Jun
27
By Kendo
Categories: Japanese Language, Practice Off the Cushion (Daily Life), Uncategorized
Jun
27
.
So, I’ve been a fan of the idea of extensive reading for a long time, and taken part in every round of the Read More or Die: Tadoku Contest (which is coming up again in just a few days, and was actually the impetus that got me to finally write this after a couple weeks of thinking about it) but it was a post titled “My Tadoku Manifesto: Why I Started Extensive Reading and Why You Should Consider it Too” that really pushed me to do it, and do it in a systematic way. I always knew the basic principles, but I never knew how one determined what the appropriate reading level was, or how to tell if a particular text was at your level. This wonderful post by Liana explained all that, as well as providing bucketloads of inspiration and encouragement. So I set off to the Nashville Metro Public Library’s Main Branch, fully hoping to find plenty of books in Japanese for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I was able to find listings for some on their web catalog. When I got there I found about 20 children’s books that were at or slightly above my reading level, and that was it. It was more than I had any right or reason to expect to find, given that I live in an English speaking country, but far less than I had hoped to find. This was just enough books to whet my appetite, give me a taste of what extensive reading could be like, and get me started, but not nearly enough to carry the entirety of the project.
However, if you know anything about me, or this blog, I’m not very easily deterred. If a roadblock comes up, I typically find a way under, over or around it, and when none of those options work, I bust out the dynamite. So, I still have a number of places I plan to search for more physical books, and have hopes of having better luck with those when I do. But, in the meantime, after burning through all 20 books in a few days, I wanted to keep my momentum. The good news: There was abundant material written in Japanese at a variety of reading levels all over the internet, and I had much of it bookmarked. Further, within a day or two of mentioning my dillema in a reply on her blog, Liana graciously put up an online resources post that had enough material on its own to carry someone from beginner to fluent. The bad news: there was such an abundance of material, none of it particularly sorted by level or easy to judge at a glance, making it difficult to know where to get started.
One solution would just be to plunge in and figure it out as I went, but I typically found myself overwhelmed and unsure of where to start. However, I’ve previously written about Incremental Reading and had been successfully using it as a strategy for intensive reading (the exact opposite of extensive reading) for months now. So a solution came to mind quite readily. Take the stories online, slap them into anki in chunks that would be appropriate for reading at one time, and read them incrementally. To give a quick summary of incremental reading, the idea is that you put lots of reading material into an SRS (spaced repetition system) and sit down with it and read. Material that you don’t understand or is too difficult gets pushed out into the future, to be encountered again when you are more able to understand it, after having read other texts or encountering it multiple times. This works perfectly as a sorting mechanism for extensive reading.
A few tips for setting this up:
First, I recommend using Anki. It’s easy to use, feature rich, and regularly updated. And it has some of the plug-ins and options I’m about to discuss.
Second, install the Japanese Support plug-in. This will enable you to add furigana to the stories that need it. This way you can have access to readings for unknown words without having to resort to using any sort of dictionary.
Now, Set up a card model with the following fields: Expression, Reading and Images.
Find a source of material, with stories you think range around your reading level. Some will be too hard, some might be too easy, that’s ok. This is why we are using this method. Pick your first story and decide if you want all of it on one card, or if you need to break it into multiple cards. I have some of each. If a story has multiple pages with images for each page, i tend to do a card per page so I can keep the images with the appropriate text (Here’s an example of what I mean). Now, copy any image or images into the “Image” field of your first card and text into the “Expression” field. Now go into the card layout and set it up like this:
This has the Image field and the Expression field showing up as the “front” of the card, and the Image field and the Readings field showing up as the “back” of the card. This way you can try reading without furigana, then if you need it, you can simply hit Answer and the back of the card will show up as a reproduction of the front, but with furigana added.
Your Cards will look something like this:
Front
Back (Notice the furigana on 下)
Obviously each card contains more text but you have to scroll down in order to read it. After you add the cards, to get the furigana on the back side, go into Anki’s browser, select the newly added cards and then from the File menu, pick “Regenerate Readings.” Provided your deck has “Japanese” in the beginning of its name, and your card model has a field called “Reading,” this will copy the text from the Expression field, and insert furigana. Sometimes, this comes up looking funky the first time the card shows up when your doing them. To solve this, go into the “Edit Card” screen, then go back and everything should look right now.
