Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, bits of French)

[garyb]

Since you mention Spy x Family, it's worth noting that Anya uses incorrect grammar, such as saying "daijyoubu masu" instead of "daijyoubu desu".

I did notice that a lot of the subtitles for her speech have pronunciation or grammar mistakes, so I figured as much and told myself that one day my Japanese comprehension will be good enough to notice what the original mistakes are! It might not even be that far away if they're basic stuff.


Japanese: Levelling up: yesterday I reached 4 on both Genki and WaniKani!

On Genki: lesson 3 was quite short and sweet, and as expected the grammar mostly wasn't new to me. Just a lot of new words.

I can't say I'm enjoying the pre-made Genki Anki decks much. Seems that the maker took the assignment of "make cards for all the words" a bit too literally and there are a lot of repetitive ones for time (1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 3'oclock...), minutes past the hour, age (x years old), etc., plus some of the words just don't feel worth learning yet. And I'm just not a fan of single-word cards - partial-word sentence cloze cards are the way for me - although when you're still learning the basics there's often not enough understandable context for sentence cards. Which is one reason I think Anki only really starts to become useful once you're past the early stages, like where I am in German now.

For now I'm deleting liberally, but I might decide it's not a useful activity and just drop it for now, and maybe after a few more lessons make my own deck for words that I feel are important but not quite high-frequency enough to catch on "automatically". There are other ways to get extra practice with the Genki material, like this free lessons site I found the other day.

On WaniKani: I'm finally understanding how to use it properly. Intervals start at 4 hours, then 8 hours, then 24 hours, so study sessions should be planned around that. For example: new lessons at 8am, review at 12pm, review at 8pm. This is very well-discussed in their forums, but it would be nice if they made it clearer when you first sign up. Anyway it's feeling easier for the moment especially now that I'm getting into that routine, and I think I'm past the first of many humps.

German: Just the usual things. I've got back into using Language Reactor with YouTube, which I "boycotted" for a while because they don't support Firefox and keep lying about the support "coming soon", but at this point I care more about results than principles and it's great for input and sentence mining. Chrome is pretty much a necessity for the modern language learner now anyway, between extensions like that and things like speech input (used by Google Translate, DuoLingo, etc.) that don't work on FF.

[garyb]

Japanese

Finished Genki lesson 4. Again the grammar was all either familiar or quite simple, but there was a lot of new vocab. I suspsect that's going to be the theme for this textbook.

My WaniKani practice definitely helped with some of the vocab: even if there's not much overlap in terms of words, there are parts of words that are familiar. Like the days of the week: I recognised 6 out of 7 of the prefixes (sun, moon, fire, water, tree/wood, earth) and for example remembering "fire-day" is far easier than just remembering the sound "ka" on its own, and all the more when it's written with the fire kanji 火 that I already know well. And it goes in the other direction too: I saw the verb "to see" written with 見 in Genki, then the very next day saw 見 as a radical called "see" in WK. The multi-track approach really is the way.

A few nights ago I had a dream where I was lost in Tokyo and asked for directions to the airport in Japanese. I guess that means I'm fluent now

Hiragana: Forbidden Speech seems to be working as advertised in terms of making anime more understandable: I'm hearing a lot of the words I'm learning from it in Spy × Family, like informal forms (particularly informal pronouns like "omae" for "you": things make much more sense knowing that!), "action" verbs, and mild insults.

In spite of the name, I'm not sure I'd recommend the game to someone who doesn't yet know Hiragana at all, just because I feel there are other resources that teach it better. The mnemonics are poor compared to the likes of Tofugu's, but it's good if you have the basic knowledge already and want to practise it. Some of the grammar and usage explanations are also surprisingly good, like differences between formal and informal phrases and the infamous difference between subject and topic (は vs. が particle). It has some genuinely good humour too. For what I expected to just be a toy that might teach me a few words, it's surpassed my expectations, even if from a gaming point of view it's quite linear and unexciting.

I also heard about Slime Forest Adventure, a similar and older game that also teaches Kanji, so if learning through RPG gaming still appeals to me after this then I might give it a look.

Also today in "please, no more resources!": I keep hearing very good things about Renshuu. Maybe I'll give it a shot once I've got a bit more of a foundation.

Thoughts on SRS

I recently read about how Anki, the most famous SRS software, finally has a decent SRS algorithm, namely FSRS. I did always find that the previous algorithm, especially since version 2 came out, was quite bad and needed a lot of tweaking. So I'm giving the new one a try. So far, the intervals still seem to be too big and grow too quickly, so I might experiment with the desired retention rate, and I'm not keen on the randomisation. For now though, I'll give it a fair chance on the standard settings and see how my retention is since that's the proof of the pudding.

I decided I might as well reset my decks for other languages (French, Italian, Spanish) since the cards had got quite messed up from all that tweaking. Which means I'm rediscovering some very old cards, like 10 years old! And what I'm realising is that most of these cards are for material that I still don't actually know very well. For French I could say it's because I've not actively worked on the language for years, but I still speak and listen to enough Italian to keep it alive.

