Ask Ryan: Going Monolingual and Trusting Yourself

Today we have an e-mail from Alan, who has managed to get through what I think is the hardest part of learning Japanese: kanji.  Now Alan is kind of worried about where to go from here.  Here’s what he writes:

Ryan,

I’d be a liar if I claimed to be a long-term reader of your blog- I actually stumbled in here from AJATT.

. . . Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

. . . You read AJATT?  Sweet.  Welcome to the blog.

That being said, I have a question for you regarding progression of Japanese sentences into an SRS deck.

I’m a Heisig1+3 graduate, and have been steadily building a library of Japanese sentences into an SRS deck. Many, if not all of these sentences come from Japanese / English examples – most are from Jim Breen’s wwwjdic. I’m at around 500 sentences, and I can really feel my vocabulary beginning to build. It is important to note that while I may take the example sentences from the wwwjdic, there is absolutely no english in my SRS deck. I simply discard the english equivalent and write the necessary readings on my ‘answer’ side.

This is where my primary concern comes in:
Should I consider going monolingual for my sentences?
(more so, is it going to negatively impact me to continue like this?)

I ask, because while I may be learning vocabulary in my current trend, I find that I am ultimately relying on English as a crutch when first pulling the sentences out.

I realize that a black and white answer may not be possible, but I’d absolutely love to hear your experience with it. Even if you’re unable to respond, thanks for a great blog and congratulations with your successful studies.

And now my reply:

First things first, I want to congratulate you on graduating from kanji!  Nice work!  It’s the hardest part in my opinion and it trips up the most people, that’s one of the reasons I’m a strong advocate of getting it out of the way as soon as possible. 

I went over and took a brief look at the Tatoeba Project, which I think is what you’re talking about with the sentences.  Am I right here?  I think it’s a neat idea, but I worry less about the English being an influencer on you, and I worry more about quality control when it comes to the sentences themselves.  There’s a few issues here:

• No context with sentences.  You always would prefer more context over less.
• Crowd sourcing can sometimes lead to quality issues because the massive load of content being created is accumulating at a rate too high for proper review.
• The learning is too some extent being externalized by someone else, instead of you.

While what you’re actually doing sounds fine (and indeed, I started off the same way myself), I would instead recommend that you get a proper reference book (as long as you’re comfortable spending about twenty dollars per book, of course, depending on your location).  In general, I’ve found that Kodansha or its subsidiary Kodansha Children’s Classics tends to print some very handy reference books that you should take a look at.  I’ve used their idioms/four character-reference book as well as How to Sound Intelligent in Japanese, among others, and I highly recommend them until you get to the point that you don’t need English anymore (for me it was about 1,000 sentences in.  Of course your mileage may vary).
 
Also, context.  This is important.  In general, you’ll eventually be moving towards a point where you start approaching larger and larger sources of text (or listening sources) for you study.  This is important because you have more context, which is particularly helpful for learning certain function words such as connectors and mastering the intricacies of pronoun usage.  To do this, you’ll need to move beyond individual sentences.
 
But seriously, let’s look big picture now.  You’re doing pretty fine.  You’re clearly on the right track and I think you’ve got at least 90% of this down.  At least.  You’re probably starting to get to a point where you are internalizing the attitudes of being an independent study, and some of this feels wrong.  That’s ok, you’re getting to the point where you can probably start following your gut as you pursue incrementally difficult challenges.
  
Hope you’re doing well, by all means send me a mail with any other concerns you have!

Anybody else out there who’s made it past kanji and has some advice for Alan?  If so, go on ahead down to the comments and give the man some words!

Take care everyone.  Talk to you later.

Ryan