When you do these cards, don’t treat them like regular flash cards at all. Just read them. The second a particular card proves too difficult, boring, or frustrating, pass it as Very Easy to push it into the future (or if its boring just delete it if you want) and move on to the next one. Cards that you can read fluently should get passed as well, but I usually don’t use “Very Easy” for these, and use “Hard” or the middle option instead. This lets me get more frequent repetition with the material that’s at my level, while pushing the material which is too difficult further into the future, to be attempted again each time they come up, to test whether or not they are easy enough for me now.
Enjoy, and whether you use this method or not, I highly reccomend you take part in the Tadoku Contest! Happy Reading.
Apr
21
.
So LTLR cards were incredibly effective. I learned a lot of vocabulary from them, and even more importantly got a feel for lots of grammar patterns almost effortlessly. But, unfortunately, they were quite difficult to make. Even when I was taking the stories from Ilya Frank’s site, simply editing a card to make it work took 5 to 10 minutes to create. They were a joy to review, but such a pain to add that I soon found myself not adding them.
A period of time followed where instead of doing any SRS work, I just did lots of “comprehensible input.” This was fun, and went a long way towards consolidating the knowledge I already had, and my comprehension improved tons. Gains, however, beyond bringing latent knowledge forward, were too slow.Thus entered the Reading Deck, followed by the Overlapping Cloze Deletion deck about a month later.
Normally, this is the part where I try to explain the theory behind WHY I think a new method will work, but I’m gonna do this differently this time and just explain WHAT and HOW. Basically, for the Reading Deck, I’m taking Incremental Reading and adapting it to language learning, creating highly narrow, intensive reading practice that then becomes super-easy to memorize. Most of the theory behind this is similar to that behind LTLR, so if you need convincing, see that post. I’ll probably be unable to resist explaining a little bit of the “why” as I go, but hopefully you’ll just give this a try.
So, you’re gonna need a good mono-dic, preferably one that lets you save entries. I strongly reccomend GoldenDict (with these dictionaries if you’re learning Japanese [ the dictionary file is password protected. The password is n1h0ng0 . My apologies to everyone who tried to access this file and was unable too. Thanks for the heads up Kyle and ブライアン ]). Be sure you turn on Wikipedia and Wiktionary for your language, as well as Forvo.
The great thing about GoldenDict is that you can highlight words, hit ctrl+c+c and a floating window will pop-up with all your definitions in it. This is great for reading the web, e-books, etc. Unfortunately, unlike it’s prime competitor StarDict (which would be awesome if it wasn’t so buggy and problematic), there is no way to save entries from the floating window. But, there is an option to save on the main interface. Set up a folder and in the preferences, tell GoldenDict where you want it to save your entries. It will save each one as an individual html file, with all the entries for the word being looked up.
So, as you go about your immersion, when you look up a word that is interesting to you, pull up the main interface if you’ve been using the floating window, and go ahead and save the entry. So far, so good. This should take almost no extra time to do. Remember, we aren’t fooling with this for every single word you look up on a given day, just the interesting ones.
Now, I do this towards the end of the day, but you can do it any time that works best for you, open up the folder and pick 5 (or whatever number of cards you want to add per day) and then open your SRS. Now just copy and paste those definitions in as new cards.
So, it should look like this.
Front:
掴む
つかむ
[他五]
１．手でしっかりととらえて握り持つ。
２．手に入れて自分のものとする。
３．人の気持ちなどをしっかりと手中にして逃がさない。つかまえる。とらえる。
４．物事の要点などをしっかりと心にとらえる。把握する。
The back of the card may have nothing on it. Or, if you’ve installed Japanese support, it may include the readings, looking like this:
掴[つか]む
つかむ
[ 他[た]五]
１． 手[て]でしっかりととらえて 握[にぎ]り 持[も]つ。
２． 手[て]に 入[い]れて 自分[じぶん]のものとする。
３． 人[にん]の 気持[きも]ちなどをしっかりと 手中[しゅちゅう]にして 逃[に]がさない。つかまえる。とらえる
４． 物事[ものごと]の 要点[ようてん]などをしっかりと 心[こころ]にとらえる。 把握[はあく]はあくする。
This is totally unneccesary, though, as I rarely even look at the back of the cards. My set-up just creates those by default. You could also include any notes to yourself on the back if you wanted. Sometimes I do that. Also, sometimes on the front I might include either images of the word being defined, particularly if the definition is difficult and it happens to be a noun (easy to get good images for). I also will quite often grab the mp3 file from Forvo if available and include that, since it comes up in the definition anyways.
