Monthly Archives: July 2010

the end is the means

Posted by Lan'dorien on

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the August reading contest, which you can find out more about and join at ReadMOD.  (That’s an abbreviation, but I just like the sound of it.  I’m installing a readmod in my brain! anyway …)  I’m prepared but I have no illusions of winning, since a lot of the other participants are pretty advanced compared to me.  Nevertheless I’m going to give it a fair go.  I still have goals on smart.fm in progress, and still have kanji reviewing to do, but none of that will take very long in a day.  If you haven’t signed up yet do it now!  The twitter hashtag we’ll be using is #tadoku.

The benefits of extensive reading as a means of language learning have been well documented.  Whereas an SRS system repeats tidbits of information at scientifically optimized intervals, extensive reading provides what you might call a “random repetition system” – you’ll run into the same words and constructions over and over again, and eventually you’re certain to know them all.  Of course you can mine sentences for your SRS as you go, which I do intend to do a bit of, but that becomes secondary.

For someone like myself whose aim is full literacy primarily, and speaking is not so much a focus, it seems no great stretch of logic that learning to do what I want to do by, well, doing it, ought to work well.  It does in every other endeavor of life, why not here?  But even for those who wish to converse primarily and never mind the rest so much, extensive reading is still a great benefit.  Ryan Layman has documented nicely here and here what he terms the “four skills flow”.  In short, reading is the primary skill, because you can’t output what has never been input, and reading provides the broadest, most accessible, and most involving input there is.

If you’re interesting in digging into why extensive reading works, have a sniff round the Extensive Reading Pages.  And if you’re somewhat literate already but looking for material, there’s heaps of free texts at Aozora Bunko.  They have an iPhone app too if you’d find such a thing useful.

the last RTK post

Posted by Lan'dorien on

One more piece of advice on RTK (learned, of course, by doing the opposite myself, and paying the price), and then I’m done, I promise.  (Until I think of something else.)

When making your first pass through RTK, it is not at all a problem to assign varying meanings to a single primitive.  For example, for the “person” primitive that goes on the left side of a huge number of characters, I used “Chuck Norris” (because Mr. T was a foo to try to pitty Chuck Norris), but I also used the generic “person”.  Then there was the “increase” primitive for which I also used the actual kanji’s meaning of “formerly”, and so on.  Quite a few like that.  It is not an issue when you are going from keyword to kanji, because you think of the story, and the story has the primitive names in it, so you get the right primitive even if there are more than one name for a single primitive.

However, it becomes a little bit of a snag (not huge, but annoying) when going the other way.  When trying to use the mnemonic for recognition, you look at the kanji, see the primitives, and think, “ok here there is Chuck Norris and a valley … hmmm … can’t think of the story … fail card.  Oh! “vulgar”.  Right, the story for that was “the people in the valley are so vulgar”.”  See where the problem is? had I always used the same name for that primitive, the story would have come to mind immediately.

This is of course an intermediate problem, and once the kanji is fully internalized it won’t even register as being any kind of issue at all.  But there’s no sense in making the intermediate steps harder than you need to.

looks a little dusty, i should scribble something here

Posted by Lan'dorien on

Not to worry, I haven’t vanished quite yet, just haven’t had a great deal to blog about lately nor much time to write.  Right now I should be snoozing but I’ll divert a minute for a quick status update.

Lately I have been focusing mainly on going through the core2000 decks on smart.fm.  I haven’t finished any yet, because that doesn’t actually seem possible – how long do those things stay at 99% anyway?! – but I’m nearly done step 4 (out of 10) and started step 5.  200 words and sentences per deck.  I wanted to start my own sentence deck long ago already, but I figure I’ll finish this as quickly as I can and then get going on building a sentence deck and a great deal more extensive reading.  The sentences one gets whilst going through the core decks are not bad anyway and if one pays attention to them and tries to understand them fully (not hard so far) it’s pretty much as good.  I think.

Speaking of reading I’ve been sporadically reading the graded readers a bit and finished the first set and and working on the first book of the second set.  The first set was really easy and the second set is a nice step up.  Next month is the reading contest so I’ll be working much more on that, both readers and my stack of manga which is getting almost impressive when it’s all piled up at once – probably about thirty volumes by now.

Kanji is still ongoing of course and after importing my deck from the RTK website to Anki my daily reviews have on average gone down a little.  Usually between 60 and 80 now.  But I also made a deck to review for recognition, so that makes for another 60ish reviews a day – that’s quick though, can be done in ten or fifteen minutes usually.  The writing reviews usually take 15 or 20 minutes so on average so I’m done with kanji in half or three-quarter hour.  As far as readings, I did take a membership on readthekanji.com but haven’t really had time to use it yet since core2k takes up most of my study time in the evenings.  So I depend on learning readings in context for now.

Also I’m slowly progressing through the Tae Kim grammar deck, adding just five cards a day, so that is usually ten or fifteen minutes worth.  I guess I’m about 20% done with that.

As far as listening, passive and otherwise, I just started the lower intermediate level podcasts from japanesepod101 which are nice because they have a whole lot less English than the beginner levels.  They’re somewhat of a challenge though, so listening to them at work isn’t proving to be terribly helpful.  Not sure what I’ll do about that.

So that’s that for now – I’m really focused on progressing through the core decks as far as I possibly can in the next week and a half before the reading contest starts, because once that begins then reading will get top priority.  It’ll certainly be interesting to see what progress I can make that way.

two for the price of one

Posted by Lan'dorien on

A frequent pattern in Japanese is the closely related transitive and intransitive verb pair.  These will use the same kanji, and usually the same reading for the kanji, but slightly different okurigana.  It’s easy to confuse the one for the other if you study randomly, but by studying pairs together, you can learn two verbs in no more time than it takes to learn one.

