Category Archives: Methods and techniques

endpoints

Posted by Lan'dorien on

Alongside Japanese study (and a few other things), my passion is the classical guitar.

Well, maybe I should say it used to be.  The thing is, I haven’t practised at all in about a year now.

I was thinking of how things could get to this sad state in my guitar study while Japanese study has been clipping along merrily for half a year or so with no signs of burning out or slowing down.  (Granted that I was playing guitar for near ten years before I started Japanese.)

I concluded* that it probably has to do with my Japanese study having a defined end goal, whereas guitar study does not.  My goal in Japanese is very clear and not too distant; I wish to be able to read a reasonably advanced text, like a book of history or gardening or architecture or the more literate variety of novel, with no more effort and no slower than I currently read such a text in English.**  I believe I should be able to accomplish this in about two years.  Once this point has been reached, no more study will be required; only maintenance, which will take care of itself with ongoing reading for pleasure or education.

In music study there is no such endpoint.  Much of this has to do with the requirements of performance.  No matter how flawless the performance, there is always room for a fast passage to be smoother, a lyrical passage to be more expressive, or a clearer conception of the composition as a whole.  Needless to say, stopping to look something up is unthinkable.  And then there’s the minor point that one’s repertoire is always one piece too small.  Always.  One’s development also follows a sort of logarithmic scale, where at first great gains are seen quickly, but later on it can take a year to notice significant improvement.  Also, unlike a language mastered to the point of fluency, musical skill suffers notably from even a few days without practise.

So because one road has a signpost off in the distance that I can see, and that is getting noticeably closer by the day, and the other simply goes on and on and on, I got discouraged with the one and focused on the other.

Naturally this has me thinking of how I can apply the lessons learned in language study to music study, but that’s a topic for another post.  I think the main thing to do is to set up such signposts at a visible distance from my current guitar skill, and work towards them.  Then set another.

What you can see, you can reach.

*a conclusion is where you get tired of thinking

**in accordance with the order of the four skills, I am more or less trusting my listening, writing, and speaking to take care of themselves as long as I focus on this reading goal

the visual language

Posted by Lan'dorien on

Most would agree that the most difficult thing about Japanese is the kanji.  And sure there’s over 2000 of them – over 3000 if you want to master all the kanji used mainly in personal names and other uncommon uses.  But for general literacy, just over 2000, and it doesn’t really help a lot to know most of them; you really need to know all of them.

So the temptation is to think, “Well, kanji is pretty advanced; I’ll learn what I can in spoken communication, and use kana for reading (or – shudder – romaji).”

Do not do this.  Do not even think this.

In fact, for someone just setting out to learn Japanese, the kanji should be the very first thing to master, perhaps even before you learn your first vocabulary word*.

The reason for this is that kanji make reading a lot easier.  Easier? really? yes.  In fact, a sentence written entirely in kana can be nearly incomprehensible.  Where does one word end and another begin?  Well, if you have kanji, it’s immediately obvious.  But more than that; what does this particular word mean, when there’s a dozen homonyms for this string of three kana?

If you think i’m exaggerating, consider the case of the word(s) こうか.  Take a wild guess how many different words (not shades of meaning) are represented by this brief string of characters.  Five? Ten? surely not more than a dozen, no?  Wrong – there’s twenty-three**.  Twenty-three!  Now granted, the intonation will be different between many of them (but you can’t tell that when reading); and granted, the context will be a massive help; and granted, this is an extreme example.  But what if you know the kanji?  Then this case becomes trivially simple, because each of these words is written with different characters.

Learning vocabulary is far simpler when you are already familiar with the kanji.  Since you have the meaning attached to the visual code of the character to hang your memory on, sometimes you only need a very few reviews to remember a word for life.  Often enough you can make a very good guess at the meaning of the word the first time you see it.  Without them though, you’re swimming in homonyms and characters that make no more sense than hieroglyphics.

I read somewhere that the Japanese (and, I would presume, the Chinese) use an entirely different part of the brain for language than other language groups that use alphabets or syllabaries.  I could easily believe this, because relating those visual symbols directly to meaning without the intermediate phonetic step feels very different than scanning a string of letters that, other than the order, all look the same.

(Current status: at present I’m at 950 cards on the RTK site, so almost halfway through the first step, which I expect to finish sometime in June.)

* you will note that I am, unsurprisingly, a hypocrite.  In my defense, I came to this conclusion rather later than I would have liked to, after a considerable degree of frustration at mixing up words, not remembering words I ought easily to have recalled, and not being able to read words I “knew”.  As soon as I realized what was going on (yeah, I’m a little slow) I started to devote nearly all my dedicated study time to kanji.

** taken from results listed in Kotoba!, the dictionary I mainly use.  Highly recommended, by the way.

story fail/story success

Posted by Lan'dorien on

When using Heisig’s method, the stories one assigns to the kanji can either work so well that one instantly remembers the character for life, or work so poorly that trying to remember the story is harder than remembering the character by rote.

Here’s an example of the second class, for the character 慣:

The previous generations had the state of mind that piercings were outlandish, but now the general public has become accustomed to this practice.

The problems with this story are twofold.  Firstly, I tend to remember the story more or less word-for-word; the words themselves are as good or better a mnemonic as the associated image.  Therefore, it is important that the keyword be the first word in the story.  That way, you read the keyword and the mind immediately fills in the rest in order.  If the keyword follows the sub-keywords, you have to remember it as a whole.  That can work, if a strong visual image is associated.  But that’s the second problem with this story; I find it difficult to make a strong visual image for it.

Unfortunately for this character I have yet to think of anything much better.

Here’s one for 泌 that worked better:

Ooze monsters are invariably found around water.  They need the moisture to maintain their shape.

The keyword is the very first word in this story.  That’s a strong point in its favour.  Also, from playing MMOs that have plenty of these ooze monsters (and they are in fact usually placed near water), it’s very easy for me to get a picture in my mind of a bunch of oozes oozing around a swamp.  The second sentence conjures an image of a didactic professor explaining the oozes in a class of some sort, which adds that bit of amusement that adds so much to memorability.

Sometimes the order of elements can be troublesome, but in this case it’s easy enough to remember that the water primitive in this form is always found on the left.

For reference here’s one such ooze:

Fairly memorable image, especially if you’ve seen and defeated hundreds of them!