Improving Japanese

[a_cubed]

SO I’ve now been sudying Japanese for eight years. In the first few years I was only so-so committed to spending the time on it. After my sabbatical here in 2007 I got much more committed to it and since moving here I’ve started using the Anki flashcard system which encourages me in a number of ways to study quite hard (1-2 hours per day typically, self-study, plus a one hour personal lesson every week). With both my teacher in the UK and my new teacher here, sometimes I’d feel like I was making no progress. That’s because they’re good teachers and are always pushing just beyond my confort zone, so I always feel like I’m working hard, and sometimes I’m failing at things. $WIFE and $COLLEAGUES do tell me I’m improving, though. Certainly I can read more of the kanji I see on the street and occasionally I can keep up with (some of) the substitles (part of the normal broadcast) on news programmes that $WIFE watches. I can even sometimes figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word and its pronunciation because I already know its constituent kanji characters from other words (or on their own).

Today I managed something that I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to. When I bought my current laptop the store didn’t have extra power supplies available, and when I enquired later they don’t stock them as standard and advised going direct to ASUS. Before Christmas I checked with ASUS and they didn’t have stock. Today I checked their website and they had stock in, so I ordered two extras (I need one for home, one for the office and one for the bag). Yes, I do need these – once in the past three months I forgot to unplug the power supply at home when heading into the office – luckily I was able to keep things short in the office anyway and come back home for the rest of the day. Why this is relevant to my improving Japanese is that the Asus Japan website is entirely in Japanese and I was able to find what I was looking for, check they had stock and go through the whole ordering process, while being absolutely certain I understood everything on the way and without having to look any words up in a dictionary. I’ve done similar things before, though I usually have to ask $WIFE to help or at least look a few things up in the dictionary. Now, this is obviously not fluency. I have a long way to go yet. According to my Anki studies I’ve only completed the JLPT2 vocabulary and have another 3000 words/phrases to learn to get to JLPT1 (the highest level and supposedly equivalent to high school gradate Japanese, at least in listening and reading, with some claim to “writing” ability but no speaking test). However, it is progress. I was also able to have a real conversation with $FATHER-IN-LAW and $MOTHER-IN-LAW at the New Year family party without needing interpretation by $WIFE. My grammar used to be ahead of my vocabulary. I think it’s now the other way around and I must add appropriate grammar cards to my Anki deck and interleave new vocabulary with the grammar. I think it will take me until 2015 to be basically fluent and maybe 2017 before I think I could even approach doing my job in Japanese. But, it’s nice to feel progress and have confidence that the work I’m putting in is paying off.

Current Mood:  accomplished

Current Music: We Too Are One - the Eurythmics

Originally published at blog.a-cubed.info

Comments

[clarehooper.livejournal.com]

That is awesome!

I lived in the Netherlands last year, and really wanted to learn Dutch (much to the surprise of my Dutch colleagues). I was only there 12 months, which gave me time to do the university-provided beginners and intermediate course, but practising was really hard because /everyone/ speaks fluent English and is desperate to speak English.

Now I'm back in the UK, but I don't want to forget what I learned. I don't know any Dutchies in Newcastle, but Anki is my lifeline when it comes to vocab. I have books and DVDs for reading and listening, and a pal on IRC for writing. Speaking is the tough one.

Did you buy or build your Anki decks?

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

SInce ANki was developed for Japanese originally (though it's got such a gflexible but logical system it can be used for anything you need to memorize) there's lots of free ANki Japanese decks. I started out with a set of JLPT 1-4 words but I've created my own cards from the books I've been studying. It's a bit of a pain, particularly having to deal with duplicates that are already in the deck (I want to ensure that I add the tag for the book as well so I can provide these decks to others for free). The worst is near-but-not-exact duplicates. I find those as I go through mostly. I've done a fair bit of modification on the original deck I downloaded as well. Some fixes to errors but also some things like adding the verb form of nouns (Japoanese does this a lot byt adding "suru" to an "action" noun - quite often one or both of the kanji in a two kanji noun (many of the nouns are two kanji) also have their own direct verb form (usually with a different pronunciation of the kanji - this is one of the things that makes Japanese a tough language to learn).

[clarehooper.livejournal.com]

I didn't know Anki's history, neat.

Learning Japanese must be fascinating!

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting language, but has some oddities. As someone who's very precise in their use of their native language the natural vagueness of Japanese can be a bit frustrating. It's not that one can't be precise, it's just that it takes a lot of words to do so.
The originator and still the main developer of Anki (who does the iPhone version as well but not I think the Android version) is a Westerner who lives in Japan. After becoming fluent himself at Japanese he set himself the challenge of helping others. As a programmer he developed the Anki system.

[clarehooper.livejournal.com]

Does the word Anki mean something?

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

Yes. "Memorization".

[nojay.livejournal.com]

I was at an anime event in Edinburgh recently where Takahashi Ryosuke, a Japanese anime producer was being interviewed on stage. He spoke little or no English so the organisers had hired an interpreter, very obviously not Japanese (her blonde hair was a bit of a giveaway...) I was very impressed by her ability to translate the guest's speech "on the fly", especially the jokes and odd allusions he made about his time working in the early days of Japanese TV and OAV anime.

