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.

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!