outside, of course I bring my iPod with me, and maintain immersion. However, I don’t own an iPhone. My notebook has a fried battery and cannot be unplugged and I don’t have a large enough vocabulary to do much reading in native materials without a dictionary handy, which I only have on my computer through webservices like Sanseido and Denshi Jisho. So, what do I do during all that time I spend sitting outside smoking? Well, I pick one of these grammar books and take it with me. And I read through them, cover to cover, skipping over anything boring, too easy (frequent these days) or too difficult (doesn’t happen too often anymore). So, for five minutes at a time, multiple times a day, during time that would otherwise be pretty much wasted, I read textbooks, work the exercises in my head, pore over the example sentences until I understand them, and before I can get bored, tired or irritated my cigarette is out and I am going back inside to all the other more organic, immersive and/or efficient study methods I have at my disposal when I am reconnected to my keyboard.
Where do you have small segments of dead time during your day when you might benefit from reading through a good grammar guide or textbook?
Do you use textbooks? Are you used by them? Avoid them altogether? Or do you have uses for them outside of what I’ve mentioned here? I’d love to hear from you.
Jun
26
I created a shared Anki deck with the primitives:
Primitives
This is a deck for memorizing the primitives which Heisig uses to build all the kanji in his book Remembering the Kanji. These are the primitives which are not kanji in their own right, but simply components from which kanji are built. The primitives are similar to, but not identical with those components traditionally called radicals. Although many (most?) of the primitives are radicals, some are combinations of two or more radicals or bits and pieces of two or more radicals put together.***To use this deck you MUST install the pangolin font. Go to http://www.transient.eclipse.co.uk/Pangolin_font.zip
OR http://www.mediafire.com/?izgnzwdtdnt. To install in Windows: After downloading the file, unzip it and go to Control Panel>Appearance and Personalization>Fonts and Paste the pangolin file in that folder.
Close and re-start Anki to use deck.
Why would you want to bother with specifically memorizing the primitives?
Those using the Lazy Kanji method:
–Become more aware of the various components making up the kanji. Because the Lazy Kanji method only focuses on writing in a secondary manner to recognition, taking the time to memorize the primitive components making those kanji up will improve your ability to remember and write the kanji by building it from its components as opposed to simply recognizing it holistically.
–After memorizing the primitives, using the Lazy Kanji deck means one no longer needs to study with the Remembering the Kanji book.
–I found when I was working through the Lazy Kanji deck that a few specific primitives were giving me problems, working specifically with the primitives allowed me to hone in on which primitives I had trouble with and eradicate the problem.
Everyone:
–Becoming more familiar with the components making up the kanji will increase your ability to learn kanji met “in the wild.”
–Will aid your ability to associate a specific primitive with the keywords used in your stories.
–“Primitives” is a rather small deck, with a little over 200 of them to learn. This can be done at the start of your kanji study or concurrent with it. I imagine that learning just 5-10 a day would enable one to stay ahead of the primitives used as one works through the book.
–Learning to recognize and write the primitives BEFORE attempting to learn and write the kanji which use them means less to memorize at a time. In other words, it turns each kanji into an “i+1″ block of information.
–Additional work with the primitives should increase your ability to see and think kanji in terms of the components making it up.
–The primitives largely overlap with the Japanese radicals, meaning that learning them will make it easier to learn the radicals for Japanese dictionary look-ups and everything else it is helpful to know radicals for.
And there you go. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
May
27
Due to a variety of factors involving chronic pain/fatigue and an inability to get medications I need, I found my kanji studies grinding to a halt around #700 in RTK. When my meds ran out, I just could not get motivated to keep going. All that typing up stories, writing kanji, and trying to remember keywords that meant the same thing despite having completely unrelated kanji was just too exhausting, and made my hands and wrists ache. Then Khatzumoto-sempai came up with something that sounded like just the thing for me, Lazy Kanji, which turns the process of memorizing kanji into something more like repeatedly dialing a telephone number until it’s memorized. With renewed hope, I made an initial attempt at some Lazy Kanji cards.
However, what I quickly discovered was that it became too easy to forget about breaking the kanji up into its component parts and I was relying on rote memorization and visual memory. In other words, it was too slow, and even more painful than writing Heisig-novels. A little bit of thought fixed the problem though. A simple modification to the front of the cards could, with little effort, bring back all the benefits of Heisig’s mnemonics without nearly as much work.
So, here’s what the cards look like:
Front
党
The TEENAGER went to a _______ in the LITTLE HOUSE.
Back:
party
The task looks like this. First, write the kanji. Attempt to write it just from glancing at the sentence, if necessary, however, it’s alright to look at the kanji. That’s why its there on the front. Then, look at the kanji and say the keyword out loud. The keyword can be any synonym that carries that meaning. So party, gala, shindig, bonnaroo (joking) would all be correct.
Grading: If I get the keyword and I can write the kanji just from the sentence, I mark it very easy. If I have to glance at the kanji I mark it easy or hard, depending on my feeling about it. Missing the keyword entirely gets it marked wrong.
Adding the fill-in-the-blank sentence does two main things. First, it serves as a reminder to break the kanji up into its components, which is the strongest part of the Heisig method in my opinion. Second, it works as a bit of “context”, providing a mental hook which is easy to grasp on to and gives the brain something familiar to grasp at while learning something that initially looks like random squiggles to it. But, because of the combination of SRS and blending writing and recognition, it is no longer necessary to use complex or wordy stories to memorize with. A simple sentence that links all the primitives together and to the keyword in some sort of logical structure is all that is necessary.
