An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
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Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#2I feel like this will only work if you can read hiragana and katakana already.
Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#3I don't understand anything and I tried a bit, but IMO this is much more effort than normal. A friend of my confirmed you need to know hiragana. She has studied it a bit and could follow the lessons, whereas I couldn't (knowing next to nothing).
Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#4I feel like this will only work if you can read hiragana and katakana already.
Not being able to pronounce or hear the words is a problem. Associating the words just with the symbols seems very taxing to the visual parts of the brain. Also using the voice/vocal/speaking parts of the brain seems advantageous.
Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#5Idk about this. I found myself translating in my head anyway
Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#6I don't understand anything and I tried a bit, but IMO this is much more effort than normal. A friend of my confirmed you need to know hiragana. She has studied it a bit and could follow the lessons, whereas I couldn't (knowing next to nothing).
I couldn’t even tell if the first example was
showing how to create a conjunction “banana and monkey” or something else like “monkey eats banana”. Yeah, this would need a lot slower of an approach to work for day 0 beginners. Rosetta Stone and Duolingo are great examples of how it can be done.
Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#7Kana is really easy to learn.
https://drdru.github.io/stories/1_01_food.html
I found the examples are literally an image abstraction and how to read them.
They're what you'd find in a similar Genki Vol 1 book, the emojis are cute.
The furigana is invaluable and it helps get the structure in place, I do it similar with song lyrics from utanet.
Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#8Nice idea, but this would be much better as a slightly animated video, especially with sound effects. E.g. to emphasize the monkey eating a banana, have a sound and animation for it.
Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#9Kana is really easy to learn. https://drdru.github.io/stories/1_01_food.html I found the examples are literally an image abstraction and how to read them. They're what you'd find in a similar Genki Vol 1 book, the emojis are cute. The furigana is invaluable and it helps get the structure in place, I do it similar with song lyrics from utanet.
More or less that’s right. They’re a good step toward seeing pictographs as phonetic characters.
When I first starting learning Japanese I took an intensive 7 week course. We learned Hiragana and Katakana in one week, though it took longer to really make that knowledge long term available. I forgot a lot of it after completing the course, but my first year living in Japan helped restore it all!
Now my kids are learning kana and my oldest kanji. The state of the art here is still drilling and repetition. FWIW this website is cute, but without learning the characters you have to rely on verbal instruction, so as an experiment it only works after learning the Kana.
Re: An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation
#10Kana is really easy to learn. https://drdru.github.io/stories/1_01_food.html I found the examples are literally an image abstraction and how to read them. They're what you'd find in a similar Genki Vol 1 book, the emojis are cute. The furigana is invaluable and it helps get the structure in place, I do it similar with song lyrics from utanet.
More or less that’s right. They’re a good step toward seeing pictographs as phonetic characters. When I first starting learning Japanese I took an intensive 7 week course. We learned Hiragana and Katakana in one week, though it took longer to really make that knowledge long term available. I forgot a lot of it after completing the course, but my first year living in Japan helped restore it all! Now my kids are learni…
Hi OP here
You definitely need to learn Kana beforehand. It used to be specified but I decided to remove it a while ago.