New iPhone

One thing that has a good effect on my language learning of late has been my new iPhone. It's my first smartphone and I've had it for a couple of months now. I downloaded the Anki app which has really enabled my flashcard usage to go up dramatically. It's great being able to check your flashcards for one minute or so while you are waiting for the train, or waiting at the pedestrian crossing or whatever. I'd say my use of flashcards has gone up by at least 100% if not a lot more.

家政婦の三田 on pps.tv

Another app that is useful is pps.tv. It's an app for a Chinese website where you can access all sorts of TV shows, movies etc. There is a Japanese drama category and I've been trying to watch a drama series from start to finish. There are subtitles in Chinese and Japanese! On the whole, I keep my eyes on the Japanese subs, and manage to follow what's going on quite well. From time to time though, I take a look at the Chinese subs too and get a bit of study in that way too.

The drama I've been watching is, like a lot of Japanese dramas, wacky as hell. It's called 家政婦の三田 (Kaseifu no Mita; Mita the housekeeper) and it's about a housekeeper who is working in the home of a bereaved family who have lost their mother/wife. The wacky thing is the housekeeper behaves like a housekeeping robot behaving and working perfectly, beyond belief, so much so that she actually creeps people out. It's wacky, but interesting to watch, and I'm looking forward to finding out why the woman/robot is as wacky as she is.

I held out from purchasing an iPhone for quite a while, but I've got to say it's a good purchase.

Another quick update

Another quick update after my last post where I mentioned that I was concentrating on the grammar exericises on the Oxford site. Well, I've just finished those this week—it took me about 3 months altogether. It helps to get into a rhythm with these things, I found my rhythm was broken by trips away and stuff, which probably doubled the time it took.

Well, "still going" I guess is the message. Progress has not been earth shattering by any means, but I did take a trip to Beijing earlier this month where I found I was at least able to communicate basic things with Chinese people, and didn't have too much trouble with having my pronunciation understood, which was good.

Going to keep up with the grammar style exercises, this time probably with the Conversational 301 text book I have for the time being.

Update and new thoughts on grammar

Well, what with summer holidays and the like it's been a while since my last post, so I'm just writing this as a quick update as to what's going on.

I've got a lot of topics that I want to blog about language learning lined up, it's just that I've come to the conclusion that I'm spending too much time blogging about it and not enough time studying, so I've decided to concentrate on the study a bit for the time being.

I'm using the Oxford Chinese site that I mentioned before, and I'm really beginning to appreciate the benefit of grammar exercises. I think I had been lulled into thinking it was not necessary by some quarters of the language learning world, and this has been detrimental to my progress. Looking back at this blog, I am not sure I would support everything I wrote here or here anymore (although think balance is probably the best way forward, and certainly there is room for both techniques).

It is an atractive proposal not to have to bother with grammar, but I'm finding that studying the grammar really gives you a better understanding of the language and helps to give you a firm foundation from where to build your sentences, and this in turn helps to raise confidence.

Anyway, I'm going to try to make my way through all these exercises over the next month or two, and then perhaps scout around for some new material.

In the meantime, I'll try to find some time for a blog post or two. If you have any thoughts on the benefits of grammar study please let me know in the comments below, or of course if you have any comments on my blog or language learning in general, feel free to drop me a line...

Another step in the right direction

Today I have another "first" I want to share. I’ve used this blog before to chart firsts, and I think it’s important to do this to keep track of my progress.

Recently, I’ve come to realise that in my 5 years in Japan my language progress has been disappointingly slow. This is due to a number of reasons I guess, and I don’t really want to go into them here, but I think I realise the mistakes I’ve been making now which is the main thing, and correcting those mistakes, although difficult, is important, otherwise I will never reach my goal.

Hopefully the "first" I have to report today will illustrate my attempts to do that.

Today's "first" is my first business related conversation at work in Japanese. My department is English speaking, I speak English with most of my close colleagues on a day-to-day business and in meetings etc. which is fine, but most of the Japanese staff on other departments expect to communicate with me in English too. This is comfortable for me, and is something that has probably gone on too long—ideally I would have been speaking Japanese, or at least attempting to, the entire time I have been there.

