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.

Vocab drive

I'm on a drive to learn as much vocabulary as possible.

The longer I study Japanese, the more the enormity of the task becomes apparent to me, and therefore the more time I end up committing to it.

On recent consideration of how slow my progress was becoming I decided to start watching as much TV as possible. My self-satisfaction at being able to work out what the plotline of a particular drama was was soon tempered by the realization that over 50% of the vocabulary is still unknown to me. Hence the vocab drive.

Using the Anki flashcards and the tangorin dictionary website I've set up a system where every new word I come across is saved into tangorin, and then example sentences uploaded to anki at the end of the month. I'm then able to review the vocab over the next couple of months on my phone.

I've actually been using this system for over a year now, and I'm starting to see some good results. It's a good feeling when a word you have recently been learning crops up on TV and your understanding of that word opens up a whole new area of meaning to the conversation that you're listening to. It's like an extra light being turned on in a badly lit room.

The language of earthquakes and disaster

"けっこう揺れてるね。Kekko yureterune"

This is a sentence I've heard quite a lot over the past few weeks. Roughly translated as "It's shaking quite a bit isn't it."

It's now over a month since the day when the Great Tohoku Earthquake hit Japan, but the effects of that day will continue for some time. One of the more noticable effects here in Tokyo are the continuing aftershocks.

Coming from the UK I had never experienced an earthquake before arriving in Japan five years ago. The UK seems to be ideally positioned, somewhere in the middle of a large, relitively stable, tectonic plate. Every 5 years or so you would hear a story about some minor eathquake hitting a small town somewhere, but these were pretty rare and freakish. Certainly, nobody I knew had ever expereinced one in the UK.

Over the past month I've often thought what a disaster on this scale would be like in the UK. How would the British people, government and emergency services deal with something like this? The only reasonable answer I can come up with would be to say that they certainly wouldn't deal with it as well as the Japanese.

One interesting point for me, being interested in languages, is all the new words and phrases I've come across in the past month. Listening to Japanese people talk about earthquakes has got me thinking how in the UK, not only do we not have the technology or knowhow to deal with something like this, we also don't have the vocabulary.

Here are a selection of words that I've become familiar with over the past month.

"地震 Jishin": Earthquake. In English we have 'earthquake': earthquakes are pretty common around the world, so it's not surprising that English has it's own word for this. But next we have: "震災 Shinsai" This translates as earthquake disaster, not a terribly common term in English. I guess in the UK, a disaster is a disaster, we don't have special words for different types of disaster, because we just don't have enough of them. In Japan this disaster is called "東日本大震災 Higashi Nihon Dai Shinsai" The Great Earthquake Disaster of East Japan.

The classic word that has crossed over from Japanese to English of course is "津波 tsunami". Sushi is from Japan, so is tsunami!

The Japanese method for measuring earthquakes is different from the rest of the world. In Europe we use the Richter Scale, measuring earthquake magnitude from 0 to 10. In Japan, they have a scale from 1 to 7 which, more relevantly for people living here, marks the violence of the shaking experienced in different areas during an earthquake. So in Tokyo on March 11th we experienced "震度５Shindo Go" Shaking intensity of 5. (pretty scary I might add). In the past few days however, people in the Tohoku region have been experiencing aftershocks ("余震 Yoshin") of "震度６Shindo Roku"! There is also "弱 Jyaku": weak, and "強 Kyou": strong, that are sometimes added to these measurements. I think these are upper and lower measurements for each level, so a "震度６弱 Shindo roku jyaku" is stronger than a "震度５強 Shindo go kyou".

Here are two words that really nobody wants to have to be distinguishing between "横揺れ Yokoyure" swaying from side to side, and "縦揺れ tateyure" vertical shaking, pitching. Both used to describe the type of movement experienced during an earthquake.

After such a devastating earthquake and tsunami the destuction left behind is unimaginable. In Japanese they have "被災地 Hisaichi" I think disaster zone is a good translation of this. "被災 Hisai" just means suffer from disaster, and "地 Chi" is a suffix for place or area. You also have "被災者 Hisaisha" The people affected by the disaster, many of whom have become "避難者 Hinansha" Evacuees, and are now living in "避難所 Hinansho" Evacuee shelters.

Listening to the way Japanese people talk about earthquakes gives a good indication of how much of an integral part of life it is here. This familiarity gives them a great advantage when dealing with this kind of emergency. I think this is reflected in their measured reaction to the events of the past month. In the UK, if something like this were to happen, we would have to find a whole new set of vocabulary to deal with it, and I think this would add to the difficulties.

Using kid's jokes

Recently I’ve started using children’s jokes to study. When it comes to language studying, especially for lowish level people like me, jokes have a number of things going for them as far as I can see:

1. They are short.

2. They contain lots and lots of dialogues and useful everyday language.

3. They usually hold your attention to the end because you are waiting for the punchline.

4. You never get tired of jokes—even bad jokes are good if you know what I mean.


Here is an example of an amusing, bad joke I’ve just uploaded and studied in LingQ—complete with my dodgy translation:


谁是孩子的父亲？
Who is the child’s father?

迈克是学校的勤杂工。
Mike is the school’s handyman.

有一天正坐在家中，突然一只足球破窗而 入，打在他身上，
One day, when he was sitting at home, all of a sudden a football smashed through his window and hit him.