My deck, which contains all the kanji from RTK1, is a shared deck on Anki, and can be found by searching “Lazy Kanji + Mod”. Some of the “stories” are idiosyncratic to my strange tastes and sense of humor, but most of them are generic enough to be useful to anyone. Having worked through all the kanji making the cards, and hundreds of them in late stages of review, I can definitely say that Lazy Kanji is efficient and far more enjoyable than the more traditional method. While your grasp on the kanji will NOT be as strong initially as someone who worked through the book the normal way, over time it will balance out. That’s the power of the SRS combined with motor memory and adult logic.
Feb
14
So, let me take a moment to praise an excellent episode of an excellent show. Many anime fans out there inappropriately diss this gorgeous, witty, intelligent show because its humor is easy to miss…especially if deadpan isn’t your favorite type of humor to begin with. My initial reaction to the first episode can be found on psgels’ Star-Crossed Blog, under the SN PL. To give a brief description of the show, allow me to quote myself:
I wouldn’t exactly call this parody, though sometimes there are a few self-referential fourth-wall moments where clearly the show is parodying itself and thus, parodying all action/adventure anime. While the long talks during the fight aren’t exactly parody either, what they are is purposefully, and blatantly unrealistic, and we are brought into the know with the author, that this is literary and not to be taken as realistic, in order to engage in a sort of verbal swordplay serving as counterpoint while the battle itself is point.
There’s something essentially Japanese in the sort of wit that goes on here, in the way character’s assumptions about each other are consistently undercut by their replies, dialogue is as dangerous as sword-technique, and deep insights are couched within simple, obvious and even naive statements. As I also mentioned on psgels’ blog, one of the most humorous ironies of the show is that while Togame is the self-proclaimed genius strategian, all she really has is a sort of wordly cleverness, with little real understanding. Meanwhile, Shichika, the main character, is supposedly quite dumb and yet its clear that he’s actual quite intelligent, and simply naive about a world he’s never known and because of this very naivety, very interesting insights about the nature of the world he encounters are drawn attention to. For instance, his conceptual but un-intuitive feel for when to use certain social and lingual niceties is constantly drawing attention to the disconnect between our language and reality. While Shichika is no Zen Master, his interactions with Togame and the other characters in the series share a certain something with the dharma battles of Old Zen, a certain kind of wit that I find refreshing and entertaining. Fifty minutes may be long for a single episode of anime, but since it is only released once a month, both episodes have felt like they went by far too fast. If you want something lighthearted yet engaging, I highly reccoment Katanagatari. Enjoy!
Feb
10
A monk asked Tozan, “What is the Buddha?” Tozan replied, “Masagin!” [three pounds of flax].
Mumon’s Comment: Old Tozan attained the poor Zen of a clam. He opened the two halves of the shell a little and exposed all the liver and intestines inside. But tell me, how do you see Tozan?
Mumon’s Verse: “Three pounds of flax” came sweeping along;
Close were the words, but closer was the meaning.
Those who argue about right and wrong
Are thus enslaved by right and wrong.”
–Case 18 from the Mumonkan, as translated
by Katsuki Sekida (71)
This story is a koan, which literally means something like Public Record, but which is a story about the earliest Zen Masters in Ancient China, used as a method of training in certain schools of Zen. My own school, the Soto Sect, doesn’t use koans in this way, but as a major component of Zen literature we still value them even if they defy interpretation by strictly analytic methods. Tozan’s–not the same Tozan who founded the Soto Sect, by the way—three pounds of flax is one of the more well-known koans in the West, though not nearly as widely known as stories such as “Joshu’s Mu”, or Hakuin’s “Sound of one hand clapping.” I think part of the appeal of this particular koan is the seeming utter randomness of Tozan’s answer. It is as if he just blurted out the first thing he happened to think, probably whatever he held in his hands or perhaps the flax caught his attention out of the corner of his eye just as he was asked. Yet, despite the seeming randomness, an inconceivable number of causes and conditions are behind his answer. Yes, it is definitely spontaneous, which is what makes it so delightful, but it isn’t truly random. Only that Zen Master, at that particular place and that particular time, could have given this answer. In Sekida’s notes we learn that Tozan himself achieved enlightenment when his master Ummon—founder of one of the five schools of Zen in Ancient China—shouted out “Rice Bag!!” Clearly, Ummon’s shout is echoed here in his disciple’s own answer, “Three pounds of flax!” Any number of different events could have occurred, such that Tozan would have given a completely different answer. Free and spontaneous, yet causally determined and non-random, this is what is at work in “Tozan’s Three Pounds of Flax.”
It is also what’s at work in my own life. There are so many factors at work in my life right now, that have put me in the position I’m in, disabled, in the midst of a divorce, raising two kids, and also seeking refuge in the buddhadharma. So I can’t up and take off for Japan right now, despite how much I feel called to monastic training. But, I am free to spontaneously take up the Buddha Way right here where I am, in a Southern Urban area in America, and I can even live a schedule as similar to monastic living as my physical body can take, except on every other weekend and one weekday afternoon when I have time with my kids. So, while in many ways I am completely confined by causality, I am also completely liberated by spontaneity and choice. This is my practice, and this practice I will share with you. I am not enlightened. I am not a teacher. I’m one guy, doing his best to wake-up, and willing to share the knowledge, practices, and choices that I try with all of you.
Gassho!
Kendo
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