Jiaozi on the zhuozi

I started a new language exchange recently with a Chinese girl who works in Tokyo. I'm very glad I did it. There's no substitute to practicing with a native speaker, especially when it comes to Chinese it seems.

You have to hit those tones spot on, or you won't be understood at all, it's like fine tuning a frickin harp! One missed vowel sound and the comprehension level just completely disappears.

I've been doing a lot of practice listening and repeating to try and get my pronunciation down, but I think I need to be more conscientious of the tones when I learn a new word, and perhaps practice my vowel sounds a bit more too. I couldn't get her to understand 桌子 (zhuozi: table) all night, but that's because I had it written down as zhouzi (o before u) and I kept pronouncing it wrong, I also fouled up and said 饺子 (jiaozi: dumpling) by mistake once aswell.

She kept repeating it for me, and I would copy her 5 or 6 times, move on, and then make the same mistake 5 or 6 minutes later. In the end I decided to make a mnemonic connecting the pronunciation to "Jaws" the movie in my head—it's not a perfect match, but it'll do for now.

It was only later that I realized I had written the damn word down wrong and this was probably the reason for my repeated failure to get the pronunciation right.

Anyway, when your in the thick of these conversations it makes you wish you'd spent a bit more time on the tones and pronunciation of the words when you first learnt them, so I'll be trying to do that a bit more in future.

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.

Recall flashcards are no more

I decided to suspend the recall cards in my Anki flashcard deck. (recall cards are when the English sentence appears and you have to try and remember the Chinese.) I'm not sure how much good they're doing, and they are the most frustrating part of doing flashcards.

I said before that the help I'm getting from the audio files with my pronunciation is the best part of the flashcards for me. Trying to translate the English sentence into Chinese in my head is taxing, and could potentially be counter-productive seeing that translating in your head is one thing you should be avoiding when speaking/learning a foreign language.

The recall cards are still there, but for now I want be using them. This means I won't have those painful moments trying to rack my brain for the corresponding Chinese sentence to translate the English. It'll just be straight reading the Chinese sentences, whilst listening to and practicing the pronunciation. Hopefully, this will make using the flashcards a more efficient and enjoyable experience, and I should be able to get through a higher volume of sentences faster.

The flashcard debate

One of my more personalized flashcards

Are flashcards really the answer? Doubts are beginning to creep in to be honest. They're definitely helpful, and with the audio file added, they give me good practice listening and repeating after a native speaker, which is pretty valuable for Chinese because of the pronunciation difficulties.

But I've begun to think that as far as absorbing vocabulary and sentences goes, maybe using podcast material is more beneficial over the long-term. Podcasts give you more context, and are certainly more interesting than the flashcards, which are really just a series of unrelated, random sentences.

I follow a few other language bloggers on the internet, and I know that there are those that are against flashcards, and those that are for. I'd probably say that I'm in the 'for' camp for now, just from the point of view that they are a good tool for remembering certain phrases, and for remembering Chinese characters.

But they do have their drawbacks. One of the main ones—which is really the reason I have begun thinking about them a little more critically of late—is that you really do have to tailor them for yourself, and this can be time-consuming. I sometimes find myself spending more time, looking for, copying and pasting, and uploading sentences, than I do actually thinking about them in a meaningful, semantic way.

But like I said my current deck of cards has definitely helped me progress in some ways, especially with the pronunciation, so I'll keep them ticking over for now I guess, just to keep my options open.

Music

I still remain to be convinced of the benefits of using music to learn a foreign language. I've been playing a couple of Chinese language tunes that I like on my ipod for a couple of weeks now, but the lyrics are not really sinking in.

I guess I need to study them harder or something, but making out the lyrics on songs was never my strong point anyway. I tend to be more interested in the tune when I'm listening to a song, and very often don't pick up on the lyrics.

Two of my favourite bands are Massive Attack and Radiohead. And I've listened to their albums for years without really knowing the lyrics that well. I think their songs really speak to you through the music itself.

Anyhow, from the point of view of picking up vocabulary, and increasing your ability to speak the language, I don't think music is that useful. One thing I will say for it though is it does give you a topic of conversation to use with native speakers.