一个小男孩满头大汗跑进来，说：“sorry，我马上打电话叫爸爸来给你修。”
A small boy ran in with sweat pouring from his brow saying “Sorry, I’ll phone my dad immediately and get him to come and fix it.”

一小时以后，果然来了个大个子男人，
An hour later, as expected, a large man came.

手脚利索地把玻璃装好，
With nimble hands he fixed the window quickly

随后向史克要10美元材料费和工钱。
Then asked for 10 dollars for material costs and labour fee.

迈克惊异地说：“你难道不是孩子的父亲？”
Mike said with amazement, “Could it be you are not the boy’s father?”

来人也惊奇地说：“你难道不是孩子的父亲？”
To which the man also with amazement replied, “Could it be you are not the boy’s father?”

It’s a kids joke: it’s cheesy and old, but I like it. There’s plenty of useful language in there, and I wasn’t sure of the punchline until the end, so my attention was held—unlike a lot of language learning material you come across. (although I'm not sure why Mike has to be a handyman, when it's his window being fixed. Maybe I've missed something in the translation here?)

This is where I’ve been getting some Chinese kid’s jokes from, and I've been uploading them into LingQ and saving the vocab in there. If anybody knows of any other good resources it'd be good to hear about them.

Using Google images

Yesterday I had a lesson in Chinese about ordering in a restaurant. I'll be honest, I'm a complete dunce when it comes to food. Even in English I have trouble describing dishes and tastes, so trying to do it in Chinese is an Everest sized task for me. Anyway, I left the class with a list of Chinese food stuffs on my sheet of paper and as I sat down to go over the vocabulary today I was struck by a great idea: Google images!

Check it out. Just punch the word into google and you get the perfect idea of what you're looking up.

From the top we have:

粽子 zong4zi: a rice ball in a leaf

春卷 chun1juan3: spring rolls

馒头 man2tou: steamed bun

羊肉串 yang2rou4chuan4: lamb kebabs

粥 zhou1: congee

在香港我吃了真好吃的粥！

Flashcards and pronunciation

It seems hard to believe that I've only been doing these flashcards for about a month and a half. It feels like a lot longer.

This may be because I have been doing flashcards of one sort or another for a lot longer, it's just that I've only been using this method for about a month and a half.

It's great though. I can feel the improvement in my pronunciation when I speak. Having the audio file attached is a great help in this respect. Being able to listen and repeat after every card is a great advantage.

I've just got back from a few days holiday in Hong Kong, and despite it being a Cantonese speaking area, I was able to put my Mandarin into practice on a couple of occasions. I found that the people I spoke to were able to understand my pronunciation, which is what most learners of Chinese say is the most frustrating thing, so I took a lot of encouragement from that. The biggest problem for me was not knowing enough vocabulary.

Hopefully, six months or so more of the flashcards and this won't be so much of a problem.

Can't wait!

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.

Pay a visit

Again, the power of using Lang-8 has come to my aid. I was scratching my head for the word to say that I had visited somewhere, like when I was in Africa I visited a lot of Safari Parks, or something like that. I know 訪問する is for visiting, but kind of more like if an Ambassador visits a church. I was thinking of 訪ねる（たずねる）but I think this is more often used if you visit your Gran, so I ended up putting plain old 行った:went, when in doubt I guess, just plump for the safest option. Anyway the corrections I got threw up 訪れる（おとずれる）, which I've never heard before, but obviously has the same kanji as たずねる。Looking at my dictionary now actually, looks like these two are pretty interchangeable. Here's the dictionary def: 「訪れる」は、「訪ねる」とほぼ同じ意味だが、「彼を訪れる」という言い方はせず、「彼の家を訪れる」の形になる。他に、「春が訪れる」「平和が訪れる」のように、ある時期・季節・状態が「やってくる」の意味にも用いる

Building a method

Starting to get into a routine after some time away from studying. Taking the useful sentences that I come across in the Smart FM quizzes and putting them into Anki. This should help build my vocabulary, get myself familiar with the sentence patterns, and help with my pronunciation, if I read them out loud as I go through them. This is just for the Chinese at the moment. Kind of feels like I'm starting with a clean slate with the Chinese after wasting so much time learning useless stuff with the Japanese (studying words I will never use in conversation, and not going over what, if anything, I had learnt).

Words and sentences

The majority of flashcards I use on the computer are single vocabulary words, but recently I've begun to add more sentences to my decks to supplement the vocabulary. This has helped a lot, and I'm finding that my retention rate of newer vocabulary is higher when it has an accompanying sentence. I think the context that this lends to the word helps to fix in place. Anyway, using Anki and the online dictionary, Tangorin, is a good combination for doing this. Exporting saved vocabulary from Tangorin to the Anki decks is a piece of cake - just set up an account with Tangorin and use the vocabulary lists.

Word for today

だらだら One of the many onomatopoeic words in the Japanese language. This one can mean to run on/down - as in tears sweat down your face, or, more usefully for me I think, to drag on. Today there was a meeting at work that dragged on and on. I wrote about it on the Lang-8 website and I learnt this word from a contributor.
問題がなかったのにみんなが話し続けてしまいました。
becomes: 問題がないのにみんな（だらだらと）話し続けてしまいました。