So since I was forbidden by my loving fiance from doing anything outside a small radius of my bed (I tend to be an idiot and start moving at the first sign of feeling better), I holed myself up with my laptop and my new collection of Scrubs Season 4… in German.
One of the things of studying an L3 is that it instantly makes you want to study your L2 again. Japanese actually has perfect sound-symbol correspondence when you know how kanji works. European languages, not so much.
Anyways, my trick was putting on German subs and German dubs, then paying attention to the points where both exactly matched. All of a sudden, figuring out umlauts and the general sounds carried out was easy. And I didn’t even have to crack open a book!
Awesome. Pretty sweet accomplishment for a sick man with only one weekend in bed. If you’re just getting started, try it out!
Dan Pink’s presentation at the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce is really enlightening in regards to the things that motivate people to work. In many ways these principles are the same reason I was drawn to writing about self-study and teaching people how they could teach themselves a language.
The basic premise is that people have a minimum amount of money that they need to earn, but if that requirement is fulfilled further amounts of money do not increase motivation. The three principles that motivate people are:
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose
Anyways, the video really needs to be watched, and the pictures are rather entertaining. Take a look!
So, about “fluent.” The other reason why “fluent” is a very unhelpful word is because it doesn’t guarantee your language will help you when it counts. Especially if you’re just trying to have a normal conversation, you can quickly have issues. Depending on your circumstances, this can be a huge problem. I have a personal story to illustrate the problem. Since I’m rather ill in bed right now, I’ll illustrate with a time when I was even worse.
Almost two years ago, I had finished teaching a semester of school and went out to eat some yakiniku with my fiance. During that time, she recommended that I try some raw liver. I’m not a usually very courageous man when it comes to food, I tend to like what I like and not try new stuff, but she was recommening it to me, and so I thought I’d take a bite.
. . . Food poisoning. Nice. After the excruciating pain of waking up in the middle of the night a few nights later with a headache so bad it felt like my head was going to explode (the worst headache I’ve ever had, to be honest), I finally decided to go see a doctor. This doctor then immediately recommended sending me to the hospital.
I would spend an entire week in this hospital, and my fiance would be gone on a business trip the whole time. So it was just me, alone, in a Japanese hospital, fending for myself. Since the issue to begin with had been me eating, I was instead put on fluid. Almost the whole week I was incredibly hungry but my body condition was alright. Going to the bathroom was another story, but I’ll save you the details.
During this time, I really only had two different groups of people to talk to: the nurses, who were often around my age, but busy, or the old people who’ve been in the hospital longer than I am. One man befriended me, and encouraged me to watch sumo with him everyday (not that I really like sumo, but I was bored as hell, so anything was going to be fine). To save myself from the excruciating boredom, I would often drag my stand and bring it with me (in all my hospital robe glory) downstairs to the hospital store, where I’d buy comics to read.
Of course, the Japanese really had to come on for the three times daily questioning by the nurses, who would inquire constantly about the state I was in. Once again, I won’t be going into any details, but there was a lot of vocabulary there that you’re better off finding out about yourself.
But, in the end, my intense week of Japanese finally ended. And I left with a working digestive system and a sense of confidence in my language skills that was otherwise unparalelled. This was, of course, later on in my studies of Japanese. I hate to imagine how it would have worked out had that been the first time I was in Japan, rather than the 4th.
Fluent. Possibly the most overused word in language learning. Basically meaningless now. Here’s some of the things that it has been used to mean, ranging from the most far-ranging to the narrowest definitions:
Able to fully converse and operate in the second language as with the first.
Able to fully converse in the second language as with the first in daily life only.
Able to speak quickly without searching for words.
Essentially, the meaning of fluent has been rapidly deteriorating over time. Of course, in research, fluency has been often used to refer to the last definition above, and has been widely contrasted against “accuracy” when talking about someone’s speech production.
Basically, it’s a broken word these days unless you can nail down the meaning of the word. In fact, I tend to avoid it as much as possible because the meaning is so ridiculously bent out of shape. It is far more important to identify what you want to be able to do in the language that you are learning.
And I generally want to be able to do everything that I can do in my native language, so I tend to have high expectations of myself. Daily conversation is not enough for me,because every day we have conversations about stuff that are not normal by any means, and daily conversation itself is too shallow for me.
Good opportunities will generally only come to those who go all out when it comes to their language learning. People who speak “a little” of anything are fairly common, but people who are actually fully functional are quite rare and, if positioned correctly, are often given more opportunities than they can actually take.
Special day here, as this marks my 100th article on the blog! We have also crossed into the beginning of my 4th month of blogging over here as well, and I am excited!
