Category Archives: Methods and techniques

i won readmod

Posted by Lan'dorien on

But, in fairness, so did everybody that participated.  I heard quite a few comments to the effect of “I never imagined I could actually read this much real Japanese, and in only one month” – and I’ll add my signature to that line as well.  At the beginning of the month I looked at my pace and concluded that, perhaps, with a strong effort, 200 pages might be possible; and in fact I did end up with 204 pages, and it wasn’t even that hard.  Also, I must here register my astonishment at the actual winner of the contest, BlackDragonHunt, and the runner-up, Seizar86, who both somehow managed to read over 2000 pages.  I don’t know that I’ve ever read that much in one month in English (not that I kept track), and I considered myself a thoroughbred bookworm.

Now, of course, the question is, was extensive reading more effective than vocabulary study and sentence SRSing?

And the answer is: I still don’t know.  More precisely, I don’t know if it was, at this point in time.   Later on I believe it would be (although I don’t think one would ever want to abandon SRS entirely, because rarer vocabulary and usages wouldn’t be reinforced adequately simply through extensive reading), and that is for one very simple reason (that Kanjiwarrior already brought up in his post about this); namely, that reading is an enjoyable pastime that one can cheerfully do all day long, but SRSing is work, and one can only do so and so much work.  So while, true, SRS is probably more efficient (not that it can be considered fully in isolation, because you have to get sentences from somewhere), several hours of reading is going to beat half an hour of SRS every single time.

That it works, and very effectively, is however not in question at all.  I noted that in the month of reading, while my vocabulary didn’t go up much, my comprehension level certainly did.  Also, my own early experience in English is a good indication.  I was reading Dickens at age 6 or 7.  And no, absolutely I did not fully understand what was going on.  But I understood enough to enjoy it, so I kept reading, and reading, and reading.  I was blessed to grow up with a large library and by the time I was ten or so I’d read nearly everything in it.  Being an only child, and growing up in the country, it was a pretty quiet time; so I think I can be fairly confident in saying that my current English ability (such as it is) is mainly due to this same extensive reading.  Even a fairly brief time can be highly beneficial, as is recorded in two case studies on antimoon; the one student recorded remarkable progress in the span of a single summer, and the other over only two years.

So why do I still have doubts about whether extensive reading is the best way to learn right now, and in Japanese?

Firstly, I found that as long as I stayed within the confines of the lower level graded readers, I could easily understand what was being said; but as soon as the grammar got a little more complex, in the advanced readers and certainly in the various non-didactic Japanese sources I used, I got lost very quickly.  Therefore, I think I would benefit from a little more study of grammar construction before charging forward.  And yes, I know, no one explains grammar to a Japanese baby; but the reason for that is that they don’t know any language at all!  As soon as you have a good grasp of one language, you have both an understanding of how a language works, and a framework to discuss it.  So while a child must learn strictly by example, because no other way is possible, an adult can quickly understand grammar with a simple explanation and a few examples, after which recognizing the constructions in the wild is far easier.  Naturally there is no point overdoing grammar study; this isn’t math or chemistry.

Secondly, I found that I was still far too dependent on furigana.  I want to learn kanji readings as quickly as possible now (which will probably mean RTK2, I think), and that will make a tremendous difference in reading ease.  At the moment, without furigana, sounding out new words is impossible, and looking them up is impractical – it takes too long and interrupts the flow of reading.

Worth mentioning is the importance of rereading.  Those Dickens novels I mentioned before – I don’t know how many times I read Great Expectations over the course of my education, but it was quite a few.  Each time I understood more, and each time I remembered more.  Rereading is what brings the SRS effect into extensive reading, and adds greatly to its effectiveness.  However, for the contest, since I was attempting to maximise my pagecount, I did no rereading at all.  I would suggest that a partial score be implemented for rereading in the next holding of the reading contest; perhaps count 0.5x pages for the first rereading and 0.25x thereafter, or some system like that.

