a simple hack

Posted by Lan'dorien on

Some kanji are just sticky.  Or maybe the word is slippery.  At any rate, if you’re learning kanji you’ll probably agree that while most of them are easy enough, some, whether out of a stubborn unwillingness to fit any memorable story, or some slip of a shade of meaning in the English keyword, or whatever other reason, just refuse to be remembered.

I would compare it to that guy in Zetsubou Sensei who blends into the scenery, but I can’t recall his name.  Oh, right, Usui.

To find which ones fell into this class for me, I went to my full list on the RTK site, and sorted by total number of failures.  This was the key to getting all of them including the ones I couldn’t even remember forgetting.  I took all those that had been failed six or more times (fourteen cards, if you must know) and wrote them on small post-its and stuck them above my monitor in my office.  Just the kanji, no keyword or anything else.  I sit here for eight hours a day anyway, so if I have them in front of me I will get all the reviews I need to make them stick just by the occasional times my eyes happen to light on them, with no extra effort involved at any time.  So far I’ve only done this with one exceptionally recalcitrant kanji but it works like a charm.

Other applications could include selecting two that are frequently confused (like “chestnut” and “horse chestnut” – seriously, Heisig) and sticking them up side by side.

more simple math

Posted by Lan'dorien on

As I approach the end of the 2042 kanji contained in the first volume of Remembering the Kanji, I’m finding (unsurprisingly) that with more cards to deal with my failure rate on reviews is increasing.  At first, it was unusual to have more than a 10% failure rate, and most of the time it would be around 5%.  Now, I’m not surprised to see over 20%, and probably average 15% or so.

I was thinking of attempting to reduce this rate by adding only very few new cards per day for a while.  Usually if I only add a half dozen or ten cards, I easily remember them all the next day, and longer term retention on such cards also seems to be a little higher although I have no hard data to support that.  So the thinking went that I could remember the kanji better if I take a slower pace, and I do believe that I would.  Given a week or two of this, easy cards would move further down the boxes, harder cards would see more reviews and then in their turn become easier, and the daily number of reviews would go down while the failure rate would also go down.

The other option is to keep adding as many new cards as I can find time for every day.  This is usually around 30, sometimes 40.  That way I would be finished adding cards in about two weeks from now, but my failure rate would continue to climb.  I might even occasionally damage my delicate OCD psyche by adding new cards with restudy cards still existing (horrors!).

Deciding which route to take, though, is quite simple.  First the goal must be clarified, and then a little elementary mathematics must be applied.

The goal is simple enough; finish RTK1 and begin reading and SRSing sentences.

The math is just as simple.  100% sounds better than 80%, and to a perfectionist indeed it sounds much much better.  However, 100% of 10/day is 10; whereas 80% of 30 is 24.  Therefore tolerating errors allows over double the rate of progress as not tolerating them.

Full speed ahead it is then.

dividing by zero

Posted by Lan'dorien on

Yesterday I learned eight new kanji.

Now you’re thinking, that’s not terribly remarkable; in fact, not even really worth talking about, surely?

Perhaps so.  The thing is, though, I got home pretty late and didn’t really want to add any new cards at all.  But then I thought; okay, half a dozen at least, only takes ten minutes.  There was a bit of a divide in the current chapter after the first eight so I did those.

My optimum number of new cards seems to hover around the mid-twenties, depending on how many new primitives I have to deal with.  So eight is only 1/3 as good as twenty-four.  However: it’s twice as good as four, four times as good as two, and eight times as good as one; and most importantly, infinite number of times better than none.

The point is, even if you learn one kanji (or vocabulary word, or grammar point, or whatever it is you’re focusing on) a day, eventually you will finish*.  If you learn none, the project will die on the vine and all the time you’ve spent on it will be utterly wasted.  Do something, anything, even if it seems insignificant, because any progress is infinitely better than no progress.

*insofar as anything like this is ever “finished”

aesthetic division of space

Posted by Lan'dorien on

That is, in short, the whole art of composition; whether in a painting, a photograph – or a kanji.

My latest Photo Life magazine arrived in the mail a couple days ago, and in it was a profile of a quite remarkable photographer, one Stéphan Barbery.  He lives and works in Kyoto.  He has clarified to me what is at least one aspect of why I am so drawn to the kanji.

I’ll let him explain in his own words, quoted from the article:

Chinese ideograms, and more particularly the regular writing style called kaisho in Japanese, are the result of several thousands of years of creation by the most beautiful and profound sprits of humanity.  These geniuses worked on an object very similar to that of a photograph: a kanji moves within a frame and must make the most of balance and unbalance, symmetry, continuity and rupture, the contrast between full and empty, shadow and light, depth and form, movement and rest, micro and macro, harmony, elegance, and overall strength within the limits of this frame.  All of this is contained within a single symbol that is not simply visual, but also bears meaning, often indirect – profound in its indirectness.

Learning to write kanji is more than simply becoming aware of each of the elements of a single character.  It is to feel one’s point of view being transformed in the way that one perceives, evaluates, and appreciates the world.

Writing kanji involves movement: it’s about feeling the movement in your hand, in your body, like a dance that allows us to look more carefully.  The photographer’s body that wanders, curious, open to being amazed, ready to be surprised, struck by beauty is not that different from the hand that holds a paintbrush and is also looking for that momentary flash, that instant.

This is not to say that his photographs all look precisely like they could be a kanji character.  Some of them do; many don’t.  But I think he has hit upon the heart of the kanji’s aesthetic appeal – that near infinitely varied arrangement of lines and space, all constrained by the same regular square frame, all with their own beautiful internal tension and balance.

Tako-ki

You can see more of Mr. Barbery’s work here and purchase his book here (I did).

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