I have been doing this job for 3 years now, and to now begin speaking Japanese to people seems like rather a large step. It’s kind of feels like the first time is always going to be the hardest, I'm going to do it and everybody's going to be like "What the hell are you doing Neil?" A barrier between myself and using Japanese at work has formed over the past three years.

Over the past couple of months or so I’ve been trying to overcome this barrier. For example I’ve been speaking about my Japanese studies more with people. And I’ve been using idioms. How have I been using idioms? you might wonder seeing as I don’t speak any Japanese at work. Well, I‘ve been talking about Japanese idioms and using them to try and raise a laugh.

I’m not sure how this first came about, but recently it’s kind of become a bit of a joke on the department that I want to use random Japanese idioms in meetings etc. And I have. Just for a laugh. This is helping me to break down that barrier that I believe has been constructed, one that clearly I must have constructed myself, but nevertheless one that I feel is there.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, this week my boss introduced me to a Japanese associate of the company. He’s not so hot at English, so she asked me, kind of jokingly, to speak Japanese. And, lo and behold, I had a chat with him in Japanese about the work we needed him to do for us. I think my boss was a little surprised, but she laughed. And it all seemed to go pretty well.

So that’s another first. Not a great leap, but a step in the right direction I guess. In the future, whenever I enter a situation where it is possible to use a foreign language, I am going to make it clear that I want to early on, no matter how bad my skills are, just to stop this barrier appearing.

If I stick to the impudent child method I spoke about then nobody is going to mind. Using humour is a great way to overcome these boundaries, whether it’s talking about funny idioms, or making example sentences about something ridiculous like Pandas again and again—something I do in my Chinese lessons—if people are laughing it’s difficult to feel uncomfortable.

Pronunciation reminder

Had a reminder this week about my pronunciation problems. I wrote about this ages ago, and how inportant it was, and then promptly completely forgot about it for a year or so.

It seems that when it comes to Japanese I can kid myself that the pronunciation is so simple (at least compared to Chinese) that I don't need to think about it. Not so!

I've also mentioned before that when you really try to speak as if you are a native speaker, almost mimicking the native speakers I guess, success seems to become easier to come by.  Tonight I was concentrating on doing this in my Chinese language exchange, and I could see my Chinese partner's positive reactions to what I was saying.

10 minutes later however my concentration had slipped, and I was back pronuncing words with a British drawl. My language partner's face had dropped, I could see the pain in her eyes.

Goddamnit! It's bloody hard work learning these foreign tongues. There's so much more to it than learning new words and grammar. You really have to live and breathe the language. You have to mold your mouth around the thing again and again to achieve a modicum of success.

This may sound a little defeatist, but the challenge is not motivation for me. Just technique and opportunity. I need to work on both.

Why children learn languages faster than adults: my two cents

When reading literature on language learning, and talking to language learners, again and again you hear the refrain "children learn languages a lot faster than adults."

I've read a lot of theories as to why this is, and I think the most convincing for me is that children have less fear of making mistakes than adults.

I often get daunted by Japanese. I hear something, a construction or idiom, and it daunts me to think I've been learning for five years, but haven't come across that phrase yet. I begin to wonder, how many of these unknown phrases are there out there? And how incredibly long will it take me to come across them all?

So I got to thinking about how a kid overcomes these problems: what makes them so immune from this? Why doesn't a child get daunted when it hears its parents, or the television, babbling away in unrecognisable jargon?

The conclusion I reached was that children clearly just don't care. They couldn't give a monkey's elbow about what the two adults in the corner of the room are babbling on about, because it's not important for them. It doesn't relate to their world. A child will not bother to try to understand a phrase or idiom they don't understand because it's not aimed at them, and it's not necessary for them to understand.

The people children speak to, their friends, parents, or teachers, don't speak to them using adult language, they don't use the sort of language that they would find going above their head.

I think this is what makes it easier for a child to learn a language, they are at the right age to speak the basics of a language and they don't need anything else. They are able to gradually build their vocabulary and knowledge of the language as their social needs require.