Now, not all of my cards are definitions. I also occasionally use short news articles from http://news.kids.yahoo.co.jp/ , short children’s fables (1 or 2 paragraphs) from places like http://hukumusume.com/douwa/betu/kobanashi/03/09.htm . But more and more I find the cards I enjoy most are the monolingual definitions. There’s something so powerful about learning words this way, for me at least. But, this method will work with any short piece of reading material in your target language. Here’s a card taken from the previously mentioned Yahoo kids’ news site/
Front:
アフリカのルワンダ共和国にある国立公園で、マウンテンゴリラが双子(ふたご)の赤ちゃんを産んだそうだよ。
ゴリラは、住む位置などによって、大きく3種類に分類されて、いずれも絶滅が心配されているんだ。このマウンテンゴリラという種類は、映画「キングコング」のモデルにもなっているそうだよ。
I even have a few cards that came from segments of the Heart Sutra. Use whatever works for you.
Now, to review the cards, just read them like you were reading anything. As you go, look up the words you don’t know (again, GoldenDict is really helpful for this because of the nearly mouse-over ability to highlight a word, press ctrl+c+c and get an instant definition). I use J-E look-ups for this part, just like I do when I read, but you could use J-J too. If you are reading and a card is too difficult, frustrating, or boring, STOP. Pass the card with a “Very Easy” and move on to the next one. The idea behind incremental reading is that you push difficult material out into the future, to be attempted again when your knowledge and skill have increased. Here comes the cool part. As you were attempting to read it, any words in the definition that were interesting should have been saved, to become eventual fodder for cards of their own, thus making it a little easier to read the original card next time it comes up.
After reading the card, I grade them like this: Most cards get marked “Easy.” Difficult, frustrating or boring cards= “Very Easy.” Cards that feel very familiar, like they are right on the cusp of being memorized get marked “Hard,” or more rarely “Fail.” This is nearly opposite of how the SRS is normally used, and it will feel counter-intuitive at first. But remember, you aren’t memorizing at this stage, you are familiarizing yourself.
At this point, some of you are saying, ok, here goes Lazy Kendo again, making this too easy on himself. There isn’t any test to these cards. How can you be learning anything? Well, do you learn when you read? I know I do. Learning doesn’t have to be painful.
However, I did find that many words were getting very familiar, close to being memorized, but then getting spaced far into the future to be mostly forgotten before I would see them again. This was frustrating for its own reasons. Mostly because I’m such a greedy learner, and I wanted all those words firmly memorized. One solution was to fail any card that threatened to get spaced too far out before it was memorized. But this created way too many reviews and I had to stop adding cards for a week to get them back under control. So, that’s when the second deck was born.
Overlapping Cloze Deletion is an old technique for memorizing data, so I can’t take any credit for it. Khatzumoto-senpai has written a great deal about it over on AJATT+Plus, in a system he’s created called MCD’s (Massive Context Cloze Deletion Cards). If you want the details, I strongly reccomend you check it out, as he’s really written in great depth about it. Most of what I know about it comes from reading those articles. AJATT+ Plus has a lot of great information, as does his other website, alljapaneseallthetime.com .
Each day, after adding cards to my Reading Deck, I go into the list of Reading Deck cards, sort them by “Date Added,” go to the oldest cards, and pick one that I feel really comfortable with. Not cards I already know everything from, and not cards that are still difficult, but cards that seem like with just a bit more exposure I could quickly learn a lot from. I copy the contents of that card (remember, these cards only have a Front, no Back) and open up my Overlapping Cloze Deletion deck. I paste the content into a new card, then go back and highlight something at the beginning of the card. Usually a single kanji or kana. Then I hit the cloze deletion button and it creates the card for me. Now you should have a card that looks like this.
Front:
手懸かり
て[...]り
[名]
1. よじ登るときなどに、手をかけて支える所。
2. 調査や捜査を進めるときの、きっかけとなるもの。いとぐち。
Back:
手懸かり
てがかり
[名]
1. よじ登るときなどに、手をかけて支える所。
2. 調査や捜査を進めるときの、きっかけとなるもの。いとぐち。
Notice that the part which was clozed out (indicated by the [...]) is bold and blue in the answer. Now we add that card and then past the same information again, this time clozing out the next interesting bit of information. Again.