In fact, to commemorate, I am releasing my first e-book: 突発！ One Week to Kana. For those of you who already know hiragana and katakana, you won’t need to read it. However, it is creative commons license, so you might want to pick it up, send it to your friends, and make your self-study a little bit more of a social endeavor!
For those who are at different stages, or learning different things, I’d love to hear about what you’d like to see in the future here at this website. Are you needing some help getting through kanji? Are you having a hard time keeping your motivation up? Are you learning a different language that you need help with?
I don’t know, but I’d like to. I’d also like to know what you’d like to see in terms of not just content matter, but in terms of the delivery system as well. E-books? Video? Once again, I can do a number of things with the right planning. I do have a video of me introducing different software and websites to a Japanese audience for the purpose of teaching yourself a language, but I’m currently trying to get that edited at the moment.
This is a moment for me personally to take a look back at my progress so far, and to plan a few things for the future. Some of the things I’ll be working on in the near future:
Getting Japanese edited (still not 100%, as I have a huge headstart at the moment with the almost daily posting)
Getting a backlog of articles for my busy schedule
Getting the previously mentioned video up.
Getting some more presenting under my belt, with video later.
Doing more in terms of longer writing.
Got any ideas on where to go here? I always enjoy a discussion, and look forward to hearing you guys. Thanks for being so awesome.
So I need to thank my coworker Casey for this one. Casey came in to my office to talk about a pretty specific instance of a possible use of the SRS, but it generalizes pretty well.
At our work, like at most places where teachers teach, there are student evaluations of the teacher’s performance at the end of the semester courses. Of course, these evaluations are always in Japanese, so it can be a bit challenging to evaluate how you did if you don’t speak Japanese yourself.
Casey’s solution? Use the comments themselves as your learning materials! Go ahead and put them into your SRS. Great idea! I always printed out the positive comments and posted them on my wall, taking the time to remind myself that I do good work and reminding me what I did right, but I never considered using the comments themselves as study material.
If you’re studying a language, I’m going to assume that you’re making an effort to communicate with speakers of that language. Which means at some point, you will have developed some sort of correspondence with them. Go ahead and use that correspondence with your SRS! Everytime that card comes up, you’ll remind yourself of the real, human moments that you decided to learn the language in the first place, upping your motivation and skills at the same time.
Seriously. If you’re sitting around wondering “I wonder if doing X will help my language studies,” then I highly encourage you to try it.
There are very few things that I can honestly say won’t work. Here they are:
You won’t learn literacy through romaji
You won’t learn to listen and speak if you don’t do it.
You won’t learn to read and write if you don’t try it.
That is it. And in fact, only one of those things is something you actually do. The other two are things that you don’t do. That’s how this language thing works.
Everything you could do will help. Are there things that are more effective than others? Yeah, there are. I happen to think that you should focus on the simple things, and that’s why I’ve been a huge fan of constant contact with the language + sentences through SRS, because they combine cheap wins, automaticity, and an effective means of assessing progress.
But anything will help in something. If you think you need to work on your honorifics, then:
You’re probably right. You know better than anyone.
By all means break something out and get it done.
Contrary to all the hype out there, it won’t ruin you for life. It won’t harden your habits into the destructive force that will make you the laughingstock of your target language’s culture for the rest of your life (ever notice that it’s always people who haven’t successfully acquired a language who say this stuff? Yeah, I thought that was weird, too).
And you’ll probably learn something pretty close to what you wanted to learn.
Go go ahead, it might hurt to try, but it won’t destroy you. Failure is cheap, and you can definitely reap the profits.
Slow and steady is good, but sometimes intense passion wins out. I’ve written before aout how you can control and raise your motivation by deliberately slowing yourself down (I’m actually currently doing it to myself in German right now), but in the right conditions, you can get yourself to practically jump off the walls with intensity too.
The trick, of course, is that you can’t do it forever, and so you have to go in knowing that it’s a temporary thing. I used this trick with a free summer to nail through Remembering the Kanji in less than three months. It helps to have a well-defined area of study for using the trick. You must:
Set your study domain: (Kanji, or kana, or maybe all of the vocab in a book or series of books, but it needs to be clear and defined and measureable)
Break it down into daily amounts: You will want the math on your side to remind you that if you follow devotedly, it will get done. This will work for you.
Set your start date: Start date is usually ideally placed sometime in the near future but not too far away. You want to give your self enough time to rev up but not enough time to back off.