Living in Japan, I've come to like a couple of Japanese artists. One of my favourites is Angela Aki. I think she's got a great voice. I don't think she's the kind of artist most people expect a thirty-something British guy like me to come out and say they like, so it's always surprising to people when I bring up her name. It makes for good conversation anyway.

If your interested, this is probably my favourite of her songs 孤独のカケラ — translates as fragment of solitude.

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!

The importance of having options

I think it's important to have a lot of different studying options to hand when you are learning a language, especially in the early stages anyway. It's very easy to get bored with what you're doing quickly, so having a number of different styles of study you can turn to when you get bored with one thing is important.

Today, I've been struggling a bit, I've mentioned this before: if the motivation dwindles it's difficult to get yourself going. But I've been flicking between things tonight, trying to get something done, and I must have accumulated at least one hours worth of useful study I think.

Back when I started studying Japanese three or four years ago, one hour in an evening was a really good achievement, because it meant sat slogging my way through a textbook. Now I have flashcards, podcasts, blogs, music, reading websites, youtube... basically any sort of contact with the language is good in my book now, and I can keep myself interested and occupied. Now one hour is a bad night, which bodes well for my language development over the next few years.

JLPT test voucher

I've finally received the test voucher for the Japanese Proficiency Test (JLPT).

I say finally, because I actually applied for the test around August/September time, and what with the amount of paperwork and the stamp address envelopes and registered mail things I had to sign seal and approve to get the thing sent off, I was expecting a pretty quick reply—-at least a 'thanks for applying, we'll be in touch' card or something.

When I didn't get this, I began to wonder if my application had actually been lost in the post, along with my 5000 yen, and I must admit, I actually had a bit of a chuckle to myself about the irony of it all. (I'm not sure why, but secretly I actually love it when the Japanese bureaucracy machine grinds to a halt. I guess it's the part of me that's filled out one too many forms just to justify my right to stay here.)

But anyway, the fact of the matter was I wasn't actually that bothered about my application getting lost. To be honest, since applying I've hardly spent any time studying Japanese. (I have a class every week that I still attend.) And my initial intention in applying was only as a sort of dry run, before taking the thing for real next year.

However, now I have a test centre, and a date and time to focus my mind, so I guess I better do something about it. I have two and a half weeks!!

Getting immersed

I haven't written a post for ages, and there's an excellent reason for that. All my time has been taken up studying and blogging in Chinese. It's great! I got caught up in the whole flashcards thing, and that has been keeping me busy, but now I've also got myself up and running on China's version of twitter. Come and check it out at:

http://t.sina.com.cn/easterngrean

All good for getting immersed. Also getting into some Chinese music through this search engine.

And even started watching a bit of TV and listening to the radio here.

There are no excuses anymore!

Tweet

My method for making flashcards

Things seem to be moving quickly of late with regard to study method. I've almost ditched the idea of completing the Smart FM goals (yes, it does seem pointless to set a goal only to ditch it) but I think I've come up with a better method.

I need to really nail those basic sentences and get the pronunciation down pat for the Chinese. So I've started data mining sentences to put into my Anki flashcard deck.

Basically, if I find a word I think is important, say "important" for example, I'll search for sentences that contain the word "important", mostly from tatoeba and nciku. The sentences need to be fairly straightforward, and not contain other new vocabulary that I'll need to learn on top of "important". This way, when I go over the card, I can concentrate on the sentence, the word, and the pronunciation. If the sentence contains recently studied words or grammar that's even better.

I then collate these sentences and put them into anki. Over the course of a day I might add 10-30 new sentences which cover anywhere from 3 -10 new words or phrases.

The final stage of this process is putting the sentences up on Rhino Spike to get a native speaker to make a recording. I haven't really worked out the best way to do this yet, but I've got a few in the Anki deck already, and these sentences in particular really stick when it comes to having to review them.

The only possible sticking point with this method I can see so far is the number of Chinese speakers who use Rhino Spike. It's not a great number at the moment, and the sentences generally take a few weeks to get recorded. Hence my previous post attempting to recruit through a Chinese social networking language sites who's name I won't mention for now.

Anyway, all is good at the moment. Feel positive about this. Just need to knuckle down and start getting through the flashcards.

Journal writing deleted on italki

I wrote a journal entry on italki about the audio recording site Rhino Spike.

