I think back on the days I spent studying Japanese. My copy of Nelson’s open on my desk, a notebook beside it, row after row of handwritten kanji. An article from the satellite edition of the Asahi Shimbun that Professor Gessel photocopied for us and a Kenkyusha dictionary of some sort to dig up new vocabulary.*
In the year 2010, I go look at a website like Lan’dorien’s Mysterious Journey, and it’s like I’m looking at an entirely new foreign language. Stuff I don’t know about (or know about, but have never used) is bolded below:
Next, I need to add the special bonus track jouyou kanji that were just approved. That, however, will be a bit lower priority. (I’ll also be using a simple SRS with the “lazy kanji” method for those. RTK, I feel, has outlived its usefulness after 2000 characters. More on that later though.) First order of business is to go through the core2000 on smart.fm as quickly as possible, and to go through Tae Kim’s grammar deck. Concurrently, I’ll be tackling the graded readers. I’m going to rip the audio CDs and have them playing as part of my mix at work. Which will also consist of normal Japanese podcasts, and also japanesepod101.com podcasts – I think. Those might be superfluous in fairly short order.
There seems to be a pretty vibrant community of people creating these tools and using them to study the language. I don’t think I’ve ever met a truly fluent nonnative communicator who used such things to master Japanese, but this is probably because their era is just beginning. I do wonder whether these new learners are actually saving any time or effort in opting for these methods instead of the old paper books and cramped fingers that I used . . . but this may just be my “get off my lawn” cane-shaking moment.
Best of luck to everyone who’s trying to wrap his or her head around these squiggle characters.
* Uphill, both ways. In the snow. Dammit.
by Ryan Ginstrom
23 Jun 2010 at 15:25
I think that a faster way to look up kanji would have got me reading fluently sooner. I could read a newspaper after 6 months of intensive Spanish study; took about 3 years to do the same in Japanese, and a lot of that was because I spent so much time flipping through kanji dictionaries, so that I could look up the word in a kokugo/J-E dictionary.
I think that it evens out in the long run, but getting up to speed on the basics quicker will probably keep more people from giving up on the language.
by Aaron
23 Jun 2010 at 15:25
I remember spending many a night in high school with Henshall hand-writing flashcards for all 1945 jōyō kanji. I have to agree; I’m a little skeptical of all these prepackaged study aids as well. Studying Chinese now I feel like I’m doing fine without SRS, Chinesepod, and etc., but perhaps all that proves is that even twentysomethings can be set in their ways.
by Durf
23 Jun 2010 at 15:37
I think in the end it all boils down to the tools of the times. In the 1980s we had books (and I had a real live ワープロ, which was a sensational tool to have at Berkeley in those days; I could type multilingual papers without using the “open up 10 spaces so you can go back and handwrite 明治維新 in there after printing” trick!) but today there are all these high-tech approaches.
In the long run actually becoming a proficient communicator (not just a reader/listener) in Japanese takes just as long as it ever did, and requires meaningful time spent in this country. But Ryan, you make an excellent point about the speed of learning in the early days being a key to staying interested long enough to get to that more challenging stage.
The only thing I find truly mystifying about these iPhone apps and whatnot is the number of them dedicated to learning the kana. At ASIJ we learned hiragana and katakana in the first week or so of class, from what I remember. Smart study decks and online tools might be a great way to work on kanji and vocabulary for years and years, but I just can’t see any better way to getting through the syllabaries than buckling down and writing the hell out of them for a few days.
by sigma1
23 Jun 2010 at 15:47
As someone who has fully embraced these methods (and knows all of the terms you bolded!), after going through the traditional sit at your desk as a JET looking at Kanken books process, I would say overall that they are useful if you are smart about using them. But I think you could spend so long finding a method and calibrating them for what suits you that unless you are in it for the long-term (in my case I have no choice!) then the fiddling could take up more time than learning.
That said, nothing will replace what I think are the two most important things for a Japanese learner in particular – being a good communicator in your own language & being in Japan and talking to Japanese people.
by Adamu
23 Jun 2010 at 17:03
I never used podcasts or any of those specialized tools, but reading the Japanese web, chatting in Japanese Yahoo chat/MSN messenger and ordering Japanese movies online helped my Japanese enormously. Also, I basically got started as a translator on my blog. I guess these new offerings came a little after I stopped paying attention.
All innovations to language learning are welcome, in my book. Whatever gets people started and keeps them interested and motivated, all the better. And free is a pretty good price point.