Front:
手懸かり
てがかり
[名]
1. [...]じ登るときなどに、手をかけて支える所。
2. 調査や捜査を進めるときの、きっかけとなるもの。いとぐち。
Back:
手懸かり
てがかり
[名]
1. よじ登るときなどに、手をかけて支える所。
2. 調査や捜査を進めるときの、きっかけとなるもの。いとぐち。
You may also notice that I skipped over some stuff. We don’t need (or want) to make a card with every single word or particle. We just want several of them. I aim for between 7-15 cards per original Reading card, depending on its length. 15 cards to memorize 1 card may seem like a lot, but the truth is that doing a lot of overlapping cards makes it much easier than just doing a few. In fact, the reason we don’t do every single word isn’t that it would be hard. In fact, it would make it TOO easy and repetitive and become boring. The magic number seems to be 7-15. Everything else will be memorized incidentally.
Now, you review these similarly to the Reading deck with a twist. As you read them, feel free to look up any word which isn’t being tested for (that means, if you cloze out the pronunciation of the word being defined, you can’t look up the kanji either, that would just give you the answer) but when it you get to the part which is clozed out, recall it from memory. If you get it right, pass the card accordingly, even if you forgot everything else on the card. If you miss it, look over the answer, fail the card, and get it right next time.
I usually only pick 1 or 2 of the Reading Deck cards per day to become Cloze Deletion sets. That’s because I still want to spend the majority of my time in immersion, not sitting in front of Anki. More new cards per day wouldn’t be so hard, but remember it is ALWAYS the reviews which bite you in the ass. Those with a higher tolerance level for SRS might do more. Just keep in mind a deck you quit reviewing because the reviews get out of hand is a deck which is doing you no good at all.
And that’s it. It’s a very powerful, extremely low-stress way to learn lots of Japanese (or any other language, for that matter). It may seem a bit complicated, dividing things into two steps like this, but that’s what makes it so painless. By the time a definition (or whatever) makes it to the cloze deletion deck, you’ve seen it so many times it is already very familiar. This goes back to the “old adage”: Learn before you memorize.
Please add any ideas you have, and feel free to ask any questions, in the comments.
Nov
24
.
I’ve had a problem. For a long while now, I’ve felt too much like Sisyphus and grown increasingly frustrated with my progress into Japanese. Especially the last two or three months. I am a disabled, divorced dad, who gets his kids every Thursday night and every other weekend. The disability already makes using the SRS challenging enough. I have “bad days,” where doing my reps is simply impossible, and I take longer working through reps than my peers do, especially when writing is any part of the task at hand. My kids are the single most important thing in my life, more important than my religion and more important than this language project. So I maintain a great deal of my immersion while I’m with them, but I will not waste any of that time sitting in front of a computer doing flash cards. Sometimes I can get a few reps done after they’ve gone to bed, but not always, and never all of them. Mostly, because of the previously mentioned disability, I try to get rested up while they are sleeping so I can have some energy and attention to give to them the next day.
Usually takes about a half-a-day to a day to recover from these weekend visits. Then, three or four days to dig out from under the pile of backed up reps that accumulated over the weekend. Another three or four days to really fall into my groove. And just about the time I feel I’m really rocking again, making progress, two weeks have gone by and the cycle begins again.
I’ve long believed there should be a way to “pause” the SRS, so no “time” passes for the cards during periods when you cannot get to it. For instance, if you know your going on vacation, you could pause it, deck sits frozen, unpause it when you get back and pick up where you left off. Also, there should be a “rewind” feature for those who lose motivation or forget for a few days or weeks, then try to come back to their decks only to have hundred or even thousands of cards due. It’s so demoralizing to face those huge stacks, I recently spoke with someone who said they’ve deleted dozens of decks for this very reason. I know that it created a lot of mental paralysis for me each returning Monday. But, I’m no developer, or programmer, so until I learn those skills, I can’t really address this problem software side.
I was stumped, and just kept trudging forward, three steps forward, two back, doing my best. But, in the past few weeks some ideas came together for me. From the synthesis of these ideas, I’ve come up with a language acquisition method so easy, so effortless, it makes Lazy Kanji look like some kind of brutal labor camp.