As an adult language learner I should be doing the same.

Of course this raises it's own difficulties in that I have to restrict myself to childish conversations in the beginning stages of my learning. As adults we often find ourselves in social situations that require a certain amount of maturity in conversation, and when you enter into a conversation as a beginner language learner this is pretty hard to do to say the least.

The temptation is, therefore, to try to learn language early on that you would like to use in an 'adult' conversation. This is something I've mentioned before as being one of my biggest failings as a language learner: the temptation to get ahead of myself in my impatience to reach fluency.

This results in me often finding myself in awkward positions where I am trying to say something that I don't have the linguistic skill to do, which results in a silence and the social awkwardness that this entails. Confidence is then affected, and loss of confidence is the worst thing that can happen for a language learner.

So I guess, my point is, speak like a child when starting out in a language, and don't be ashamed of it. The more confidently you use childish language the quicker you will begin to make progress and begin to sound like an adult. If this means you have to restrict the number of occasions you are able to speak the language in the beginning stages then so be it—although I don't think there is anything wrong in making basic sentences in an adult setting, just be sure to do it with the kind of swagger of someone who is comfortable with the fact that they are a beginner and not someone who is trying to feign knowledge of a language they don't have: be like the impudent child who isn't afraid to speak up when the adults are having a discussion.

A horrible sentence should be a horrible sentence in any language

I get the impression that I’m doing something wrong. I think there’s a quicker way. Nothing to do with study technique, but more to do with the way I’m thinking about the foreign language.

I feel there’s a shortcut. A better way to remember. A better way to retain the information—to somehow connect word and meaning faster and more permanently.

Take a sentence like this:

你把钥匙放在哪儿了？

In Chinese this sentence is an exotic thing to me. I’m in awe of it in a way. The use of 把 to indicate the direct object is something I can’t comprehend yet. The Chinese characters are both complex and beautiful (one of the main reasons I am interested in the Chinese and Japanese languages) and the sentence is something that is pleasing to the ear.

In English, on the other hand:

Where did you put the keys?

Oh God! What a horrible sentence. Could it be more mundane and everyday? A sentence that can only irritate, or cause frustration. “Oh, crap, somebody wants the keys. Now I have to remember where I put the damn things—I can never remember where I put the damn keys!! I might have to look around for them for a while, they must be lost if he/she’s asking for them. Crap!”

The words ‘exotic’, ‘awe’, ‘complex’, ‘beauty’, ‘interest’, and ‘pleasing’, are clearly words not springing to mind when I hear this sentence in English. So perhaps this is where I am going wrong. This is where my brain is taking me away from the reality of the situation.

你把钥匙放在哪儿了？should also fill me with dread. This is also a sentence to be feared: a sentence to strike fear into the heart.

This must be the shortcut to connect the meaning with the language (something I’m sure all those linguists go on about). This is the shortcut I need to start taking more often.

Note to self: must stop appreciating the beauty and sound of foreign sentences and Chinese characters and start taking note of the unpleasant consequences they can cause.

Success

YEEEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!

HaHa! Just completed a phone call in Japanese. My first full, fault free, everyday life phone call, on my own— No Japanese friend hanging over my shoulder prompting me, no hesitation, no embarrassing English help from the person on the other end of the phone. YES! I CANCELLED MY GAS CONTRACT OVER THE PHONE IN JAPANESE!!! And I'm pretty chuffed about it.

Next step. Ordering Pizza!!!!!

Language learning is a swimming pool not a path

What I want to tell you in this post is perhaps the most important thing I have learned about language learning since I started studying Japanese.

When I began learning Japanese five years ago I was a true beginner, not only to Japanese, but to language learning. Back then, I think I viewed learning a language rather like a path. It was something you had to make your way down until you got to the other end where you would achieve fluency. I viewed studying a language as a series of points on a line, which needed to be checked off before I could move on to the next point. “Seen that piece of grammer? Yes. Great! What’s the next piece on the ladder of difficulty?” Before I knew it, I was studying from intermediate books! Sure, I hadn’t really had any lengthy or in-depth conversations with anyone yet, but I knew the word for “government” and, and I’d seen all the beginner level grammar at least once, so... On to the next stage!”

