Bilingual Sentences Source: Hideo Kojima

http://www.kjp.konami.jp/gs/hideoblog/

That's it!
小島秀夫 (こじま　ひでお）, the creator of Metal Gear and Zone of Enders, is learning English. And he has a blog! And he seems to be doing good!

Writing the compounds + anki stats

As a rule, I have trouble to write compounds.

This week, I tried to copy the senteces by hand during the reviews, and some I could, some I didn't.
I'd say I can write from memory only 30% of whan I can read.
But I don't think it would take much effort to learn how to write the rest.

I purposely ignored this until now and I plan to ignore it a little bit longer.
I have plans to go to Japan next year. If these plans get confirmed, I'll start copying every sentence during my reviews by hand.

If not, I'll continue with recognition only and I'll pray than production will come on its on. It is already comming, I just don't know how much I'll have to wait.

So, if you are in a hurry to write by hand, recognition only might not be for you.

Finally, the anki stats:

The 3526 seen cards in this deck contain:
2108 total unique kanji.
Jouyou: 1845 of 1945 (94.9%).
Jinmeiyou: 51 of 287 (17.8%).
212 non-jouyou kanji.
Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 80 of 80 (100.0%).
Grade 2: 160 of 160 (100.0%).
Grade 3: 200 of 200 (100.0%).
Grade 4: 199 of 200 (99.5%).
Grade 5: 185 of 185 (100.0%).
Grade 6: 180 of 181 (99.4%).
JuniorHS: 841 of 939 (89.6%).

How (fast) to remember compounds

I have great news for those who have already finished RTK. Remembering compounds is piece of cake.

Some will give you trouble but most of them stick after the first few reviews, for life. Much, much easier than RTK.

But as it is so easy, I did not developed a method. I go through them randomly, as I encounter them. If I fail remembering them twice, I make a place mnemonic (like in the movie method) and go on. Simple as that.

I have no data to show how fast I remember them, but I remember that there were times that I added comfortably 100+ sentences/day. I never could do it with RTK, so do your math.

But I still have something to point out.

First, you need to find room for the readings in your brain, just like the primitives in RTK.

When you first encounter a new reading, it will bog you down. It'll take some time to get used and after some time, it will be part of you and it will help you go forward.

I think this readings are connected with how much you listen to them. Kanjis with reading しょう、かん、けん readings are numerous. You listen to it all the time. You will build a kanji framework for them quickly.

If you looked from a "grammar" perspective, they would be the hardest. Most readings share kanji that look a lot alike to each other, but these are very very irregular.

But that is not what happened to me.
They are the easiest to remember.

Answering questions

Kris stated: Thanks for this post and your blog, please keep posting as you seem to be where I am at my Japanese studies and it is encouraging for me to read about your progress.

Thank you! I'll do my best!

Kris asked: You mentioned in the previous post that the Tae Kim sentence pack had mistakes. Are you using them anyway?

The sentences were great, but they had mistakes. So I'm not using them anymore. It was sad to throw away that many sentences, but I think it was the right decision.

Alyks asked: What I'm curious about is how you deal with sentences you have no clue how they work?

Specially during the beggining, I saw many many sentences which I did not knew the meaning and had only a loose translation.
Hey, I dont know. I allways have a little of clue, and I work on that.
In the beggining the sentences were small and simple, and soon they got bigger.
Everyday I meet an old sentence that had a meaning that was much more complex than I tought it was. Even for the simplest sentences. I guess this is my japanese evolving.
Anyway, this also happends to me with my both portuguese and english.

Phauna stated: Anki is not a substitute for a textbook, it just makes revision of the textbook more efficient.

I seem to be doing fine without doing grammar drills. A friend presented me to Minna no Nihongo. BTW, the book is really well made. I learned so much just by reading the preface, but the book itself is not meant for AJATTers. It has allmost no kanji at first and even at the end of volume 2 it still only uses very few kanji.
Also, it takes too long to intruduce grammar points and usage of particles (as you are supposed to be studying kanji and kana, etc).

To design a textbook like Minna no Nihongo, one should make it kanji heavy from the beggining.