I've been using the Anki decks too, JPLT 4 and 3 (which are really 5 and 4 since the JPLT was revised a couple of years ago). They use the Monash EDICT as the basis for their kanji-English mappings but I've seen a bit of criticism from others about how uncommon in everyday usage some of the dictionary translations are -- "分" is one example where EDICT and the corresponding Anki card returns a plethora of results, almost all of which you're not going to run into in regular modern Japanese (a tenth of a shaku?). The Anki flashcards for the JPLT also don't do jukugo (multiple kanji) which, again is probably going to be the most common form of kanji someone is going to run into in real life.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

There are multiple Anki decks covering the JLPT. I'm using a vocabulary not a kanji deck. I agree that you want to learn vocabulary, not just the individual kanji. Yes, there's more cards to learn but I find it much easier to learn a kanji in context of a word than on its own. The deck I'm using is created from a list of vocab (there's various ones available that people have put together) for the tests, rather than an automatic derivation from a dictionary. Some of the individual kanji with lots of meanings, if you want to be fluent, you do have to learn most of them. One can always make a judgement with Anki that one knows enough of the meaning.

[clare so (from livejournal.com)]

Kudos to you having a real conversation with $IN-LAWS! I've seen numerous men with Asian (Chinese, Japanese or Korean etc) wives who, at best, acquired elementary level in the language. Having living in a colony, I've met kids who attended British schools and did not learn the local language at their age level.

Schools and Languages

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

We're more concerned about $DAUGHTER gaining English than Japanese. She's in daycare where she hears Japanese all day, so I make a significant effort to speak a lot to her in English. We're using the OPOL (One Parent, One Language) approach, though I keep having to remind Tomoko to speak Japanese to Hana (my Japanese is still limited enough that we mostly speak in English to each other). Once $DAUGHTER goes to school we may adopt MLAH (Minority Lanugage at Home) whereby we just speak English at home, though that might not be so good for my Japanese development - at that point I should be approaching fluency, I think). We've talked briefly about an international school, but we have years to look into it. The problem with a Japanese school is the English classes. Almost all Japanese schools now have English classes taught by a native speaker, though I think they're relatively limited in number. Given that we hope and expect $DAUGHTER to be bi-lingual we'd have to work out some other option for her as putting her in these classes would be a BIG mistake - she'd get bored and disruptive and it could easily cause resentment in the other pupils. Ont he other ha an international school with the instruction primarily in English would also teach her Japanese, but Japanese universities don't recognise their qualifications (mostly the International Baccalaureate) so entry to university could then be problematic if she wanted to stay in Japan. Assuming the university system looks anything like it does now in 20 years time.

[clare so (from livejournal.com)]

Whatever you decide OPOL VS MLAH, it's a big commitment for both you and $WIFE. Learning a minority language requires the child's motivation as well: Make it fun instead of being a torture. I've Chinese-Canadian acquaintances whose (grand)parents are MLAH. Some of them even keep up with popular culture and entertainment gossips - a good way to use the ML. Reading is quite a big hurdle because of the writing system. Still, putting the children in Chinese classes on Saturdays is not the magic bullet to fluency. I've even met a child whose parents are Chinese-French OPOL both minority language. (Note I live in English speaking part of Canada.) Wonder how it turned out. Just my two cents...

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

English is, for good or bad, rather easier to teach as a minority language in many places, though, because of its ubiquity as an international language and therefore the easy availability of materials and experiences. You're right about the key being to engage and maintain $DAUGHTER's interest, though. Online communications will be good for this as $MOTHER (mine, i.e. $DAUGHTER's $GRANDMOTHER) talks to us on video skype regularly. $DAUGHTER at nine months is responding to the voice and the face on the screen quite well (they met on our trip to the UK in September last year) and I'm hoping that $NIECE will also keep up the contact over Skype, though as she's a young teenager that may become spotty over the next few years as her focus turns more to her peer group than family (natural progression - she'll come back to a more balanced set of relationships later in life most probably). Even though I'm an HE educator, I'm still a trained qualified educator and since $MOTHER is a retired primary (obNA: elementary) school teacher I'm sure we'll be able to keep things interesting. SO long as $MOTHER's health lasts well enough I'm expecting her and $DAUGHTER to interact online quite a bit.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

I knew I'd levelled up in Japanese when, one day, after suffering from a significant loss of blood, I asked the hospital staff if they had such a thing as a sphygmomanometer handy. Granted, the Japanese word for that is a lot easier than the English one--but I'd never even needed one before that, and my brain managed to come up with the correct word for me.

Turns out my blood pressure was normal--which was bad, because its default state was high at the time.

[clarehooper.livejournal.com]

Furthermore -- you may be interested by the Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

It fairly often goes into analysis of Asian language, e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3736

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

Looks interesting. Thanks for the link.