Basically, my thinking was linear. I had to make my way down the path going past check points ticking things off. I thought I was on the fast track to Fluencydom!

The trouble with this approach however, was that I found I was beginning to get bogged down. Annoyingly, the intermediate texts were still full of the beginner grammar and vocab that I’d seen, but hadn’t really spent the time mastering, and I had to kind of re-learn it every time I came across it. This was a real pain in the arse, and made studying the actual intermediate level stuff really hard. "Why do they keep putting this beginner stuff in? I don't want to have to look at that again!" kind of thing. Disillusionment soon set in, and my “percieved” progress ground to a halt.

I’m not sure actually how I’ve reached the place where I am now, but with the help of the internet for ideas, (great sites like AJATT, LingQ, Lang 8 etc.), and blind, stubborn refusal to give up, I’ve been able to make some progress and alter my approach to studying languages.

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is that learning a language is not a path—and I’m going to stretch the analogy usage here a little—it’s a swimming pool. Yes, a swimming pool! Only, when you begin to study the language, the pool is empty. You have to fill it up, and what you have to do is start filling it up with lots and lots of sentences. Easy ones to begin with— because as everybody knows you can’t put difficult sentences into an empty swimming pool— and keep putting those easy sentences into the pool, until the the pool seems ready for slightly more difficult ones. And then, again, you need to add lots and lots of the slightly more difficult sentences to the pool before your you’ll start to see the water level rise.

I guess my point is that learning a language is nothing like solving a maths problem, or fixing a car, or walking down a path for that matter, it’s not really like any of those subjects that you learn at school that require you to get from A to B. It’s not linear, it’s voluminal (Can I say that?) You need the volume, not the checkpoints. Yes, it’s a long and gradual process to achieve the volume required to move onto the next stage, but it’s a process that is actually quite easy, and relatively painless once you know how to go about it and dedicate the time to doing it. Tiny, tiny baby steps, repeating over and over again what you know, slowly adding to this pool of knowledge that you are building up.

This conclusion is something that I’ve only really arrived at relatively recently, but as far as my Chinese study is going it is great. I can feel real progress when I talk to my Chinese teacher, and studying is painless and enjoyable because I know what I have to do, and I’m not pushing myself too hard. If only someone had told me this 10 years ago!

Consuming sentences more important than memorizing sentences

I tried for a long time to try and reproduce sentences I had memorized as language practice. This was a slow and painful process. A lot of time was spent digging around in my mind trying to find the clue that would allow me to remember the sentence. Looking back, I think this was a complete waste of time.

Now I just try to consume as many sentences as possible. I just see them, comprehend them, and let them sink in without worrying about being able to reproduce them. It’s easier and more fun that way, and the stress and discouragement that I felt from trying, and often failing, to reproduce sentences has gone. In the past, this kind of discouragement would perhaps have made me down books for a week or two, surely a much more damaging result that just letting a sentence go past without trying to memorize it! I think the thought of having to push myself through this memorization process was enough to make me think twice before picking up my textbooks during those times.

Now I'm banking on the fact that there are only a finite number of sentence patterns in a language, so enough exposure must surely result in mastery of enough of these patterns to achieve a certain level of fluency eventually.

I think this is clearly the case for vocab too. I remember my word list: a sheet of A4 paper that I used to create (by hand) everyday, containing ten to twenty Japanese words with example sentences. I would carry it around with me in my pocket and try to memorize the words every time I had a spare second. I remember there were words like 法律 (law) and 期限 (time frame) and countless others that I can't remember now because they clearly weren't relevant to my everyday life.

Useful, relevant words will crop up again and again, providing you are putting in enough hours in contact with the target language to allow this to happen, and I think in order to put in enough hours, you have to try to avoid discouraging things like sentence memorization.

Prove It!

Language learning is a series of stages that you need to prove that you can do. Once you have proved that you can do something you are then free to use it, experiment with it, improve it, fine-tune it, do what ever you want with it, but the first and most important stage is proving that you can do it.

