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How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

making.duolingo.com

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Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#101

Post by e12e »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #43
reustle wrote: post #29

I've been learning japanese (and living in japan) for the past few months, and tried out duolingos new course when they released it yesterday. I've used quite a few different apps and books, and I must say I was pretty unimpressed. Their lessons give very little info on what you're learning, and with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning. I will experiment with it a bit more, but I've al…

> with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning Damn, that's precisely the opposite of how you should learn them. My Japanese ability pretty much exploded after I set aside two months to study the kanji divorced from their readings with James Heisig's method. Totally worth it. The readings come with time.

Indeed. It's my understanding that the success of kanji in China was exactly that some lord on the borderlands could write with kanji what he wanted to convey, and then, at the heart of the empire someone could read it back in mandarin. While the border Lord might only speak some local language.

The parallel is to teach everyone Latin language and how to read and write Latin letters, rather than just teach everyone how to read and write kanji.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#102

Post by Cerium »

twoquestions wrote: post #60

I took Japanese in college, and the worst thing wasn't the writing system, vocabulary or grammar. They were hard mind you, but far from impossible, nothing flash cards couldn't fix. What was (and is) very hard for me is how (in general) the bulk of Japanese communication happens in what is unsaid. Even trying to work through patio11's Stockfighter course, I found it very hard to 'read between the lines' in what he wa…

I met my wife because sometimes I "can't read the air". We were pen pals and she wanted to tell me about a graduation trip she was going on across the country. I didn't know it at the time, but just to be polite she invited me on the trip with her, expecting that I would understand and decline. I didn't, instead I accepted! We went on an amazing trip and fell in love.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#103

Post by wccrawford »

neves wrote: post #99

I've been told by a friend of mine that speaks Japanese that the most difficult aspect is that how you speak changes due the social setting. It's not just the syntax, you must learn how to speak in each different situation. Here is Richard Feynman talking about the same problem: While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis a…

I'm going to disagree with your friend. The hardest part of Japanese is reading it. You can train all that social stuff through usage and watching a lot of TV. But reading? It's a nightmare.

The simple elementary school stuff isn't hard. But the highschool and college-level stuff? Ugh. Thousands of characters with multiple pronunciations each, sometimes with very tiny differences between them.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#104

Post by kazinator »

rootsudo wrote: post #21

I learned hiragana and katakana using the "Kanji Study" app by Chase Colburn. On the google app store. I don't know the guy, but the app is simply amazing. Repetion, through fun methods, I learned hiragana as I rode the Tokyo metro and katakana too. (It also helped that everywhere was both Kanas) Since we're all talking about how we all picked up some Japanese, I thought I'd throw it out there. I normally never donat…

I learned hiragana and katakana simply by writing each character over several pages, and also writing out the 10x5 tables numerous times. It was a week or two out of my life.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#105

Post by zhengyi13 »

shawnps wrote: post #27
OriginalPenguin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct that it's like learning anything else. If you put the time in and are motivated and go about it the right way you can learn it. But it's still "the most difficult language to learn". So it's worth taking that difficulty into account. For example one can learn Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese in around the same amount of time it would take to learn Japanese.

What about Chinese? As someone who's learning Japanese already, Chinese looks more difficult to me. To me it seems very subjective, some people will be better at learning one language vs. another.

I spent 3 years learning Mandarin in college, and then spent a full 13 months at Beida in 96. I've had significantly less training in Japanese: one year in CC, but decades now of regular subbed anime, a Japanese wife, and two Japanese-speaking-first children. I think their relative complexity is broadly equivalent, but in different ways:

Phonologically, Japanese is easier. No tones, and no retroflex consonants to worry about as in Mandarin (unless you don't mind sounding southern/Taiwanese). There is a pitch accent in Japanese, but apparently it varies wildly from one end of the country to the other, and it's not generally critical to comprehension, unlike Mandarin tones.

Lexically, Japanese is easier, at least IME. Don't know a word? Given all the borrowing in Japanese, I've had very good luck just to mangle the English word into Japanese phonotactics, and 90% of the time, the person I've spoken to immediately knows what I mean.

