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How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

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Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#141
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been living, working, studying, playing in Japan for the last 8 years. I came here with no knowledge of the language (except "ohayou" because of that Sesame Street where Big Bird goes to Japan). Learning katakana and hiragana took an afternoon of riding the train and reading signs. The first 3 years I didn't really study much, but talking to old men in bars and spending time in the hospital boosted my communicat…

Where are those coupons? :-)

Promo code for 50% off forever on wanikani CRAB YORI GATOR

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#142
I enjoyed the series produced by public television called "Irasshai". The lessons are available on the Georgia Public Broadcasting site and texts can be purchased from Amazon. For those who have fond memories of "French In Action", this will give you a similar vibe even though it isn't quite the same thing.

http://www.gpb.org/irasshai

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#143

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…

That app is one of the best I found, but it's sadly based on data that is flawed at fundamental levels IMHO. The even more sad part is that it's actually hard to find good data. In fact, the data that I would like to exist doesn't exist, or is so hard to find that I haven't found it. But there's probably some matter of taste in there, so I won't bother you with that, but I'll list my gripes with the data a lot (if not most) apps use.

- Jim Breen's JMDICT/EDICT. While very valuable, its "word priority marking" data is based on word frequency from old newspapers. That makes it both outdated and biased (newspapers don't use the same range of vocabulary as conversational japanese or books or other forms of expression)

- Jim Breen's KANJIDIC: It contains all sorts of readings for characters, some of which don't even appear in many japanese dictionaries, without any kind of differentiation whether they're rare or not. I also recently found that the Kang Xi radicals it contains don't all match the Kang Xi radicals contained in the Unihan database from the Unicode consortium (I reported the discrepancy to M. Breen).

- KanjiVG: Used in many apps, including Kanji Study, to show stroke order, and document radicals/kanji parts. Sadly, that last part is full of fantasy. To give a couple examples:

- The parts it gives for 息 are 自, 目, 心. Yeah, 目. Because, you know, if you remove the small stroke at the top of 自, you can see 目, but that's highly irrelevant. Furthermore, the only meaning listed for 自 is "one's self" except in characters like 息, 臭, 嗅, 鼻 it's "nose".

- The parts it gives for 専 are 寸 and a vertical stroke. Sure, there's barely a character for the top part of that character (many fonts don't have it, but it exists: http://glyphwiki.org/wiki/u24c14), but a vertical stroke? really?

Consequently, when looking at characters associated with a radical in Kanji Study, you end up with lists larger than they ought to be if you look at simple radicals like 目, because everything that contains 自 or 首 is listed as well.

Maybe that helps beginners in some ways, I don't know, but feeding them with useless information doesn't sound very useful on the long run.

Now, another problem I have with all these resources (and others you can find on the web) is that the most comprehensive data tends to be in English. Which is great for native English speakers, but really, studying a language in yet another language that is not native to you is not the greatest experience.

Finally, past a certain level of japanese (from my experience), it's better to use japanese-japanese resources. Because things don't map 1:1 between languages, and past a certain point, you get a sense of how some japanese words differ from what you would normally find in dictionaries to your native language. And it's then better to have other words defined in terms of those you already know than in terms of yet other not-quite-matching native words. Sadly, I haven't found good online (or in-app) japanese-japanese resources, except for Kanjipedia.

OTOH, I realized a while ago that I'm completely useless at translating japanese into my own native language. I'd take a japanese sentence I understand fully and be completely stuck trying to convey its meaning in my native language. This may or may not be related to the fact that my japanese abilities grew mostly through japanese than through non-japanese resources. Either way, translation is definitely a skill that is acquired separately.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#144
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…

This is a very salient point on the difficulty and nature of Japanese. Japanese language is very tightly integrated with Japanese society, to the extent that I would cheekily argue it doesn't even count as speaking Japanese outside of the context of a Japanese social setting or structure. To elaborate on your point regarding the proliferation of vocabulary from honorific synonyms, consider how much of the grammatical…

I used to work a job in Japan that involved a bunch of foreigners fluent in Japanese from different countries (so Japanese was the only common language, but none of us were Japanese) gathering for regular meetings. If there weren't any Japanese bosses present, we'd just drop all the cultural/social restrictions on the language and use it as a tool with our international frame of mind.

Of course we all operated in Japanese in a professional setting daily, so knew the "correct" way to speak, but also had the ability to just drop all that when we wanted (which Japanese people basically never do). Totally different way to use the language, and if any Japanese people happened to overhear, it kind of blew their minds.

I found it very interesting to unpick all the different levels of linguistic, cultural, and social meanings and conventions in the language.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#145
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Who is James Heisig, and what is his method? I'd like my Japanese ability to explode too!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_kanji

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#146
post #19
post #7

How can you measure which language is most difficult to learn? It is not an universal fact. It depends on many factors. Title is click bait obviously.

Measure the average amount of hours to reach a certain proficiency.

That is a false metric. Different for me, different for you - assuming we come from different countries.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#147
I've been learning some simple Korean, and the biggest stumbling block is romanization. 한글 is so simple to learn that there is no reason to romanize it. To make matters worse, Korean vowels are very specific, and quite different from English vowels. My instinct is to find Korean children's books, and learn to read like a Korean. Either way, romanization is harmful.

Japanese does not have the same problem per se. Romanization of Japanese is quite effective. All you need to understand are a="ah", e="eh", u="ooh", o="oh" and i="eeh". That being said, it is still very important to learn kana; else, what would you read?

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#148
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been living, working, studying, playing in Japan for the last 8 years. I came here with no knowledge of the language (except "ohayou" because of that Sesame Street where Big Bird goes to Japan). Learning katakana and hiragana took an afternoon of riding the train and reading signs. The first 3 years I didn't really study much, but talking to old men in bars and spending time in the hospital boosted my communicat…

Where are those coupons? :-)

Fair enough. I guess I should have posted it. If you do some google searches you can find a bunch, but a lot of them dont work any more. The one that worked for me was CRAB YORI GATOR
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