I guess in the end I could not make phauna's claim invalid. I just know it can be done without textbooks. I'm not saying my way of doing it is better, just that the textbooks avaliable are bad.

But one thing I totaly agree with: After you have acquired the grammar sense by reading, knowing the rules helps you a lot.

Phauna stated: I'm not sure lyrics are a good source, they are kind of unnatural language.

I agree. But they are so easy to remember that I could not ignore them!

Alyks asked: That's awesome! How many sentences do you do a day?

Thank you! I do as many as I need to get tired of it!
I'm with 1485 sentences today, I had 1082 14 days ago. This gives me about 28 sentences/day.
My goal now is Finishing the Joyo, as I am with 50.5% I think I will need at least 2.000 more sentences to do it. So I plan to be done in 2-3 months.

BTW, my most recent stats:

The 1485 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1030 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 982 of 1945 (50.5%).
• Jinmeiyou: 15 of 287 (5.2%).
• 33 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 79 of 80 (98.8%).
• Grade 2: 154 of 160 (96.3%).
• Grade 3: 161 of 200 (80.5%).
• Grade 4: 138 of 200 (69.0%).
• Grade 5: 120 of 185 (64.9%).
• Grade 6: 100 of 181 (55.2%).
• JuniorHS: 230 of 939 (24.5%).

Dont think twice before throwing a sentence away

Any sentence will do, but only if you throw away the bad ones.
They'll take your time and energy. They will take away your will.

If you are having too much trouble to memorize a piece of vocabular, throw it away.

If are dubious about an aspect of the sentence, throw it away.

If you think it is too long, throw it away.

If you think it is now worthful, throw it away.

Don't worry about the kanji count. Just do your best allways, that it will rise again.

Sentences: any will do fine

When I first started with this thing of sentences, I was very worried on how to find them. It looked that it would be so much of a hasle.

Now I know. Any sentence is fine.

The problem is you. You have to understand what you are mining, but not completely. You must know your strenghts and weakness. You gotta check yourself every week and know where you are strong and where you need to work on. And use your strenghts to help your weakness.

That is the beauty of RTK. Not knowing kanji was a serious weakness. Ignoring it was even worse. RTK made of my weakness my strenght and now I use my kanji power to guide my vocabulary, my grammar understanding, my pronuntiation.

So, in my last self avaluation, I got a low score on particles. Reading trough RevTK forums. (kanji.koohii.com) I found out that some guys are working on a book called All About Particles. Google books has the first chapter of it and I fell in love with the book instantly.
It was made for AJATTers (just ignore the romanji).
It ilustrates the use of "all" the particles used in japanese trought sentence examples, full of kanji, providing hiragana transliteration and a loose english translation.
So, I ordered the book: http://www.betterworld.com/list.aspx?SearchTerm=all+about+particles

I have not written yet on "loose translations", but they rock. That's one of the reasons I like yahoo japans dictionary so much. Loose translations are a way for you to get the "feeling" of a sentence without translating every element of the original sentence. So, for properly understand the original sentence, you'll have to resort on reflecting over the original one.

Anime sentences, the final bout.

Hello,

I've done some more sentence mining from lyrics. They have a great thing about them. They are "free". They were already memorized. They are nice to repeat - as long you like the song.

But they are few and they are skinny.

Same for anime sentences. They are too skinny. By skinny I say: Short, few kanji, hard to know how to write, etc.

But that lead me to another way of doing the sentences. What I'm doing now:
When I hear a new word, I put it in Yahoo和英辞書 and mine sentences for it.
Then I do the repetitions.
If I find a word that I'm not confortable with, I put it in Yahoo和英辞書 again and I get some more sentences.
I do that until I'm tired.

It is working fine. I already told why I like Yahoo dict sentences, but I'll say it again. They are thick, they are heavy, they have the exact amount of kanji, the have the exact amount of new words, a certain degree of irony and a lot of culture.

First impressions on extracting sentenes from anime.

Yesterday I started mining sentences from anime karaoke openings. It was very fun.

It was very easy to pick the animes to check the openings. I already had a few favorites of myself, but it would not bother to check for some more. One thing is that anime fans are usualy not quiet people, well, at least not quiet in the internet. They like to discuss what is the best of any category of anything that has a thing to do to anime. And they have built various lists of top anime openings.