Syntactically, there's a lot more similarity in Mandarin's basic SVO word order to English.

But Kanji. OMG. You need to learn roughly the same set of Kanji as hanzi to be high-school literate, but the Japanese set will generally have a minimum of two pronunciations per character, which vary wildly in context. Mandarin generally has one pronunciation per character, which becomes far simpler to learn.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#106

Post by panglott »

Naritai wrote: post #62
panglott wrote: post #58

"To show just how complex this can get, let’s take a simple English phrase – “I love you” – and dissect the many ways in which it can be said in Japanese. Spoiler alert: it’s not such a simple phrase in Japanese. One of our course contributors, Sho, estimated and found that there can actually be as many as 248,026 ways to say “I love you” in Japanese!" These kind statistics are a kind of lie in themselves. You can sa…

This seems like a modern version of the old claim "Inuit have 100+ words for snow". I've found that's true for most of the claims of "X language has Y words for concept Z!!!" Inevitably it comes down to one of two things: -language X has a slightly different concept of 'word' than English does (such as allowing for conjugations to refer to past or future states) -The english word is question has a variety of context…

It's a widely known myth, but I'm pretty sure that Inuit absolutely has 100+ words for snow: it's just that's a meaningless and unsurprising assertion. The Inuit languages are polysynthetic and can say in a word what European languages need a sentence for, so Inuit can sidestep Zipf's law on word frequency.

But also, English has plenty of words for snow, here's 50: https://www.thoughtco.com/snow-terms-types-3010117

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#107

Post by xiaomai »

baby wrote: post #47
_hao wrote: post #46

From a pragmatic point of view Chinese would be much more useful, but there are a tons of good resources for that already, so dunno. Congratulations anyway. I've used Duolingo to refresh my German some time back.

I still wish Duolingo would make a course on Chinese :( Currently my favorite app is "Decipher Chinese". I read one story a day, save words I want to remember and get quizzed on them periodically.

I also use and enjoy Decipher Chinese. Another thing I would recommend is reading the books posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/chinesebookclub/. It's really difficult at first but I find that reading actual Chinese books (with frequent word lookups in Pleco) has helped me improve my Chinese rapidly.

(I don't get through the books in a month... I'm actually only 70% through the first one I picked up several months ago).

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#108

Post by [deleted] »

reustle wrote: post #29

I've been learning japanese (and living in japan) for the past few months, and tried out duolingos new course when they released it yesterday. I've used quite a few different apps and books, and I must say I was pretty unimpressed. Their lessons give very little info on what you're learning, and with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning. I will experiment with it a bit more, but I've al…

[deleted]

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#109

Post by kazinator »

I made a Windows application for drilling oneself in kanji meanings and readings.

http://www.kylheku.com/tankan/

It is browser-based. It runs a tiny webserver, controlled by an icon in the system notification area.

If you go through the license workflow, you get full use of the program for a limited period. Put in "hackernews" into the promo code field and I might provide a generous extension.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#110

Post by zhengyi13 »

accountyaccount wrote: post #97
baby wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by law they must speak in Mandarin. Check the law here and grep for "putonghua" http://www.gov.cn/english/laws/2005-09/19/content_64906.htm If you travel in regions where Mandarin is not as predominant as it usually is, you will often see signs telling you "please speak in mandarin". The only exception really is Hong Kong.

Interesting. So it seems like if someone wanted to do business with, or work in, China (not HK) — learning Mandarin would definitely be the most useful?

Generally, yes. There's still places liked Shanghai where there's a very strong local language culture, but Mandarin should always suffice.

I've travelled in parts of China (Xishuangbanna in particular comes to mind, in southernmost Yunnan) where they have truckloads of non-Han minorities, and Mandarin was the lingua franca, and got me around, but I frequently spoke it better than anyone around me on the street.

OTOH, if you travel out to say, Xinjiang, I'm told you might be better off speaking Russian - the people out there are not Han, and really don't want to be part of China. Speaking the language of the empire out in the colonies might not make you many friends :)

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