Admittedly, although I claimed to be sharing the benefits of the site with italki users, my reasons for writing it were self-serving.

I uploaded a load of Chinese Mandarin sentences on Rhino Spike that I wanted recording to put with my Anki flash cards, to help with my mandarin pronunciation.

These haven't been recorded yet, so I figured I'd try and get a few more Mandarin speakers using the site by writing a little piece about it in Mandarin and posting it on italki.

Anyway, I just received a message from another user telling me that she just saw my entry moments before it was deleted (by the administrators we presume).

Why would they do this?

They don't want competition from other language sites?

These two sites are hardly in direct competition. And I'd have thought if italki really wanted to help their users, they'd at least encourage this sort of information sharing.

Seems like overkill on their part to me. They see another website being talked about and they immedietely delete the entry?

Is this what the internet is about?

Or is Rhino Spike a blacklisted site in mainland China?

I can't really see why.

Anyway, here's my entry for those poor souls at italki!

一个实用的网站

我觉得这个网的概念非常好。

大家知道这个网站马？

http://rhinospike.com

你的想听的外语文章能录被讲母语的人录下来。

我想录的上载句子很多。

你有空就看看一下这个网站

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.

Putting my foot in it!

So language error of the day today may make it into the top ten for the year.

I wanted to buy some running shoes, so I went to a store in Shinjuku where I was told they sell the sort I'm after. I couldn't see any on the shelves so I plucked up the courage to ask one of the staff if they sold them.

すみません。。。

My enquiry was met, as usual, with a rather long winded reply, which I interpreted to mean, no we don't have any at the moment.

Not too discouraged by this I decided to plough on and ask when they would get some in. The clerk wasn't sure, so I was escorted over to his boss, who began to go on about sizes and seemed to be saying that they'd have some in tomorrow.

Great! I thought. It was then that the conversation took a turn for the worse.

What size are you?

She asked.

Oh, shit!

I've never bothered to remember what my shoe size measurement is in Japanese / American measurements, so, beginning to get a little flustered, I told her that I only knew my size in UK measurements.

In fact, I made a bit of a mess of telling her that, and a thin layer of sweat had by now formed on my head as I began to mentally wrestle with the dual problem of shoe size conversion and foreign language communication.

Oh, that's OK. She said. What 's your shoe size in UK size?

Oh, she knows UK sizes? Great!... Shit!..... What is my shoe size in UK sizes.....? Oh yeah it's 11..... or 12.... or something like that isn't it.

11 o'clock. I said.....

..... or half past eleven.

Yes, that's right I converted my feet into clocks and began to talk about the time.

They didn't seem to mind too much though, and it was only when it dawned on me that I had made the error that I brought real attention to it by trying to correct it. No, no! not 11:30 of course, 11 and a half.

Unfortunately, all my hard work went unrewarded as there is no knowing, apparently, when they will have any 11s or 11 and a halfs in. And, in my rush to extract myself from the embarrassing "feet becoming clocks" conversation I didn't manage to find out what an 11 and a half is in Japanese measurements.

Better google it I guess...

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.

Chinese character goal

I have set myself the goal of completing all the Smart FM Chinese character goals by the end of February—6 months from now.

This goal will be difficult, but I have made it difficult in the belief that this will get me to study faster and harder than if the goal was easier.

At the moment I’m on level 2. Level 1 took me approximately 20 hours. Considering level 1 was pretty easy for me anyway because I’m familiar with a lot of the basic Kanji, let’s say that it takes 24 hours to complete one level. In that case, a robot would be able to complete the course in 10 days. Unfortunately, I’m not a robot, so 6 months is my goal. That means I have to complete one and a bit goals per month—let’s say 30 hours a month. That’s about an hour a day. When I have to work, that's unlikely, but if I can keep in the game, I can play catch up when I have some spare time.

I'm going to measure my progress by saying 50% of each level should be completed by the 15th of the month—50% of level 2 by 15th September, level 3 15th October and so on, and the whole goal should be completed by the end of the month (so far, so good). Then it's just a case of fitting those other 2 or 3 goals in somewhere along the way.