So what now?  Certainly I’ll keep reading, but I think it’ll be a few months still before I can make it my main focus again, this time for good.  For now, I’ll finish core2k, build my sentence deck, and start working through RTK2.

どうもありがとうございました to LordSilent for hosting this contest.  It was a great experience.

smart.fm: taking a new tack

Posted by Lan'dorien on

I’ve been using smart.fm for a while now, mostly working my way through the core 2000 series of vocabulary goals.  As good as smart.fm is, it has some failings which have led me to start using it a little differently.

There are two main problems.  The first is that there is no way to undo an answer.  Since you don’t grade yourself, the first answer you give is the only answer you’ll have a chance to give.  Therefore, if you make a typo whilst entering the text for the last phase of questions, smart.fm will assume you actually did not know the word, and set back your progress a week or more from where it should be.  The next problem compounds this, as well as being a serious nuisance on its own.  Normally, to “master” a word, if you get the answers right every time the question will come up four times.  If you have some trouble with the word, of course you’ll need to answer it more often.  The problem is with the timing.  It seems smart.fm’s SRS system does not properly take into account the need for more frequent reviews of problem items.  As the goal progresses toward the end, naturally the reviews come further and further apart; but problem items also come further and further apart.  That is why a goal can sit at “99%” for ages.  There are items you haven’t mastered, but instead of asking you at the appropriate intervals it just lets them sit there at timings commensurate with those for items you already know.

Then, once the goal is at last complete and you’re in the long-term review mode, the frequency the cards come up is set in stone.  A true SRS will give you grading options so that items that are still a little difficult can be marked “hard” or whatever scale the system uses, and easy items can be marked “easy” or “5” or whatever, to optimize the efficiency of reviewing.  But with smart.fm the question is answered either correctly or not, and therefore the spacing cannot accommodate your real requirements.  (In fact, if you do answer a “mastered” item incorrectly, it remains at “mastered” status, so I don’t even know if it takes your answers into account at all once in long-term mode.)

The core 2000 goals have their own unique drawbacks once you want to really master (not “master”) the words; namely, they’re too easy!  With every review, you get the audio and a related image – and sometimes the meaning of the word is actually in the image.  This is brilliant for initial acquisition, but it becomes a limit to the depth of your memory.

Hence my new and slightly different approach to this.  I believe this will take best advantage of the real strong point of smart.fm, namely, initial vocabulary acquisition.  That, it is really brilliant at.  So now, once the goal is at 98% or 99%, instead of waiting for the incomplete words to leisurely make their way to the front, and then continuing with the very inadequate long-term reviewing, I have made a deck in Anki (just modified the shared core 2000 deck, actually), that I will be using for the final phase.  I’ll be reviewing from kana to kanji, in order to best memorize the kanji readings.  This will of course require me to write the sentence for each review.  As I complete each goal on smart.fm, I’ll stop reviewing it there, unsuspend the cards in my Anki deck, and carry on from there.  The one thing I still need to do for this deck is to optimize the initial timing; once I’ve passed a card for the first time, I don’t want to be seeing it again nearly as soon as the default time, because I already mostly know it from my smart.fm reviewing.

edit: a couple points that people reminded me of.  You can actually turn off the audio and images if you want – I’d forgotten that because I’d never actually done it 🙂 Also, I should mention that this is all based on using the iKnow! app; I have done very little with Drill Beta.  However, as far as I know, the background timing control is the same between them.  Please correct me if I’m wrong on that.

readmod mid-way update

Posted by Lan'dorien on

August is half over and therefore so is the ReadMOD.  Herewith a brief report:

In short, I’m at 92 pages, almost all of which have come from my graded readers.  I’ve nearly finished the level 3 set, with one book remaining.  That will provide another 10 or 12 pages.  However, I don’t think I’ll continue to the level 4 set just yet, since the later books of level 3 are really, really stretching my grammar comprehension – in several cases stretching it right past the breaking point.  And I really don’t like not understanding more than 10% at the very most.