Who do you have to prove you can do it to?

Well, first and foremost you have to prove that you can do it to yourself. Once you feel confident with the knowledge that you are able to do it, then you will feel like you have proved it.

How do you prove to yourself that you can do it?

By proving to other people that you can do it.

The biggest hurdle is getting across that barrier that people put up. The barrier that says you cannot do something, and if you try to do something I will listen carefully and comment on your ability to do that thing. When you fail, I will correct you. When you screw up big time I will laugh a bit and offer you encouragement. When you succeed, I will applaud you. When you have succeeded enough times to prove to me that you can do something, then I will just listen to what it is you are saying and take it on face value.

Only then have you proved it to yourself, and you are free to use it.

This is definitely the case with people you know. With complete strangers you have the advantage of them having no idea what your language ability is. But they will soon find out, and the barriers will then be set.

So, to be able to work on gaining full mastery over something you need to prove that you can do it. To yourself, through proving that you can do it to others. You will then be able to experiment with it to your heart’s content, all the while receiving natural responses because the listener knows you can do it.

That’s my experience, anyway.

Taking stock

I have come to a few conclusions about myself and my method of study over the past couple of days. Not sure what has brought this on. Guess it was just time for these things to occur to me.  Here are a few of the highlights:

I am a bit of a daydreamer.

I don’t concentrate hard enough when I study.

I am not concentrating on important things that are important for communication.

I am studying language that is too difficult, language that I will not be able to use because I do not have the foundations to get to a point in a conversation to use this language.

I need to practice basic sentences, and focus on sentences that are useful in communication.

I need to work with Anki more to practice lots and lots of basic sentences, to get myself confident with these, so I have the foundations to move further on.

I need to focus on Chinese or Japanese.

I want to focus on Chinese because I think I have more interest in China and more motivation to learn the language.

I need to study hard, and by this I mean focus hard, and get myself thinking about the language and challenging myself to produce the language more.


Ditching Japanese seems like a big step, and will be hard seeing that I live in Japan (for now). But I think as far as individual study goes, I want to focus exclusively on Chinese. I have the drive to do this, and when I study Japanese it feels like I am wasting time that I could be using to study Chinese. So I’m going to get rid of, or at least hide, all the Japanese language books I have in my apartment and focus on Chinese.

Step by step

I've just had two days off, and to be honest, I haven't really felt like studying much. This is not unusual and I've compensated by watching some TV and doing a bit of reading, but it has reinforced a pattern I've noticed in my emotions and motivation with regard to my language study.

It feels like there are a lot of very small steps that I need to climb to progress in a language. Every so often, it feels like I have climbed one of these steps, maybe I notice that I am able to understand something that I had had trouble with a few months previously, or it might just be a general feeling of progress that is hard to define, I just feel like I have improved in some way.

Climbing one of these steps is a good feeling, and may be followed by a few days of positive feelings about the whole thing, but this is, I have begun to notice, followed shortly after by a period of not such positive feelings—it's as if there is a high after the fact, that is, like any good drug addict will tell you, followed by a low.

I think the reason for this is probably pretty easy to work out. It's like the feeling of climbing one of those steps is accompanied by an expectation that the rest will be pretty straightforward—I've moved up a level and my language experience will improve! I can look forward to trouble free conversation anytime soon!—Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, and climbing one of these small steps is usually followed pretty quickly by more frustration and hardwork.

I think this has been the case this week. I'd had some pretty good conversations in the past week, using language I hadn't used before, and felt that I'd kind of found a comfort zone in the language. Of course this was soon followed by some less successful attempts, and this may have resulted in the lack of motivation over the last few days.

What can I learn from this? I guess not to get my hopes up so much might be one way of looking at it, but it seems a bit negative to me. The more positive way to look at it might be to try and remember what it was that had caused this feeling of progression, and try and do more of it in the future. In last weeks case, it was listening to podcasts on LingQ that I believe had given me the added confidence in my conversations that week, so I'm going to try and listen to a few more of them over the coming weeks.

Musical Instruments or Foreign Languages: which are harder?

