On how to learn Japanese: 2nd phase

I wanted to go to Japan, but today I assumed a great commitment. This commitment will keep me where I am for at least 3 more years.

Reaching fluency was an urgent matter, but now that things are different I'm here to announce the second phase of my Japanese learning.

I decided to stop worrying about how many hours, how many words, how much time, what dictionaries to use, what kind of input is best, how much I got better with how much time.

I'm glad with the Japanese I got until now. I discovered I can read manga and 小説 just for fun. And I'll keep doing that. For fun, not for learning purposes.

I'm confident that just by doing that, in a few years (not 18 months anymore, but just in time for my real goals), I'll be fluent.

Grammars do exist!

I might have not made my position publicly clear about grammar study in language learning, but I will now.

I'm against it. I think it is, in most cases, a waste of time.

Grammars are very valuable. Study of grammar brings a deeper understanding of the language. It is just that knowing it has very little effect on your comprehension and your output. That's it.

If you already know the language well, learning grammar will boost your ability to reflect over sentences. It will give you ability to discuss the language with other people.

It will probably make your reading or listening skills better, but its effects are minor comparing to simpler things like reading for your own enjoyment.

But if you enjoy learning grammar, thought, you'll be killing 2 birds with 1 stone. If you fall in this category, for all means check this link:
http://www.geocities.jp/niwasaburoo/

Massive unintentional grammar practice

Today my thoughts were drifting, and then something came up in my mind.
Maybe I'm doing a lot of grammar specific practice.

How? By "unconjugating".

I see conjugated verbs everywhere and I have to "unconjugate" them to check the dictionary.

So maybe, I'm a bit of an hypocrite (you know, being a forget grammar evangelist).
But maybe that's what reading and listening a lot forces you to do.

Practice grammar is probably needed after all, but you do it without noticing.

Vocabulary is everything

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070802182054.htm

I might be a little biased to read this article and say this, but yes, vocabulary seems to be everything.
The more words you know and the harder they are, the easier it gets to learn new words. Simple as that. And grammar comes by accident.

Memorization of vocabulary in context, with the aid of tons of audio is the key. End of story.

Input X Output

If we weight the importance of output and input, input would comprise with 98% of the efficacy, output would be 1% and more 1% to unknown factors.

It is not that you can or not become fluent from input only. It is that the best way to achieve it is to focus at least 98% of your effort on input.

980 hours of input and 20 hours of output have much better effect than 500 hours of input and 500 hours of output.

It's not a question of belief. It is a fact.

Yes, my numbers are skewed, but it is not possible to account it perfectly.
Anyway, probably 1% for speaking practice is already way too much.

For Japanese I've read far more than 30000 sentences.
Right now, only my sentences deck account for more than 3000 sentences.

Also, I've listened far more Japanese that I have read.

I'll take some lifetimes to do the same with output.

Speech

Well, all I can say is that I already  can speak a little of Japanese. 

I have not put it on trial yet, but I plan to do it soon.

Until now, the only interactive output I had was chatting on the net, only for a few days, months ago.
I stopped because I noticed that it had no effect on my Japanese. Just reading and listening were working very well.

But now something is changing. I'm talking with myself a lot in Japanese lately. I do not do it actively. 

I do it without noticing. 

Btw, this made me recall that before I could speak English, I ranted with myself the same way I'm doing with Jap now.

It started without form. At first there were only sounds. But these sounds kinda fit into each other. Lately these sounds are becoming words. For now, it feels that I'm fooling myself that I can speak Jap, but my hope is that these grunts will become proper speech.

Input before output. But maybe, the time for output is near.

Freedom from the SRS and the dictionary

Today I realised someting nice.
If a card is scheduled for more than 6 months, it might as well as be erased.
Plain normal reading will give you more exposure than your SRS deck. And this exposure will be of better quality.

I'm also changing my strategy for reading and SRSing:
* I'll try not using a dictionary anymore.
* I'm not adding adding cards for vocabulary that I can figure out from context.
* I'll add to the SRS sentences for the words that I had to look up.

Actually I was doing this already before writing this post. I was reading this text:
http://news.tbs.co.jp/newseye/tbs_newseye4072374.html
The only word I looked up was 殺到. The rest I could figure out.

Early rising

I'm not an early riser. But I can imagine some of the benefits it would bring me. 

