Going over old ground

Today I had a chance to re-study some grammar that I must have first studied about two years ago. It was worth it. I have been using the grammar incorrectly for the past two years.

Lately, my company has been offering free Japanese and English lessons to staff to encourage communication in the work place. I took up the free Japanese lesson gladly, and quit the school I was going to that was costing me about $30 an hour.

I was a little dissapointed to find however, that I had been demoted from an intermediate student to a beginner student again, and was asked to purchase the second Minna no Nihongo book despite the fact that I had already finished the third in the series.

I figured this was down to a bit of mis-leveling and maybe I'd ask to move up a class after a couple of lessons if I found it too easy.

On the contrary it has proven very useful, and enjoyable. The grammar we looked at today was the は and は combination that is used when you are comparing things.

For the past two years or so, if I wished to compare something, I would say something along the lines of 私は新宿が好きです。でも池袋がすきではありません。　Apparently this sounds unnatural to a Japanese speaker. A little hard my teacher said. The sentences are perfectly correct, grammatically, but 私は新宿は好きですが、池袋は好きではありません sounds much more natural.

This was probably explained to me two years ago, but it may have been lost under the weight of all the other vocab, particles, and Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana I was trying to deal with.

I think a study environment where about 10-20% of the material is new to you is really the ideal situation. In the early beginner stages of learning a language this is difficult: everything is new so if you were to only work with material that provided you with this 10-20% it really would be very boring. However, I do think there is a tendency—there was in my case anyway—to run ahead and try and cram in as much as possible as fast as possible.

I can remember when I first started studying Japanese I was dying to get onto that intermediate book, I couldn't bear being on the beginner book. It was just so basic and childish. I wanted to be in the intermediate stage, chatting about stuff like the recession, and global warming.

Well, you know what, I've been into the intermediate stage, and studied from  an intermediate book, and I still can't really talk about the recession or global warming that well. In fact, as I've noted, I can't really compare stuff that well.

So maybe it's a case of the hare and the tortoise. If I'd taken my time with the beginner stuff a bit more, I might well be ahead of where I am now.

A walk in Tokyo (東京散歩)

Using my new Tokyo walks magazine I went for a walk on Sunday. First I had to decipher some of the Kanji!

Headed to Northern Tokyo. They have trams up here.

This is the grave of a famous Japanese writer, Natsume Soseki. 夏目漱石

Back in the day, they wrote the name backwards. That's natsu (夏 summer）on the right, me (目 eye) on the left. Summer Eye, good name for a writer.

護国寺(Gokoku Ji) A 17th Century Buddhist Temple, one of the only ones not to be destroyed during the war.

I liked the roof.

This grave was better than Soseki's.

A Japanese garden.

Met this little lady in the Gardens. Apparently she is the goddesses of handicrafts like tea ceremony and cooking...

...and PC (パソコン)—that's computers; not being careful with your gender-specific terminology. I guess if you're a goddess these things aren't hard to pick up.

This is a marriage hotspot too. Here are two for the price of one.

Navigating my way around using the magazine was good fun, and got myself immersed in the language. There was a little museum at the end of the course with some Buddhist artifacts that had been collected over the years. All the signage in there was only in Japanese too. I actually found myself being able to read some of the signs in their entirety, which was a good feeling. This is a stone statue of the seated Buddha from the Tang Dynasty in China (8th Century). It's well old!

He's a lazy git

Continuing the function based language-exchanges today. Today's function was describing people.

This was useful, and I got the chance to go over some vocab that I hadn't used for a while, and pick up some new vocab too.

It occurred to me as I was asked for the tenth time to describe my friend/coworker/boss/girlfriend, that it's pretty much the same as when your describing people in your first language, you search around in your head for the vocab you have available to describe these people—for the most appropriate word. A case of making do with what you've got to satisfy the questioner's curiosity. How good a job you do boils down to how much vocabulary you have at your disposal.

