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!

status: what I’m doing

Posted by Lan'dorien on

This is a bit simpler than it would have been a couple months ago.

Right now, my main focus is finishing RTK.  I want to get all the kanji in my head before going any further.  This is because kanji is pretty much required for vocabulary acquisition, unless you want to confuse yourself badly.  (Full post on that coming up.)  So before I do much of anything else, this must be finished.

My method for this is to use the RTK site.  I add usually 20-30 cards a day.  I go through them and assign stories and practise them on Kanji LS Touch in practise mode.  Then I test myself on the same app – I leave the cards on the RTK site for later.  The next morning I go through the new cards on RTK site, writing them with pen and paper as I do.  Expired cards are reviewed in the same way, usually by end of lunch break.  So when I get home in the evening, I have no due cards and can add new ones as time permits.  This workflow gives me an error rate of usually no more than 5%, and a rapid increase in my kanji count with no sense of pressure.

For vocabulary, while this is on the back burner set to low, it isn’t off the oven entirely.  I use smart.fm with the Core 2000 goals.  Most of these words are already familiar, but there’s some new ones, and anyway review is good.  I don’t use Japanese Flip on my phone much anymore because it isn’t as efficient (no example sentences, no audio).  But if I’m away from a computer with a few minutes here or there it still gets some use.  The smart.fm iPhone app is pretty bad so I tend not to use it.  I prefer to use my netbook for late night reviewing.

Grammar is mainly gotten from japanesepod101 lessons at the moment.  This is not really focused on that much since I just listen to the podcasts during time that would otherwise be wasted.  I could get a lot more out of it by repeating lessons until they were mastered and using the pdf files.

Also, passive input and “exposure” time is still there, mainly in the form of anime.  This is usually an hour or so a day, on average.  It isn’t terribly efficient in terms of education but that’s hardly the point.  (The Endless Eight was a bit of an exception – repetition is the key to learning!)  I do find though, that when I hear a word that I recently learned in context, and recognize it for the first time, it sticks a LOT better from that point on.  This gives me a great hope for sentence-based SRS, both written and audio.  That is what I will mainly be doing once RTK is finished.

language and photography

Posted by Lan'dorien on

Language and photography have a certain structural similarity.  Both are based on logical and scientific laws and principles; but neither is a science.

In photography, you have your laws of focus and exposure, the laws governing how your sensor or film responds to light, the optical laws governing what angle your lens sees and how it draws the image.  In language, you have laws and principles as well; parts of speech, conjugations and inflections, and all the rest of the grammar.

But just as a master photographer goes into the field and creates his art without once thinking about exposure, hyperfocal distance, and so on, and simply doing this automatically; and just as he might even have trouble explaining how it all works; a person fluent in a language doesn’t think about where to put the particle or how to inflect the verb.  In fact the better they are at the language, often enough the worse they are at explaining it, which is why a native speaker isn’t always the best teacher.

So in both cases, when one is a beginner it is important to master the logical principles; but as one matures, it is a serious error to continue to treat the study as a science instead of an art.

fitness and language

Posted by Lan'dorien on

I’m a bit out of shape right now. Well – ok – I’m rather a lot out of shape. Last year I was doing reasonably well with my running, but now I’m back to plodding.

So how did this sad situation come about? Simple – I took a bit of a break.

There is nothing as evil in the occasionally Sisyphean pursuit of physical fitness as the “bit of a break”. The problem is it starts out as just a short while but as one continues to think “wow I just don’t have time today either” that hiatus just gets longer and longer and the next thing you know it’s two weeks later and you’re fat and slow. A couple of those episodes over the course of a winter (usually precipitated by a holiday or some such) and a year’s worth of work can be undone.

This is pretty similar to the situation one can get into with one’s L2. Sometimes things get pretty crazy in life, no denying that, can’t be helped. That’s just how things go sometimes. But when a language is still on its wobbly infant legs, to leave it alone for any length of time will mean the loss of far more time than you will ever save. To go into a sort of maintenance mode is not a problem for a reasonable time, but at all costs resist that temptation for the “bit of a break”.