Japanese Day 1 and New Language Learning Methods

Konichiwa!

It’s been a long time since I’ve embarked on a language adventure, which explains the huge gap in posts. I stopped focusing on language learning a long time ago, as I felt that my Chinese was good enough to do what I needed. This is still the case, but my dream of becoming an omniglot is still looming in the distance. I had a brief stint into Korean about a year ago, but other things in my life simply kept me from moving forward there. I feel I’m ready to move on, so it’s time for..

Japanese! I’ve chosen to learn Japanese mostly because I’m really interested in East Asia and the big 3 languages here: Chinese, Japanese, Korean. My ultimate goal is to be able to speak these three fluently, and since I’ve already got Chinese down, it’s time to work on Japanese.

Spanish was an example that showed what not to do. Chinese was an experiment in what’s possible. Japanese is going to be a polishing of the language learning processes. What I did wrong or didn’t do at all during the Chinese process, I will be doing while learning Japanese; however there are going to be some major differences.

I will be learning Japanese from China. Originally I was planning on embarking on a 90 day language excursion to either Japan or Korea, but it never materialized for multiple reasons. Other than the financing of the trip, I simply don’t believe that my methods are polished enough to learn a language in the fastest possible fashion. I already know that I can learn a language in 2 years, but I think it’s possible to learn the same amount in a condensed time.

I have some big plans for the future when it comes to languages and language learning, but for now I need to do more experimenting and learning.

When starting a new project. It’s always best to set out goals, a plan and to understand what problems might come.

Japanese goals:

1) Fluency in 1 year while studying outside of Japan.
2) Ability to understand most Anime

If any of you are familiar with Parkinson’s law, you would know that any project will expand to fill the time allotted. It’s very important not to set a time goal too softly or else you will fall prey to this law.

When learning a language it’s important to have vocabulary goals, which should be based off of interest or necessity, don’t just take a stab and say “I’m going to learn Business Chinese”; you need to be much more specific than that, and need to have real reasons behind your decision. I like Anime (and I’m guessing many of you out there do too), so I’m choosing Anime as my goal. If I were learning Chinese over again, I would probably just choose to be able to play my favorite video games in Chinese (which I ended up doing anyway).

I’ll probably add other specific vocabulary goals along the way, but for now this should suffice. I’m not sure exactly what my definition of fluency is going to be yet. I will set that definition at a later date.

Methodology Goals:

1) Advanced memorization techniques – made simple
2) Improved methods of creating an abroad experience at home
3) Time efficiency – so those that work can still achieve goals
4) Keys to mastering pronunciation
5) Mastering motivation
6) Anything else I can find

For methodology I plan on doing a lot of research. I have already been hitting the linguistics books. The biggest problem I have noticed in my research is that most methods are complicated and it’s not clear how to put them into daily use. Many methods require specially trained professionals – obviously I won’t have those resources available. I have already found a few that are awesome though, including Spaced Repetition and Sentence Mining.

End Goal:

1) A complete guide on how to learn a language

When I started writing the how to learn a language series, which sadly only has two parts to it at the moment, the plan was for it to be a comprehensive guide for those who wanted to attain fluency in the quickest manner. There are far too many things missing, and I plan on filling in the blanks as well as polishing up on the series. I may start a whole new series – we’ll see how it goes.

The Plan:

As mentioned before in this post, the materials that you study are extremely important. You won’t see me simply posting my workbook solutions from some textbook on here.

I’m going to be doing a lot of things different this time around. Here are some of the additions:

1) A Spaced Repetition System: I will talk more about this in another post, but it’s basically a memorization technique that helps you insert words into your long term memory, instead of focusing on short term memory as traditional schools do. For now I will be using the program Anki. This is probably the most exciting part of my new plan.

2) Blogging in Japanese: As I won’t have as many opportunities to use the language as if I were in Japan, I need to find other outlets for expressing myself in the target language. Blogging is the most obvious choice in my opinion. Actually I would do this even if I were in Japan, as writing things out in a blog format will do wonders for your expressive abilities.

3) Listening just to listen: I will be watching Japanese TV shows and Japanese Anime without subtitles in order to gain an understanding of the flow of the language as soon as possible. My ear is definitely not trained to listen to Japanese, and it needs to get there soon. Steve Kaufmann talks a lot about this in his blog.

4) Music: This kinda goes into the “listening just to listen” category, but there are other benefits to this. Music keeps things interesting and exciting. If I can find a musician or a group of songs that I really enjoy in the target language it will make things a lot easier and also helps me learn new vocabulary.   Staying motivated is not trivial by any means.

5) Sentence Mining: I’ve been learning a lot about different techniques used by other people in language learning, and this along with SRS (Spaced Reptition System) seem to go hand in hand to improve how well your mind handles input.  Basically, sentence mining is where you find sentences that use what your trying to learn (grammar point, vocabulary word, etc), which allows you to learn everything in context and nothing out of context, so you never just learn “Book”, but instead learn “Sarah, did you read that book that I gave you?” and “How many pages are in that book?” You still learn the meaning of book, but more connections are made in the brain and you learn how book connects to the rest of the language matrix. This seems extremely powerful, and possibly when adapted to the top 1000 words vocabulary list can give you an extremely efficient method of absorbing a new language.

So here is what I will be doing in a nutshell:

Deconstruct the Language: I’ve talked about this before here. Goal: 1 week to deconstruct, then let Anki handle the rest.

1000 Words: I will be mining 5 sentences for each word and uploading it to my Anki

Blog: I want to get used to producing the language as soon as possible.

Japaneseblog101 + other audio and video: Need to train the ear ASAP

Pronunciation Drills and recordings: Japanese pronunciation is actually quite easy, although I want to sound native, so I’m going to be doing some drills including a lot of recordings to increase speed and accuracy. Hopefully I can find someone to review them and give me feedback quickly.

It’s a little early for me to start doing “interesting” things in Japanese (such as video games or Anime), but luckily in the early stages motivation is always high so I don’t have to worry about running out of steam. For now my focus is on perfecting the basics.  I’ve got my work cut out for me!

Also for some additional readings for those who are hungry for more, check out:

1) A well written article and interview with the man who “invented” Spaced Repetition

2) A guy who likes to break things down like I do. This is where I found out about sentence mining. He did a French in 30 days trial, which had mixed results, but is definitely worth a look.

Related posts:

1. Frustrating phases in language learning – How to focus your efforts
2. When to stop learning a language (or start again)
3. How to learn a language in under 2 years Part #1: Get out of school
4. How to learn a language part #2: Set up for success 1-3

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