Should I manage this, then in theory, I should know enough Chinese to read a newspaper by March next year. I guess the grammar might be a little weak here, but if the goals work as they should, then character recognition and pronunciation shouldn't be a problem. Seems hard to believe.

Watch this space.

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.

Exciting new blog

I have a new blog!

And no messing around this time. This one's going straight to the heart of the Japanese nation. A Japanese blog, in Japanese.

Check it out:

http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/easterngrean

My initial idea is to try and translate Japanese news articles into English. I'm gonna try and select ones that have links to China, and hopefully, as my Chinese improves, I'll be able to translate them into Chinese too. Actually, I mean, from Chinese, into English. Vice versa will probably have to wait a bit longer.

Anyway, hope it's interesting.

Feedback/comments welcome!

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.

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).

Need more time

Lately, I've had little free time for studying, and it begins to feel like I might have forgotten everything. Of course it's not true, but I think momentum and continuity are very important in language learning. At times where I have had time to study over a period of days, confidence grows and I can notice the improvement. I guess, it's obvious to say, but I really need more time to study.

On a seperate note, I've noticed that I tend to retain flashcard vocabulary better if it's part of a sentence, rather than just presented on its own, so I'm trying to improve my flashcard vocab decks. I think I might have said this before, but context is important, and helps with memorization.

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.

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.

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.

Preparing for the future - speaking Japanese

Speaking to my friend last night, she told me that I sound like a foreigner when I speak Japanese. Bad news! I haven't paid much attention to pronunciation when speaking Japanese because when I started out, learning the pronunciation of the Japanese syllabary was pretty straightforward, so I think there was a tendency to imagine that I had it mastered it and ignore this aspect of communication.

Japanese pronunciation is much flatter than English. My pronunciation has a rising and falling intonation to it, so it doesn't feel natural to me to speak in a flat tone - it's something I have to concentrate on when I do it.

I was trying to think about speaking like a robot to make my pronunciation more Japanese, but you can take this too far - you don't want to talk through your nose and end up sounding like a Dalek, however tempting this may be.

Anyway, I was reminded of the Flight of the Conchords, and their song, The Humans are Dead. It's pretty funny.

Transitive and intransitive verbs

I can never remember these, and never bother to try. I get the feeling my Japanese would improve a lot if I made the effort. So here goes:

Transitive verbs are the verbs that take an object. As in 'I open the door', vs. 'The door opens'. Here 'open' is both transitive and intransitive in English, so easy to remember. But if we translate it to Japanese we have to use two different verbs: あける and あく。

So 'I open the door' becomes: 私はドーアを開ける。And 'the door opens' becomes ドーアが開く。 Notice that the transitive verb takes a を as the object marker, while the intransitive verb takes a が.

Now it's just a case of remembering all the variations - and there is no rule to help you do this. Here is a list of some transitive and intransitive verbs:

Write blog

Had my Chinese lesson this morning. It was very good. I was really concentrating on putting myself in the mindset of communicating in Chinese, rather than just trying to put everything into my head the way it is organised in English.

Thought about the film Raising the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂 Dà Hóng Dēnglóng Gāogāo Guà) during the lesson. And the way the guy gets them all to extinguish the lanterns with the command in Chinese, something like, "Feng deng!" (btw probably the most Chinese Chinese film I've ever seen, and really good. Highly recommended.) Chinese can be like that sometimes though; "Here's five yuan" can be literally translated into English as “give you five yuan” (给你五块钱）So I think the guy in the movie was saying something like "out lanterns!"

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。

Getting in the zone

There's definitely a mood that you have to get into for language studying. A sort of zone - like a sprinter I suppose, or an artist painting a picture - when you're in the zone it's all so easy: words come readily into your head, recognizing kanji is like reading the alphabet, communication is just plain simple.

I think there are probably a number of factors that contribute to whether or not you are in the zone, but the obvious one for me is confidence. I've noticed that after particularly successful lessons, or conversations, my ability to study and absorb the language is heightened. It seems obvious to say, but after a bad lesson, or an occasion where you found you couldn't even utter a sentence, the motivation to study just isn't there at all - for me anyway.

What I want to do is try and find a way to place myself in the zone without having to wait for some fortuitous circumstance to put me there. Maybe a I need to start boiling potions or something. Try to find the elusive elixir of second language acquisition. My goodness, I'd probably make a fortune.