I already had Macross Frontier. Today I got three more: Chobits, Oruchuban Ebichu and Ouran High School Host Club.

My first impression on lyrics, and one thing a friend also commented with me is that they are partly nonsense. So here is my balance of sentences, for now:

Macross frontier: 14 sentences.
Chobits: 5 sentences.
Oruchuban Ebichu: 5 sentences.
Ouran: 15 sentences, but most from the ending, not the opening.

Macross has many many songs. I only collected sentences from only one, the first opening. But for the other three I pretty much exausted them.

This raises a problem. Tought sentences from openings are valid and mining them is fun, they are few. Gladly I have a hundred more series to check out!

Answers + about learning the readings of kanji from the sentences

Yo, folks. This post is for a few answers from commentaries.

The link for the yahoo dictionary is http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/
Beware. It was 4 search options. The one you are looking for when you search for sentences is 和英, that is, japanese -> english.

About the number of sentences, counting only the sentences I kept in the SRS, I have 232 sentences. The tae kim pack had about 800 sentences and I already had gone trought 60% of them.

About on how to learn the readings, I believe there are now 2 choices.

1) Learn it from the sentences, and doing rote memorization for the readings.

2) Learn it from the sentences, but use some kind of mnemonic for the readings.

I'm tending to pick the number 2 because the success of RTK.
The method I plan to use is the DrMovie method. Or better said, a variation of it,
because I already did RTK and because I know a lot of japanese already from previous studies.

I'm already adding places for the readings I already know. From that little I've noticed that:

1) Adding a very familiar place for a familiar reading makes that place very strong.

2) Recognizing a learnt word from a sentence while watching anime/doramas makes that word really hard to forget.

3) For familiar words relearnt in the sentences is very easy to put the readings in their respective places.

So, operationaly speaking, these 3 things make mining sentences from anime scripts a nice option.

Now, alyks pointed me this post:
http://blog.feedmejapanese.com/2008/07/08/collecting-sentences-or-learning-japanese/

The sentences from yahoo are awesome, they are very rich, but they are not familiar, and they are not fun. They have no context.

There is one more thing I noticed while watching Macross Frontier. The series is great but there is an special point about it. It has many songs. And fansubbers are getting crazy lately and putting karaoke subtitles in everyone of them.

So, my next try on mining sentences will be on these karaoke subtitles.

The first steps into real japanese

Yo,

Last sunday I started doing sentences.

I still have some trouble with katakana, but carefuly following the rules of writing kanji to write katakana makes them easier to remember.

At first I opened the first chapter of "luck stealer" manga. I found it reaaally hard to read. The lack of kanji and the excess of slang made me realize reading what would be "hard texts" for those that did not have done Heisig would be more apropriated for me.

So I forgot it for a few moments and started to browse trought dictionaries. I first checked out sanseido, then yahoo. And I was lost. So I decided: The first thing I have to get used with is dictionaries.

I started to pick random sentences from the interface of the dictionaries, started with the options in the search field.
The next few hours made me realize how great yahoo japan japanese to english (eiwa) dictionary is. It gives little definition to the words, but it does provide a LOT of sentences.

So I started to put these on my SRS (now I'm using anki). If there was a word I did not knew (pretty much everyone by until now), Id search for it in the dictionary and put more sentences with it.

After putting 70 sentences, I started to drill them. I did some during the sunday. And some during the monday. I'm impressed on how my japanese sense improved just from these 2 days.

I feel like kanji is something totaly different from what I was thinking of it.

Finishing the sentences, I decided to try something different. I went to JLPT 4 vocabulary list and choose 2 words that I tought would be very useful: ageru (raise) and iu (say). I did ageru first. yahoo dictionary presented me about ~50 sentences for it. I choose some simple ones first, than I would only chose sentences that had at least 2 kanji I could not read. After that I did the same with iu, but with iu there were much more sentences to add.

I got reallly impressed on how interesting were this sentences. They are adult sentences (I mean adult japanese, not erotic japanese), with a lot of kanjis and heavy gramatical structures, with a lot of vocabulary. But they are somehow interconnected.

I plan to drill them starting today. Wish me luck.