1. Very recently, there was news that Khatz had deleted his entire sentence deck in favor of a new method of his own. I’m not privy to the details of this new method. He is, at least currently, (quite fairly, I’ll add) reserving those for members of his premium service, AJATT +Plus. I have no income, and am currently not a subscriber, but I would be if I could afford to be. What I do know about this method is that it draws on large chunks of text to provide context and relies heavily on cloze deletion and redundancy. This reminded me of another technique I’ve long been fascinated with:
2. Incremental Reading. IR, in short, is feeding lots and lots of reading material into an SRS, and using the SRS’s scheduling features to push material you aren’t ready to read yet out into the future while bringing those items you want to see sooner, closer. It can be a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the most important parts. You can read more about IR here: http://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm .
3. A few days ago, someone from the #ajatt channel on irc.rizon.net , linked to a youtube channel run by a gentleman known as Fluent Czech. He has lots of interesting and novel ideas for learning languages, many of them approaches very, very different from the AJATT style methods most people I know use, but definitely not the typical, terrible, traditional methods that have failed so many of us in the past. Then, Sunday night I came across this video:
4. Which leads to Ilya Frank’s Reading Method… This method involves reading text in your target language with LITERAL, word-for-word translations inserted directly into the text. You read a paragraph of whatever you are reading WITH the translations, then immediately read that same paragraph without them, and keep moving forward. Here’s a small example of what that looks like:
[ ばあさまは、ももを拾(ひろ)って家(いえ)に帰(かえ)りました。Baasama wa, momo wo hirotte (the old woman, having picked up the peach; hirou) ie ni kaerimashita (returned home; kaeru). 夕方(ゆうがた)になって、じいさまが山(やま)からもどってきました。Yuugata ni natte ([when] the evening came: “when it became the evening”), jiisama ga yama kara modotte kimashita (the old man returned home from the mountains; modoru).
ばあさまは、ももを拾って家に帰りました。夕方になって、じいさまが山からもどってきました。] — Momotarou, Ilya Franks.
I immediately disliked a few things about Frank’s set-up. Firstly, the romaji HAD to go. Second, FluentCzech had the brilliant realization that the literal English meanings should go IN FRONT of the target language. This way your thinking from meaning into the structure and vocabulary of your target language, and not backwards trying to pull your target language into your native tongue. However, even setting this up in a way I’d consider backwards, Franks method has met with lots of success in Russia where he has published HUNDREDS of books formatted this way, three or four a month, and read by thousands of language learners.
5. Finally, I’d been thinking about narrow reading. Narrow reading is reading only books by a specific author or within a certain, small topic or genre so that you experience a lot of repetition of vocabulary and grammar until you’ve mastered that stuff and can move on to a new author or area of interest. This is supposed to make your reading more effective and also build confidence because as you get familiar with the author/topic your reading becomes much easier and faster. What could be more narrow, though, than reading the SAME material, at spaced intervals perfect for keeping the vocabulary and grammar your encountering in working memory?