I live in the south of brasil, in a city called Sao Jose, but my job is in Florianopolis, which is an island. I have to cross the bridge everyday to get there. The bridge is the only access to the island, so there is a lot of traffic, specially from 7:00 am to 8:30 and from 17:00 to 19:30. My goal is to totally bypass that.

I'm waking up one hour earlier each day, until I get to 5:00 am. I'll cross the bridge around 6:00 am and 16:00.

Btw, the picture is the view from my window, that mass of land in the horizon is Florianopolis.

Learning french from the perspective of a portuguese/english bilingue

I started listening to lots of French today. One might try and do the same expecting to get the same results. For that, I'll leave here a disclaimer.

At the time, I can speak and listen both english and portuguese at native level. This gives me a huge advantage for learning French. I have an impression that 95% of French vocabulary is cognate or with English or Portuguese. The grammar has a lot in common with both languages and pronunciation has a lot in common with Portuguese.

If one starts to learn French only knowing English, he might have much more troble with vocabulary and pronunciation than me. So be more carefull.

Prerequisites for learning a language

When I first started this blog, I thought that anyone, at any age, could learn a new language. After this long year, I realized there actually are some requirements.

1) The habit of reading.

If you don't normally read in your own language, you will not be able to read in a foreign one. Reading gives great opportunity to learn new words while having fun.

2) You must enjoy listening to something.

Music is not the best. In my experiente, the best are dialogues. I strongly recommend shows like South Park. It's almost only made of dialogues and its fun. Also it gives you opportunity to learn words that you'd normaly won't learn from books. Hahaha.

Short pause and reacceleration

The listening the news project is somewhat halted. I'll go back to it soon enough.

I did not reviewed my sentences and RTK decks for 3 days. The following day, I had 500+ sentences to review, mainly from the mass adds from the hollydays. The RTK review was very small and it is back on track. The sentences review is probably gonna be back on track today. For 6 days I only added 3 sentences.

But I did not stopped with the fun stuff. I started a new experiment. I got Code Geass again, now with subtitles. It was not on purpose. It is harder to find raw series as soon as they get out of fashion.

So I started to watch them with the subs.

For my admiration the lyrics translation is not that great. There is even a mounstruous transcription mistake. Also I've seen many other mistakes in the series.

Well, what am I doing with subbed anime? I'm watching it slowly. I let it go while I get 100% of understanding. When I hear something I cannot figure out, I go back 10 secs and read the subs. Then I go back and hear it again. Most of the times I get that "click" and figure out the meaning of the word that I could not understand. Then I go back again and listen to it one more time.

Because of that, I can say that I understood 100% of the first 5 episode of Code Geass season 1. Yeah, it is cheatting. But hey, it gives me motivation!

The audio is also in the mp3. Only today I listened to episodes 1 to 5 two more times each.

AJATT youtube videos and Success in listening

I'll comment about this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34i9lr94pI&feature=related

Somewhere in this video, Katz talks about 4 levels of listening.
Here they are:

1) You pick up the sounds that exist in the language and the sounds that don't exist in the language. You cannot understand anything. Everything sucks.

2) You can sometimes pick up a few words. It feels great to hear the words you know. And later on, to learn what the words you heard really mean while reading. It sucks because you cannot understand complete sentences.

3) You can sometimes pick up whole sentences, not only words. Sentences from the beginning to the end. It sucks because you need so much effort to understand so little.

4) The situation has changed. Sometimes you cannot understand a word or a setence. You are getting used to understand more than you dont understand. It sucks because you still don't have the complete understanding. You turned yourself into a spoiled brat.

My comment: What I wanned to say is what Katz already said. It sucks all the time. If you stop because it sucks, well, you'll stop sucking, but you'll stop learning. All you have to do is hang on. It'll work out by itself while if continue doing your parallel studies.

And, for the records, I wanned to register that I finaly feel like I achieved the lvl 4.
I watched the episode 07 of nodame yesterday and I think I understood about 95% of it.
There is still so much that I can't understand, but I'm already more used to understand than to not understand.

7 minutes of complete understanding.

Yesterday, I was watching the 5th episode of Nodame Cantabile Pari Hen for the first time.

At about ~10mins, I got pissed off because there was this word I could not understand. Then I noticed: Hey, taking the OP off, it is about ~7mins of real japanese that I could understand!

Hurray! AJATT is paying off.

All Japanese All the time.