Daily routine

At the moment I have about four or five different memorization / flashcard tasks that I set myself to complete every day. These things don't take much thinking about, or motivation to do. They're kind of like the chores that I have to complete of an evening - like the washing up, only more frustrating/rewarding/annoying/interesting etc. Beyond that, at the moment I have these two books that I said to myself I'm going to get through. These take up more time, and are therefore taking a little bit more motivation before they get picked up.

Spring has arrived, so I'm inside

Decided to also take a systematic approach to a Chinese grammar book that I own, 中国語会話。The great thing about this book for me is that it's aimed at Japanese people, but the Chinese is at a fairly basic level; therefore, I get to review some Japanese as I study the Chinese grammar. My decision to go through this book came about after my Chinese lesson on Friday. The pronunciation, as everyone says, is very difficult, and it's clear to me that it's going to take a lot of practice to get anywhere near comfortable with it. To that end, I've decided to bring my study indoors. I've always liked to study in a local coffee shop or library, but to make progress with the Chinese pronunciation it really is necessary to get your toungue around it, so for the sake of my own fragile confidence and the well-being of other coffee shop-goers I think I'll be working on this one from home.

Fortunately, spring has finally arrived in Tokyo, and my apartment lends itself well to warm weather (i.e. in the winter it is a small prison cell; in the spring / summer I can open the large windows and enjoy the fresh air).

Emperor project

This is a project I've had in mind for a while now. I'd like to make some sort of record of all the main Chinese emperors. Chinese history is very interesting, and I find the emperors themselves, and all the ceremony, myths, legends, and intrigue related to them, fascinating. Quite often they were just figureheads and the people with real control of the empire often lurked in the background, controlling the emperor as they liked (often this would be a eunuch or dowager empress who planted a young, inexperienced emperor on the throne in order to take control themselves). On the other hand, some emperors were absolute tyrants, who commanded vast armies, and undertook massive construction products at great cost of life. My first choice falls into this category: Emperor Yang of the Sui. From what I read he has a pretty bad rep among historians, but was also responsible for some pretty impressive construction projects including completion of the Grand Canal, which was so vital to China's trade and commerce over the coming centuries.

I'll be placing them on a separate page, which can be found on the links to the right.

Good days and bad days

Yesterday was great. I had a really good lesson in the morning - lots of chat, used some grammar structures I hadn't used before. It was so good I found that for the rest of the day Japanese was just rattling around my head. I couldn't stop learning and practicing in my mind so much so that picking up a book to study was just effortless.

Today was completely different. We had a different teacher, and I think she must have been pretty new because it was hard work for the other student and I to figure out what we were supposed to be doing. Anyway, I haven't really been interested in studying much today.

Youtube videos

Watching videos on youtube in the target language is a good way to improve your skills. I think it's important to find interesting ones. This is one I found recently that I particularly like.

Latest idea

So my latest brainwave for getting over this barrier which I seem to have hit in my Japanese study is to make my way systematically through the Japanese grammar dictionary (どんな時どう使う） A more advanced student than I recommended doing this about a year or so ago, but the size of the book put me off a bit - and I don't think I was really ready at that point for such a commitment. Anyway, the book is big, and the prospect of making my way through every grammar point is daunting. However, I think it's got to be done for those moments in a conversation when you know what you want to say, you know the vocabulary you need to say it, but the damn grammar structure just isn't there. So, I'm going to give it a go. (I'm skipping the level 4 ones as I think I've got them down by now.)

So, over the last couple of days I've looked at:

ないことはない：kind of works like かもしれない
ところだ：I've known this construction for a while, but never use it.
おりに：First time to see this one. Think it works like 際　but perhaps more like an opportunity to do something, have to check on this. Also not sure how common this one is.

My only concern is how deeply you have to study these things to get them to stick. In the past I was all for writing out my own examples, but I've come to the conclusion that this is a bit of a waste of time, so I'm just going to study them, then put them into my Anki flashcard deck (an example sentence of each) to review at intervals later.

How long will this take me? Well, if I do all the level 2 and 3 grammar points, I'm looking at something like six months I reckon. That would take me to the JLPT test next December, which could work out nicely.

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.