Let’s look at a couple examples.  How about:

集まる／集める　（あつまる／あつめる）

Here, 集まる is the intransitive form and 集める is the transitive.  Both have the meaning of gathering or collecting.  So you might say, for example, ”虫集まる” – “The insects gather” – or ”彼は虫を集める” – “He collects insects”.  You can see the only difference is the next-to-last syllable, which moves from the あ row for intransitive to the え row for transitive.  Several of these pairs work the same way; another such is 決まる（きまる）- to be decided – and 決める（きめる）- to decide something.  But there are lots of different ways in which the pairs can vary and that is just one of the more common forms.

Koichi from Tofugu has put together a good basic list of such pairs on smart.fm, and that’s a great way to get started.  This interesting linguistic phenomenon can either really confuse you or make your learning more efficient, so you might as well use it to advantage!

redundancy or reinforcement

Posted by Lan'dorien on

I think I might be at the point where I have enough reference material.  What led to this revelation was reading about a book (Naoko Chino’s sentence pattern dictionary), getting all inspired to purchase it, and then realizing I already had it and it hadn’t been off the shelf in months, while I focused exclusively on kanji.  Le sigh.

That led to an idea though, which led to a question, which led to this post.  I am very new to the practice of SRS.  Mainly till now I’ve only used the SRS at smart.fm, which manages itself mostly, and the RTK site which isn’t really an SRS at all.  Now I have downloaded my RTK progress to Anki, and also made a reverse deck with Heisig keywords for kanji recognition.  Also I have a good start on Tae Kim’s grammar deck.  So I have a good start, but that’s it.

So when I was looking through Chino’s book a little, I realized firstly that it was very neatly laid out for grammar study, in a way that would work nicely with the way I think about things; and secondly, that the example sentences were a great deal more realistic than Tae Kim’s, which are designed to convey the grammar point with an absolute minimum of vocabulary and no frills whatsoever.

Immediately then, I had the bright idea to study through this book and put most of the sentences into an SRS deck.  It might form the nucleus of my eventual main sentence deck, but most likely would stand on its own.  The doubt I have though, is, would this really be terribly useful?  I’d be covering more or less the exact same ground as Tae Kim’s.  Different sentences, and a simple rating of comprehension instead of production.  But pretty much the same thing.  It wouldn’t be a problem, I don’t think.  It might even work better doing both than just one.  Or it might be a waste of time and I should commence mining from non-didactic sources.

What say ye the collected wisdom?

finding my feet

Posted by Lan'dorien on

After doing nothing but hoovering up new kanji for months, it felt a little strange and confusing once I didn’t need to anymore.

I tend to get a little lost without a fairly strict routine so it was important to get my new habits formed early.  Anyway I still have RTK kanji reviews tapering off, and they will be for quite a while, so there was some continuity there.  Also the usual anime and japanesepod101 hasn’t changed.  I’m not sure if I want to carry on with japanesepod101 past the “beginner” lessons.  I suspect repeated comprehensible input of natural Japanese, in podcasts and other audio, will prove more efficient.  So I need to set up iTunes to grab a bunch of podcasts, get some more fluffy sugary j-pop (heh), rip the audio from my graded reader CDs, and perhaps get some stories from that classics at bedtime site.

The first thing I started was the core2000 on smart.fm.  I’ve nearly finished step 1, 3/4 done step 2.  Those were mainly review.  Step 3 is more difficult and at the moment I’m only 30% into it.  Apparently step 4 is easier again.  It’s hard to say when I can expect to finish these ten steps, but I’m guessing by end of summer probably.  With a 2000 word vocabulary I should easily be able to read a lot of manga, simple magazines, light novels, and the like.  So from there I can mine my own sentences.  I’ll probably start before then, but for the time being the sentences in core2000 are satisfactory.  It’s quite a good feeling though, comparing how I can go through it now compared with before doing RTK.  Before the kanji were an obstacle, but now they are a help.

Also, I bought AnkiSRS for my iPhone and put the Tae Kim grammar deck on there.  This isn’t high priority but I spend probably ten or maybe fifteen minutes a day on that.

Today’s RTK reviews were 83 in number, and those will continue to go down.  Those are easily dispatched during break time at work.  Doesn’t even use up nearly all of it.  So I can do smart.fm during part of lunch hour.  Kanji recognition is still a bit of a problem though, so I want to put a reverse RTK deck in Anki and go through it that way.

I’ve started to read the graded readers a little, and need to increase the time doing that.  I breezed through the first reader without having to look up a thing, which was almost a little disappointing.  Also bought some simple manga (Lucky Star, Minami-ke, and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (which is maybe not all that simple)) but found it very difficult, because there’s quite a bit of slang, exclamations, words trailing off or cut short, etc., and it’s often hard to sort out which the actual words are.  Kanji are helpful in such cases.

Also I played with the Read the Kanji site.  I really like this and intend to buy a membership.  It’s cheap enough.

I keep intending to rewatch some anime with subtitles off, but I have so much new stuff I want to watch.  Just finished Hand Maid May yesterday, which was a great deal better than I expected (granted I wasn’t expecting much), and today started Kino no Tabi which is really different and quite interesting.

So there it is.  Status reports after RTK are going to be a little fuzzier, apart from smart.fm goal percentages.  That’s quite all right though.  How many people know how many English words they know?  I sure don’t.  It’s just a matter of continuing to get used to the language day by day.