Yesterday I went AJATT, i.e. All Japanese All the Time.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/

I ripped the audio o Tiger & Dragon and I'm listening it continuously, from waking up to going to sleep. I plan to do it for 3 months, and then measure the results.

http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Tiger_&_Dragon

My current stage is: I can sometimes catch complete sentences while listening japanese.

First dream with japanese

I usualy don't remember my dreams. I don't even remember the one I had this night. But it was in japanese, for certain.

Yesterday I had done a lot of anki repetitions before watching the 4th episode of heroes, and I ended up having a heroes related dream, in japanese.

I wish I could remember more.

Went monolingual

Well, just for the sake of records. Today is the day I really went monolingual. I tried and failed a few times, but now it is for good.

I did about ~10 sentences from a list of sentences that should cover all 能力試験2級 points.

These are my current anki statistics:

The 1921 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1116 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1065 of 1945 (54.8%).
• Jinmeiyou: 16 of 287 (5.6%).
• 35 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 79 of 80 (98.8%).
• Grade 2: 154 of 160 (96.3%).
• Grade 3: 172 of 200 (86.0%).
• Grade 4: 148 of 200 (74.0%).
• Grade 5: 138 of 185 (74.6%).
• Grade 6: 112 of 181 (61.9%).
• JuniorHS: 262 of 939 (27.9%).

EDIT: The sentences list covers 2級 grammar points, not 4級.

The Lang-8 experiment

Today I wanted to try something new. So today, while doing my daily random clicking, I waited for such a chance. Then some Lang-8 spam arrived: "the site got a face lift".

It was already nice, but no it is a bit more usable. It is practicaly the same, but with some anoying bugs resolved.

Then I felt like I should try it. I already had an account for a long time. I already helped some members, but I had never, ever written anything in japanese. Remembering my wicked feelings from the beginning of this post, I did it.

Here it is:


皆さん、よろしくお願いします。

２３歳です。
ブラジル人で、ブラジルに住んでいます。

日本語を学びて始めたの時からもう六ヶ月過ごしました。
まだ初心者ですね。
日本語はちょっと難しいですが、とても面白いですよ。
漢字もうまいですね。

興味はペルソナとかファイナル・ファんタジとかＲＰＧゲムです。
今ペルソナ４の為で勉強します。

明日為に成ること、不可能じゃないけど。
来年留学生で日本へ行きたいんですが。

頼むぞう。

It started with what was kindoff a lie, but hey, it is too late to change it now. I'll have to bear with it.
Now I'll wait patiently for the results. Next week I'll post the corrected version here. Wish me luck.

Raw Anime and Doramas

Yai, before this posts, I'll do some bragging.

I read the first two chapters of One Piece and Claymore without recurring to the dictionary.

And the preface and first chapter of http://www.geocities.jp/niwasaburoo/

Hurray!!!

Now on raw anime. For 2 weeks already I'm watching only raw Anime and Doramas. That means, audio in japanese with no subtitles at all. There are some dialogues I understand 100%. There are some that I cant understand even 10%. But it is getting better!

At first I could not understand the most basic things. Those things that I knew I could understand reading, I could not while listening. But everyday practice helps a lot.
I AM getting better at this!
I rewatched some old chapters and I noticed I could understand more and more, everytime I watched them again!

What I took from this is: Watching subbed anime is good for getting used to the sounds of japanese, but will help you little to understand it. It is not worth as "study time".

So, I'm making a promisse here: I wont ever, ever again watch japanese media with subs.
Well, taking off when I'm watching it with friends, of course.

The dr movie method.

RevTK forums are a great resource for the japanese learner. Not only for its site review the kanji, but for the people that frequent it.

This week some guy with the handle alyks came up with a method called Mr Movie Method. He used it to go trought RTK and the on yomi simultaneously at a 50 kanji/day pace. Quite impressive.

Here is his blog:
http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com/

I intend to use it for the on yomi while doing the sentences.

Tae Kim's japanese grammar

If you are living on planet earth and have been trying to study japanese trought the internet, you must've already checked Tae Kim's guide to japanese grammar. It is very comprehensible, with great examples, and with a nice coverage.

So last week I got a pack of sentences from Tae Kim's guide and imported to anki. There were about 800 sentences. It made me see that these would do great good to my japanese. And the were very easy to read. Why 'were'? Because the pack had a few mistakes and I got afraid of picking something wrong in such a crucial stage that is the beggining so I trew them off my SRS. Too bad. The sentences were great.