Slave to the flashcards

I fear I may have become too much of a slave to my flashcards. It`s now three years since I began regularly updating my vocabulary from the Tangorin website into my Anki flashcards. I`m absolutely positive that this has increased my vocabulary substantially, but I wonder if I have relied too much on this and neglected other areas that also need work in learning a foreign language. It`s as if the flashcards have become a distraction, they can lull you into the sense that you are progressing more than you really are.

In order to keep the number of cards in my decks at a manageable level I have been deleting them when they get to around the three month mark. This has enabled me to keep the number of cards ticking over, may have had a detrimental effect on my long term retention of some of the less common words. I`ve begun to notice this anyhow.

I`m also frustrated with my lack of progress with fluency. I was hoping that by now I would be a confident speaker in my workplace, or with Japanese speakers in my life, but this is far from the case. I feel I need to take a different tack to break new ground.

I`m currently taking three lessons a week, so I don`t think this is the problem. More likely that I need to use, or engineer situations where I can use, the language more frequently in my day to day life.

Free online Mandarin lessons

I've been working my way through the lessons on this website for my Chinese studies:

It seems that it was set up by Oxford University—not sure how long ago, but some of the video looks pretty old.

Anyway, I thought I'd point it out as I've been enjoying working through the lessons. They're just about the right level for me, and all the dialogues attempt to have some amusing point thrown in at the end. Even if the amusing point isn't funny in itself, just the intention can raise a smile.

Another interesting point is the acting. The women that appear in every video are pretty bad at acting—it's painful in places—but they're supported manfully by a middle-aged bloke who does a good job despite the crick-inducing woodenness going on around him.

But besides the cheesy humour, and bad performances, it's useful material with some good exercises thrown in for practice after you've watched the video. Take a look.

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.

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.

Change of class

Not much to blog about of late. Mainly because I've been skipping Japanese classes and my Chinese teacher is ill, so studying has taken a bit of a backseat over the past couple of weeks. My employers have recently started offering free Japanese lessons to staff, which is good news—and means I can quit my other class, which I wasn't so happy with either, and was pretty expensive—so I'm in the process of getting out of the other school and waiting for my employer's classes to start.

The World Cup is taking up a fair amount of free time too. Will probably have that back pretty soon though—when England crash out and I don't have to wake up at 3am to watch their matches anymore.