So, I've been thinking about how to get around to starting language learning posts here with you all. It's been awesome seeing a general interest in getting back up with Japanese, but it is tricky when we are all at different levels of formal/informal education and exposure, have different learning styles, and have no native speaker to reference.
This post is going to be two things: a general braindump, because on weekdays my capacity for critical thinking gets expended in the office trying not to murder people whom I want to send to
http://www.lmgtfy.com, and also a general signup to commit to some goals.
Braindump
If years of academic Japanese have taught me anything, it is that critical mass is the most important part of acquisition. This guy over at
All Japanese All The Time may sound quacky and weird, but the core of his ideas are right, IMHO: there is a time and place for rote repetition, and often picking up a new language is it.
The trick – I think – is that certain types of rote work better than other types of rote depending on who you are. I was very surprised, when I briefly stayed for more than just a holiday in Japan, to find that rote memorisation of vocabulary (literally going alphabetically)... worked. But that was because I was immediately exposed to usage, and there was a constant feedback active/passive loop.
I'm going to try to provide that exposure, but at the same time rote has got to work for the individual since – short of switching all your internet browsing over to JP – it's hard to get effective reinforcement. Picking a
non-English/first-language aid/crutch to make rote effective might be the key here: visual people might go for picture flashcards, audio people might try to memorise a song, textual people a Japanese-to-Japanese definition or reading in general.
That's my meta on "picking stuff up" in general. But there are whole categories of stuff to "pick up" – reading comprehension, listening comprehension, writing fluency, speaking fluency. I'm going to focus almost entirely on reading and listening, with a side-step into writing
to reinforce the two and
copying spoken Japanese by natives to do the same. I'm nowhere near native, and will not pretend to be: I'm not going to teach or co-learn aspects that I'm not native in. It's fairly important to emphasis the "do not co-learn badness" part here: reinforcing bad and/or plain wrong ideas can be fundamentally terrible for you. Even then, it leaves a lot of stuff to cover, and a lot of ways which it can crossover into more intense practice in the writing/speaking domain.
Goals
So - goals! NYRs! Whatever you want to call what you want to achieve! I'm thinking we do this on a
week-by-week basis, because long-term goals are hard to hit: it's easy to overpromise and even easier to underdeliver. Weekly checkins with others = peer pressure = good pressure. Even if a goal is dropped, rolling it over to the next week is easy. Then there can be
big picture goals: things you want to achieve that you might not get 100% of the way through but that will guide weekly aims. These can go up to the end of the year.
Here are mine for the upcoming week:
- Write a post a week with original material catered directly to people's questions or difficulties
- Work through, by rote, 10 常用漢字 per week including all phrase-words
- Translate at least half of a rakugo story and publish it here
And my bigger goals:
- Write a website or flashcard tool or GDocs thing so that people can have printable, submittable worksheets/exercises
- Get through my kanji book by doing the 10/week minimum by the end of the year
- Watch at least 12 episodes of something in Japanese with only Japanese subtitles by the end of the year
- Switch over to only using Japanese-to-Japanese dictionary lookups by March
If you're interested in tagging along – whether you're seeing this post now, or at any time at all while I'm still updating my journal with the tag "Japanese" – leave a comment with yours. Depending on what people jot down, I'll plan for the next post!
Prep
Until the next post, here are some things you can do to get yourself prepared and/or excited.
Physical Study & Practice MaterialsDon't even bother typing when you do any exercises – go straight to pen and paper, and then type in response to posts here. Muscle memory is your friend, and it's really nice to
write things physically!
Get a nice
writing implement while you're at it. Ballpoint and 0.5mm pencil will smudge the least; gel will be smudgier; nibs will be painful. Muji has great pens
and Japanese writing supplies if you're lucky enough to live near one. You're going to be writing a lot: enjoy the experience! (I hated coming to America where most writing paper felt like sandpaper. It makes a difference when you're doing repetitive exercises, let's just say that.)
Then get
good writing paper.
Cheap: get a notebook, preferably one without any lines, or at least faint ones, or one that's gridded. You want to not feel like you're cramping your kana and kanji. I'm a big fan of nice paper, so I'd be happy to send people notebooks!
Slightly more expensive: find and print grid paper online. Henceforth, we shall call it by its given name: 原稿用紙 genkouyoushi.
One PDF source here.
Prettier and better ones with kanji grids. Print a whole bunch for your weekly goals!
Expensive: Japanese stationary stores (and some Asian marts) in the US will have 原稿用紙 for sale in tear-off gum pads or in practice notebooks.
Japanese IMEsI'll write a separate post on getting set up on this because this one is already the length of the moon, but you should get your computer set up to switch cleanly between English and Japanese IME inputs. Google has an IME that introduces crowdsourcing to typing: this is awesome, because suggestions that pop up are going to be the most-used ones. I default keyboard switching on all my systems to something like CMD-SPACE or WINDOWS-SPACE.
Dictionary/Grammar/Practice BooksIf you're just starting out, resist the urge to buy anything just yet. I have tens of reference books I've never cracked open beyond an initial gleeful reference.
Books that
are really useful in my experience: one good physical introduction-level book if you're just starting out. This can be Genki, Minna no Nihongo, or any equivalent. Make it a goal to go through each chapter. Write on every margin. Use the hell out of it: make it worth your money.
Other useful books are JLPT practice books. Stores like Kinokuniya will often have entire sections dedicated to them. They sometimes come in trilingual or quadrulingual mode, English/Korean/Mandarin/Japanese being the most common. If you have one of the other two (Korean/Mandarin), they provide a interesting triangulation onto certain grammatical or vocabulary contexts, though the
quality isn't necessarily always 100%.
I'll grab some PDF'd materials that I'll put up into f-locked posts – those will get you through just about anything else.
For kanji, don't pick up a dictionary unless you plan on using it. I've got some recommendations if you do want one, but in the meantime sites like
Jisho.org will get you through just about anything. On the iPhone side of things, imiwa? is an invaluable app.
Audio/VisualThis will be expanded further along, but now is a good time to figure out if you like listening to songs, or anime, or Netflix original series. Shows like 深夜食堂 (shinya shokudou/Midnight Diner) on Netflix have both English and Japanese subtitles in addition to being good introductions to aspects of Japanese culture and types of speech – I highly recommend watching them in English now, and then gradually trying to pick up things from the Japanese subtitles later.
My Old PostsI did a
short-lived and more disorganised equivalent of this last year: if you're starting from the kana or basic grammar level, it might be good to go back through those posts.
If you're interested in More Estorericer Stuff, I once wrote a post on classical Japanese and the opening lines of
the Tale of Heike. It's written sort of terribly, but if it interests people I would love to do more of that – gotta keep in practice.
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