So in that case I will have to broaden my sources.  I do have a big stack of manga, so that will get considerable attention.  Unfortunately only two series have furigana though and my kanji reading is still very weak.  よつばと is currently meandering through the postal service towards me – 急げ!  Also, I’m planning to spend a good amount of time on jpopasia reading lyrics.  I like this idea a lot because songs are repetitive, and you’re hearing the text sung as you go along, so it should be pretty effective for learning kanji readings.  Also, lyrics are usually grammatically pretty simple.

The question then is – is this more effective than ordered study?  And the answer is – 1. I don’t really know 2. it depends 3. probably 4. let’s continue another two weeks and answer it then 😉

四字熟語 – four-character compounds

Posted by Lan'dorien on

Japanese has a great many expressions made up of four kanji.  These are called 四字熟語 (よじじゅくご – yojijukugo).  That neatly self-referential term can be defined roughly as “four-character mature expression”.  Usually their meanings can be deduced from the kanji, but they are better considered idioms than words.  Many are sourced from Chinese and keep their original meaning, while others are native in origin.

Idioms add spice and colour to any language, and I think the addition of the kanji’s layers of meaning make this especially true of the 四字熟語.

Moreover, I believe that learning these can have the double purpose of learning kanji readings easily.  With every expression you get four readings, and they have a sort of built-in context, which makes learning them easy in the same way that learning phrases can be easier than learning individual words.

I have now taken the 401 most common 四字熟語 and made a shared deck for you anki users.  Search for “yojijukugo – 401 most common”.  There are three other 四字熟語 decks as well, but obviously mine is the best 😉  Big thanks to Kanji Haitani for providing the source material, and to BlackDragonHunt for parsing it into a tab-delimited file and saving me hours of work.

Eventually I want to upgrade this deck with example sentences, but this will do for now.

Edit: here are the kanji statistics for this deck.

The 401 cards in this deck contain:

  • 718 total unique kanji.
  • Old Jouyou: 643 of 1945 (33.1%).
  • New Jouyou: 15 of 191 (7.9%).
  • Jinmeiyou (reg): 21 of 645 (3.3%).
  • Jinmeiyou (var): 0 of 145 (0.0%).
  • 39 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

  • Grade 1: 66  of 80  (82.5%).
  • Grade 2: 100 of 160 (62.5%).
  • Grade 3: 92  of 200 (46.0%).
  • Grade 4: 90  of 200 (45.0%).
  • Grade 5: 68  of 185 (36.8%).
  • Grade 6: 57  of 181 (31.5%).
  • JuniorHS: 170 of 939 (18.1%).

JLPT Levels:

  • JLPT 4: 82 of 103 (79.6%).
  • JLPT 3: 107 of 181 (59.1%).
  • JLPT 2: 276 of 739 (37.3%).
  • JLPT 1: 178 of 922 (19.3%).
  • 75 non-JLPT kanji.

==================

Update 2011-12-10:

A quick follow up on this is probably in order, since people still view this post from time to time it seems. It must be said that the original deck was, for me, an abject failure. Learning more than one reading in a card is a very very bad idea. However; now, much later, when I’ve gotten a great many readings under my belt already, I’ve come back to the 四字熟語 – not this deck, but the deck at readthekanji.com – and now, it’s really coming together. Usually when a new card comes up, I’ll know all the readings maybe a third of the time, three of them another third or so, occasionally two, and almost never one or none. So now my brain can find a home for that new reading, the 四字熟語 with its full reading and meaning, and usually only one reading is unknown or weak. Now that built-in context can really set to work.

So if you’ve come to this page looking for a shortcut for kanji readings, apologies but this isn’t it. There really isn’t one; but, once you’re at more of an intermediate level, with perhaps a solid knowledge of readings for a thousand characters, not all of them per character but the common ones, and some exposure with a bit of recollection for a few hundred more perhaps, at that point studying these 四字熟語 for both their own value as idiomatic expressions and for kanji readings will prove to be of great benefit.

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.