One possible downside of all these options is the tyranny of choice. From that paragraph, I suspect the writer might be dangerously close to equating the accumulation of study materials with actual progress.
by Durf
23 Jun 2010 at 17:30
Actually I think the “tyranny of choice” might be overstated in this case. I just took a look at this post, which recommends using an iPhone or iPod Touch instead of a dedicated electronic Japanese dictionary. It has a couple recommendations for apps, which are added to in the comments. But you end up with a list like this:
Kotoba: Based on Jim Breen’s databases
Japanese: Based on Jim Breen’s databases
Gengo Japanese Dictionary: Based on Jim Breen’s databases
Aedict (for Android): Based on . . . you get the picture
When you start digging into all the offerings out there, they start to look the same after a while. I can’t imagine loading more than one of these on my iPhone (and I think I have Kotoba on mine, although I use 大辞林 far more and will zap the former if I feel like I need to free up some space).
by Leonardo Boiko
23 Jun 2010 at 20:27
I use Anki for SRS, but I find I can *only* learn kanji by writing them. As in, with a pen, on paper, many times.
by Matt Holland
23 Jun 2010 at 21:48
While I generally don’t want to knock anything that helps people study – man, I couldn’t agree with you more. Perhaps it’s because I’m impatient and wanted to see results quickly, I also just had a big fat book of kanji, and wrote them and read them over and over for a frightening amount of time each day, then I read newspapers, then books, and now I’m writing industrial analysis documents in Japanese.
I think another important element is where people are studying Japanese. I started studying the language after I came here, and haven’t returned since so I can’t really comment on that, but I imagine having a lack of 24/7 foreign-language stimulus, one would need more interesting or dynamic ways to engage their brain. Personally I can’t imagine studying it anywhere but here, I’m sure I couldn’t do it.
by Lan'dorien
23 Jun 2010 at 22:56
Hi Durf, thanks for the mention
I agree looking back at that paragraph it looks a little like I’m over-methodizing! (that’s a word right?) But a lot of it is essentially the same thing. smart.fm is just another SRS, so pretty much what it boils down to is: SRS flashcards for vocabulary and grammar; other than that, just maximize exposure as much as possible. Read as much as I can, listen as much as I can. That’s it really.
Heisig’s method has been around for a long time now – since the ’70s I think? – but the website dedicated to it at kanji.koohii.com has made it far easier to get through. I went from knowing about 200 kanji in March to knowing all the jouyou in June (keyword and writing only mind you, readings I’ll learn in context), and that’s taking it pretty easy – friend of mine did it from zero in about two weeks. Granted he didn’t do much else those two weeks! SRS has been around for a long time too – it’s scientifically proven and very easy to implement. Even easier now of course, that one can put a full-featured SRS program on one’s phone.
It’s all about maximizing efficiency and maximizing exposure. Make it easy, don’t waste time, study a lot, stay immersed as possible even when not actively studying. So I don’t think in that regard anything has really changed that much from the earliest days of foreign language study. The big difference now is that with the internet the world is so connected that it’s very easy to find ways of making things more efficient, and very easy to find such quantities of native material (not to mention connecting with native speakers) that near-immersion is possible without going to the language’s home country.
Oh, about iPhone apps – I can’t figure out either why there’s so many kana apps – kana shouldn’t take more than a week to learn without any technology at all! The only thing I can think of is that a kana app is pretty simple to make so a lot of them get made, maybe? I will admit to having 13 study apps on my phone
but only three of them ever get used – ShinKanji, which is a very excellent free kanji reference; the Kotoba dictionary; and of course my SRS app. Some are very specialized, like the particles app, so that will likely see some use yet; some, like Human Japanese (a good introductory text with interactive quizzes and games), were very good to go through once.
by natem
24 Jun 2010 at 22:30
When Japanese study got big, the methods improved some, but the demand on the students got astoundingly low. To wit, at my university the class had not yet reliably memorized the KANA after four semesters.
I was able to make reasonable sense of television and the freshman level lectures in Germany after two semesters of German. After four semesters of Japanese, even children’s manga was way beyond me.
by Cyril
25 Jun 2010 at 12:48
Lan’dorien,
knowin all the jouyou kanji in 2 weeks ? or even in 2 month, is it real ?
what do you learn, what do you remember ?
Even Japanese need a few years to learn them.
by Lan
25 Jun 2010 at 22:44
Cyril – it’s real, definitely. Two weeks is very rare of course. I took about four months. After going through Heisig’s system one knows a single English keyword and the writing for each kanji. Not a full meaning, and no on or kun readings.
It essentially puts the student at a similar point as a Chinese native beginning Japanese. I wrote a short review of the system, the next post after the one Durf links. Hope this helps
by Ryan Layman
28 Jun 2010 at 23:13
Hey Cyril,
I’ll back up Lan there. I picked up kanji plus readings in one summer from 0 all the way to RTK 1&2. I still retain them and read them fine at the moment. I used an SRS to do it. It was easily one of the most productive summers I’ve ever had.
At this point, I just rely on technology and actually using the language to reinforce it, and I haven’t had a problem since.
It doesn’t do everything, but it does do the job of keeping learned stuff in my head, so it was ideal for kanji.
by Victoria
06 Jul 2010 at 08:39
I may be old-fashioned but I still rely on the big Nelson dictionary to help me out when I really need to find a kanji.
Apart from that, another old fashioned method is just to write and write and write. It’s one thing to be able to read kanji but another thing altogether to have to write it.
One tool of torment in the Japanese Interpreting and Translating Masters course I’m doing now (MAJIT) is the TREND dictionary of ‘current terms’. I’m now heaving a sigh of relief after having been subjected to tests from this for the past year.