So, for a few days now, I’ve been making what I’m calling Literal Translation Looped Reading cards. Some from original material (websites, wiki, etc), and also working through all the material Franks has made available to English learners of Japanese on his site. Removing the romaji and re-arranging the translations takes a little editing, but its still very easy and there’s quite a bit here to begin with, saving me much trouble. So, here’s what a typical card looks like:
Front:
(«on a certain day»)ある日(ひ)、(Momotarou came to/appeared before the old man and the old woman),桃太郎(ももたろう)はじいさまとばあさまの前(まえ)へきて、 (sat in a polite position: «neatly/properly»)きちんとすわって (folded both hands)両手(りょうて)をつき、
「 (thanks to you)おかげさまで、 (I’ve grown up so big)こんなに大(おお)きくなりましたから、 (to the island of the demons)おにが島(しま)へ (I am going to get rid of/wipe out/vanquish the demons)おに退治(たいじ)にいってまいります。 (please)どうか (the best: «number one» in Japan kibidango /millet dumplings/)日本一(にっぽんいち)のきびだんごを (make; つくる — cook, do + くださる — do something for somebody)作(つく)ってください。」 ([he] said)といいました。
(the old man and the old woman were surprised)じいさまとばあさまは、びっくりして (would try to stop [him]; tomeru)とめました (but)が、(Momotarou would not listen to them at all: «no matter what they said»)桃太郎(ももたろう)はどうしてもききません。
(the old man and the old woman against their will/had no choice but)じいさまとばあさまはしかたなく、(lots of the best millet dumplings in Japan: «large quantity» made)日本一(にっぽんいち)のきびだんごを、たくさんこしらえて、 (made him carry /the dumplings/ on his belt)こしに下(さ)げさせ、 (made him tie a new band/towel /around his head/)新(あたら)しいはちまきをさせ、 (made him put on new /traditional Japanese skirt-like/ trousers “hakama”)新(あたら)しいはかまをはかせ、 (made him wear [a sword at <<his>> side])刀(かたな)をささせ、『([that had] “The Best/Strongest in Japan Momotarou”)日本一(にっぽんいち)の桃太郎(ももたろう)』(written [on it])と書(か)いた (made him take a flag; もつ — have)はたを持(も)たせて、(sent him on his way; おくる + だす /auxiliary verb denoting the beginning of an action/)送(おく)りだしました。
Back:
ある 日[ひ]、 桃太郎[ももたろう]はじいさまとばあさまの 前[まえ]へきて、きちんとすわって 両手[りょうて]をつき、
「おかげさまで、こんなに 大[おお]きくなりましたから、おにが 島[しま]へおに 退治[たいじ]にいってまいります。
どうか 日本一[にっぽんいち]のきびだんごを 作[つく]ってください。」といいました。
じいさまとばあさまは、びっくりしてとめましたが、 桃太郎[ももたろう]はどうしてもききません。
じいさまとばあさまはしかたなく、 日本一[にっぽんいち]きびだんごを、たくさんこしらえて、こしに 下[さ]げさせ、 新[あたら]しいはちまきをさせ、 新[あたら]しいはかまをはかせ、 刀[かたな]をささせ、『 日本一[にっぽんいち]の 桃太郎[ももたろう]』と 書[か]いたはたを 持[も]たせて、 送[おく]りだしました。
So, the task, read through the front, then, read through the back. If you could read it without the literal translations in the text and still understand the “gist” of things, then pass the card. If you were a bit shaky while going through the passage the second time, fail it. If the card was completely maddening and you didnt understand at all then hit “very easy” and push it way out into the future. Keep doing that until you are finally good enough to read it.
Anyways, that is it in a nutshell. These are SRS cards with almost no test to them. No stress involved, and a big pile of them backed up simply means you have some reading to do. It has taken so much pressure off my studies and made me excited about learning all over again. As I advance, I’ll probably begin leaving out translations for vocab. I already know, but it was recomended to begin with EVERYTHING translated because it is very helpful in internalizing the structure of your target language. I don’t have any real empirical data of MY OWN yet (although Franks seems to from his studies with Russian learners), but I do know this. Some Japanese idioms which have baffled me for ages suddenly made perfect sense after encountering them with this method. Any ideas, comments, questions or suggestions, please let me know. Does anyone have any experience using Ilya Franks method in its original form?
Ouch, almost forgot something VERY important. Read through everything in order, but read the English bits silently and the Japanese bits outloud. Your mind extracts the meaning from the English this way, but what it latches on to is the Japanese. Very important part.
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 [I now recommend downloading fabiusli (anki user: fabio.pintus)'s "Primitives (media version)" deck. He kindly turned each primitive in the deck into an image file so that it is no longer necessary to install the "pangolin" font. This means that you can use the deck on your iphone, on multiple computers, etc. fairly hassle free. Mad props to him for taking the time to do this. To be honest, I considered it when I first made the deck and I was too lazy, so there you have it...]:
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
＊＊`A poster named Wayne made some improvements to the deck, and has re-released it under the Anki Shared Decks as “Lazy Kanji Mod V2″. I heartily recommend everyone download this version, as it is 1) more easily customizable, and 2) he’s made some brilliant modifications of his own that you ought to give a try and 3) he’s added a ton of useful information to each of the cards, like links to stroke order references. I’ll also mention you can download the Stroke Order Font and with just a few tweaks have stroke order right on the card. However, if your uncomfortable doing that, or if your working from a mobile device making it difficult to install new fonts, his solution is an excellent one. Anyways, this is the deck that “I’m” using now, so you should too.
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.
Recent Comments