Set your end date: This is actually harder than the start date. You want it long enough to be done, but short enough so that it’s hard. Yes, this time, you’re intentionally challenging yourself as a means of motivating yourself. Not to beat yourself up, but to take yourself to a new level. The difficulty itself is what will be motivating you this time around.
Using this method, you can get yourself to accomplish something great on your way to total language mastery. But first, you need to take some prior precautions. Make sure you spend the day before and the day after taking some time to get ready or wind down, and make sure to celebrate your accomplishments. Good luck!
Seriously. Don’t do this if you’re not ready for it. But when you are ready for it, give it a shot.
I’m seriously in need of some German learning material. I got a lot of Japanese stuff, but now I need to redo my environment so that I can be well-adapted to learning the German language. Since German’s sound-symbol correspondence (basically how perfectly you can look at text and pronounce it perfectly) is somewhat weaker than Japanese, it made sense for me to acquire some listening materials in German, then on top of that I added some comics for my own reading purposes.
I did this using the German Amazon. What other choice did I have? The good news is that the system works exactly like your home country’s amazon. Even the blue and gold buttons are all basically the same, so it’s really hard to bumble it up even in an unfamiliar language.
However, I did have a problem. Last time I ordered something from the German Amazon, I wasn’t very specific about when I wanted it. I ordered these materials about a month ago . . .
And they’re due to arrive where I live in Japan in October.
So, yeah. I wanted to be a little bit more choosy about the speed of my shipping this time around. Thankfully, when I ordered some stuff today, it wasn’t as much of a challenge figuring out how to say weeks in German, and then choose the option with the lowest number. Bummer I don’t live in Germany, but we gotta do with what we have.
So yes, use your target language’s Amazon if you’re feeling lucky, and then you’ll reap the benefit of not just learning as you order, but learning after you receive, as well.
A little while ago, I wrote about my belief that it may be a better idea to cover the idea of language learning as a lifestyle choice. As a lifestyle choice, the greater the degree of contact per unit of time, the faster you will learn the language.
These are just some of the things I choose to do to up my language learning:
I like to watch anime subtitled, and then make fun of the crappy English subtitles (or give props for some of the best subtitling jobs I’ve ever seen – Gintama’s “Ill Smith”).
I like to watch American movies with Japanese subtitles, and do the same (or, alternately, learn how to say a particular line of speech pragmatically in Japanese if it’s done well).
I like to watch Japanese movies/TV straight.
I like to watch Chinese movies with Chinese and Japanese actors speaking in Chinese complete with Japanese subtitles using archaic Japanese.
I like to play video games in Japanese (in fact, I don’t think I play in English anymore).
I like to keep spare manga around (the shallower, the better) for easy pick-up and put-down.
I like to read something super intelligent in Japanese so I can learn how to qualify my speech to say what I want without sounding like a jerk.
. . . I like to read manga so I know how to sound like a jerk.
I like to teach grammar in Japanese.
I like to give presentations in Japanese.
I like to play anime music in my office when people aren’t around.
I like to play J-Rock when people are around.
I like talking to people about the music that I’m listening to in Japanese
I like to ask Japanese people their thoughts about the Prime Minister of the Year.
I like to read the Japanese versions of anything that gives me the choice.
I like to read the Japanese version of my favorite fantasy books (David Eddings, anyone?).
I like to use Windows in Japanese. But I’d rather use a Mac now.
I like to answer phone calls from random Japanese people.
I like learning to read obscure Japanese kanji.
I like to troll the Japanese internets to find out about my favorite public figures.
I like to read YouTube comments in Japanese, just to remind myself that it’s just as bad everywhere regardless of culture.
I like to joke with my students in Japanese before class.
I like to read stuff I’ve read in Japanese. In German.
I like to find new German news sites.
I like to put on German podcasts before a Japanese person comes into my office, so I can nonchalantly brag in Japanese that I’m working on a third language.
… I’m kidding, I really just do it so they won’t hear the anime music.
Learning Sound-Symbol Correspondence through DVD
So since I was forbidden by my loving fiance from doing anything outside a small radius of my bed (I tend to be an idiot and start moving at the first sign of feeling better), I holed myself up with my laptop and my new collection of Scrubs Season 4… in German.
One of the things of studying an L3 is that it instantly makes you want to study your L2 again. Japanese actually has perfect sound-symbol correspondence when you know how kanji works. European languages, not so much.
Anyways, my trick was putting on German subs and German dubs, then paying attention to the points where both exactly matched. All of a sudden, figuring out umlauts and the general sounds carried out was easy. And I didn’t even have to crack open a book!
Awesome. Pretty sweet accomplishment for a sick man with only one weekend in bed. If you’re just getting started, try it out!