So it was good to go over exactly how much vocab I actually do have today.

I also got advice on which words are commonly used versus ones that are not so common, which is always useful to know.

Here is a list of some of the useful vocab that I went over/learnt today.

Positive describing words:
やさしい　＝ nice / kind
おもしろい　＝ interesting / funny
気さく　＝　friendly / open
真面目な　＝　serious / diligent
行動的　＝ active

On the negative side:
いじわる　＝　mean
だらしない　＝　lazy (I'd always used なまけもの, but apparently this is more common)
気難しい　＝　difficult (to get along with)
不真面目な　＝　Not 真面目
内向的　＝　introverted

So I think another one of the benefits of this type of lesson is the opportunity to collect all of this info in one place, giving you the chance to think about what vocab you have available next time you find yourself having to describe someone, pay a compliment, order a pizza, etc.

Random video

Love this video. Just had to steal it and put it on my blog...

Dear Japan from Matthew Brown on Vimeo.

LingQ

Been using a site called LingQ over the weekend. There are lots of listening resources on this site, with scripts that you can check off the vocab you know, and highlight for review the words you don't. It's fun to listen to some real-life conversations on the podcasts, and you get a much better feel for the language with the longer transcripts than with say the one-sentence examples you get with the SRS (Spaced Repitition Software) like Smart FM.

So, I've kind of put the SRS on the back-burner for now. Actually, I'm just waiting for the moment LingQ tell me I have to start paying for their service, then I'll probably be back on the SRS.

New name

So, I decided to give the blog a new name after signing up to the blog on google reader, and finding that the three kanji characters that make up the pen name I had given myself for the blog: 夜青龍 make up the blog title. These characters are basically a twist on the famous Sumo Wrestler, 朝青龍。His name means 'morning blue dragon', mine is the evening version.

Anyway, that name doesn't really slip off the tongue well for people who can't read Japanese, so hence the name change.

The name is taken from the Monty Python skit below. It's been said before, but Monty Python really were ahead of their time—I can remember sitting through a Spanish Evening Class in the UK that wasn't far off from this in the year 2005, (I specifically remember going round the class trying to memorize cutlery words—what a waste of time!)

Anyway, it's really funny, and I think shows the British attitude to foreign languages quite well.

Functioning

I had a really good language-exchange session today, and came up with a new and easy way to make the sessions interesting and productive.

When I meet up with my language-exchange partner, we usually go through an English lesson in a textbook from the company I work for during her study time, and then switch roles so I become the student and she is the teacher for the remainder of the time. However, I have never really settled on a good resource to use for my half of the session.

Most of the Japanese texts I have are very grammar based and it can become pretty dull pretty quickly for my friend, and me, once we get bogged down in some grammar point. I've tried using newspaper clippings and the like as conversation topics, but that can be time consuming to prepare, and can prove difficult if the subject matter contains a lot of tricky vocab. The English texts on the other hand are very communication focused and are designed to teach one function of language usage at a time: for example, today's function was starting a conversation with a stranger, so the student gets to practice saying things like, "I see you're wearing a Redskins jersey, are you a fan?", so the whole time is spent practicing, what really is the main aim of language learning, communication.

Anyway, at the end of the English half of the exchange today I was feeling pretty tired and wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, when it occurred to me to try out the English texts in Japanese—why this didn't occur to me earlier, I don't know. Basically, we just translated all the activities into Japanese—not really that challenging when the language is only lower-intermediate level—and repeated the lesson in the other language.

It was great!! It was the first time I'd really had the chance to be a student using the method that my company promotes, and it does work. I really feel like I can retain the language I used as it is all contained within this one language function, and next time I feel the urge to start a conversation with a stranger, the language, topics and questions we covered today will all be ready and waiting in my head.

I'm really pleased to have confirmed to myself that this method of teaching works, and I'm looking forward to my next language-exchange to try out another function.