Is mastering a foreign language as good an achievement as mastering a musical instrument?

I was skimming through this site the other day when I saw a Chinese Mandarin script that had been recorded by someone from Scotland, who listed their accent as Glaswegian. The thought of someone speaking Mandarin with a Glaswegian accent was pretty enticing, so I clicked on the recording, and, low and behold, the Mandarin was perfect. It really was like listening to a native speaker. I was well impressed!!

Well, this got me thinking as to how I would love to be able to speak Mandarin like this, and what a sense of achievement this would give me.

I began to think, would being able to speak Mandarin this well, be equivalent to say, mastering the violin, say to a level where you could play in a proper orchestra? And if so, why are there no people who are exulted for their second language talents, as world class artists like say Joshua Bell or Yo-Yo Ma are?

The only comparison I could think of is perhaps someone like 大山 Dashan, or Mark Henry Roswell, to give him his real name. But then 大山 really is famous for his performing skills I think, it just so happens that he is performing in a foreign language, and performing a type of cultural comedy, 相声 Xiangsheng, that is completely foreign to his native culture.

So I guess my question is this: Is learning a musical instrument to an extremely high standard more difficult than learning a foreign language fluently? Is there something that makes an art form like playing the violin different to training your vocal muscles in such a way that there are able to speak a foreign language?

One argument might be that mastering a foreign language really is just a means to an end, and not actually worth anything in itself—seeing that there are, depending on which language you are learning, already many millions of people who can already do what it takes a language learner years to achieve, just because they were born and raised in that area.

My feeling is that learning a second language is very much like learning a musical instrument, and the satisfaction gained from mastering either is just as great. The truly great pianists, cellists, and guitarists however, are at an advantage over the language learner in that they have mastered something that few people manage to do. Mastering a foreign language is equally, if not more difficult—you have to rely on, and use others to a certain extent to make progress, and bend to the culture and society of the language you are learning—but the number of people who actually master the skill are then dwarfed by the number of people who can do it anyway, without spending so much as a minute consciously thinking about it. It’s like spending years and years trying to behave and move like a cat, only to find out that there are already millions of cats!!

Perhaps.

Maybe I should take up the violin… again.

Actually, I should point out that the Mandarin recording uploaded by the Scotsman, was, it turns out, not actually recorded by a Scotsman at all, but by a native speaker. On further investigation it transpired that some technical difficulties forced the recording to be uploaded by someone other than the person who recorded it. Still, I’d like to think that there are some Glaswegians out there who can speak Mandarin like a native.

First Chinese Lang-8 entry

Yesterday marked my first Chinese entry on the Lang-8 website. Until now I have used the site exclusively for Japanese, but I decided to test the water with my Chinese with a simple entry about a visit to the park on a nice sunny day. It was short, and simple... and still needed correcting. Am I depressed about this? Not at all. I'm happy that I feel confident enough to make an entry in Chinese and I feel I know what I need to do to improve—due to my experience learning Japanese. Learning both languages certainly seems like a tall order, and I'm not convinced myself that it's a sensible idea, but I still have plenty of motivation and I guess that's what is important. My theory goes that once you know how to learn a language yourself, (that being what works for you: a good method, and the path you need to take) then picking up other languages becomes easier—it certainly seems to be the case so far for me anyway. Here's the post, and the correction in red:

东京的公园
Tokyo Park

今天去东京的公园了。
今天去了东京的公园。
Today I went to a park in Tokyo.

天气很好。
The weather was good.

我喜欢坐在公园。
我喜欢坐在公园里。
I like to sit in the park.

New blog; new course

New blog. First entry. Hoping to keep a record of my progress learning Chinese and Japanese. I realise that learning both is a bit of a tall order, but I started learning Japanese about three years ago then became really interested in China and Chinese about a year ago and decided that I wanted to learn Chinese. Can't bring myself to give up Japanese yet-- as I've spent far too much time and money up until now. So going to plough on with both and see what happens.

On holiday for the next few days so decided to take a few extra Japanese lessons during the break. First one was this morning. Going was a bit slow, but all good practice I guess.