That's made me doubt whether SRS was really as much of a key part of my success in these languages as I thought! Especially given that my recent realisation that my lack of vocab in German was holding me back, on top of seeing that doing more vocab study right from the start for Japanese with WaniKani was working well, made me decide that I should dive back into sentence mining.

Maybe it's not the flashcards themselves that helped, but the fact that making them forced me to do much more intensive listening and reading and really pay attention to the material I was consuming - so it was the input itself that did most of the work? Or maybe I deleted the ones that I knew well and had become too easy, although I don't remember doing that much.

I suppose I've mostly seen SRS as a way to learn the kind of vocabulary that doesn't come up frequently enough in "natural" contexts to be acquired without flashcards, which explains why I don't know the stuff in these cards well, and the fact that I still don't know it well might mean that it's not actually that useful to me after all? And maybe my good experience with WK means that SRS is actually a good way to speed up acquiring the high-frequency stuff, which is a good argument for using it for German right now since I still have so many quite basic gaps?

Also, Anki is also now the main way that I'm keeping my French, and often my Italian, alive, but the cards I have aren't really appropriate for that purpose. They're more of an extra helper to be combined with a much higher volume of input and practice, which is what they were when I originally made them.

More questions than answers for now. I'll keep thinking about all that, and see how FSRS goes.

[gsbod]

Where Anki really helped me was in learning to read and write kanji. The SRS meant I was reviewing things with a level of intensity which I couldn't get from just working through the textbook exercises available, but was necessary to force the kanji into my head. It was also really useful to have a flashcard format where I could get instant feedback on whether I was pronouncing or writing a kanji word correctly.

However, when I started learning Japanese, WaniKani didn't exist, and by the time it was launched I was too far in for it to be worth me working through hundreds of kanji I already knew. I suspect WaniKani would also do the job for a lot of people, which would make Anki redundant.

For German, it definitely helped me with testing on details like correct noun genders, and which prepositions/cases to use with which verbs, which I would otherwise have become quite sloppy about. But I think it was less essential than for learning kanji.

I was using Anki a bit for Spanish before Christmas but I've dropped it again and am actually quite curious to try and keep going without it.

[garyb]

For German, it definitely helped me with testing on details like correct noun genders, and which prepositions/cases to use with which verbs, which I would otherwise have become quite sloppy about.

Sounds familiar: it seems like most of the cards I've added in the last few weeks have been about genders or prepositions/cases with verbs! My iTalki lesson really showed that I often get these wrong, and there's usually no clear pattern to them.

Anki did seem to be an absolute mainstay of Japanese learners in the past, and while WK has displaced it a lot for learning Kanji, it seems that most successful learners still rely heavily on Anki for vocab and usage etc. as they get more advanced. That's another reason I've started embracing SRS again: if it works for Japanese then it should work even better for "easier" languages like German too!

[golyplot]

Hopefully JPDB will displace Anki for Japanese vocab as well.

[garyb]

Hopefully JPDB will displace Anki for Japanese vocab as well.

Ah yeah, JPDB is another one I keep seeing mentioned and is on my list of resources to check out once I'm past the very basics. I'm just holding off for now because I feel that with a textbook + WK + bits of input and podcasts I'm already covering enough ground. But it seems promising, so of course I'm going to ask if you have experience with it.

WaniKani has convinced me of the merits of a good pre-made SRS over the DIY method with Anki, but so far all the premade Anki decks I've tried (for European languages) have been completely unfit for purpose, not helped by the limitations of Anki itself. At a glance, JPDB seems like a best of both worlds: quality pre-made content and possibilities to work through it as you see fit and use it with your own texts. I'm not surprised to see Japanese resources leading the pack, as usual.

[golyplot]

Yes, I do have experience with JPDB. I've been using it for years now (it looks like I briefly tried it in Sept 2021, but have only been using it continuously since March 2022.)

I can't stand Anki, so I see JPDB as the least bad option in that niche. It's still frustrating to do the flashcards sometimes and you have to blacklist cards aggressively to get a good experience, but I think that's inherent to the whole SRS experience, and JPDB is a massive improvement over Anki on multiple axis.

[garyb]

Thanks!

I actually gave Renshuu a try yesterday. I liked what it was trying to do and it seems to be trying to solve the same kind of problem as JPDB: a sort of upgraded SRS with good pre-made content and example sentences, although with a wider scope including grammar and Kanji as well as vocab. Plus it has specific Genki-revision material so I thought it could be a good substitute for the Genki Anki decks. But it had gamification aspects that turned me off and I just found the user interface far too busy and cluttered, especially on mobile, and like your early JPDB experience I spent much of the time just marking words as known or not wanting to study. It seems like an ambitious project that tries to cover a lot, but they've not figured out how to present it all well yet. I come back to my thoughts on resources, especially digital ones, doing one thing and doing it well.

Maybe JPDB could be an alternative but again, I think I have plenty of resources already for the moment, and I'm not sure how much value there really is in doing extra work to learn all or even some of the Genki vocab since most of it either falls into the "common enough that it'll come up all the time anyway" category or the "not very important just yet" category. But that just brings me back to my big question about how much vocab study is needed as a beginner, since I feel I underdid it for German but it's also easy to overdo.

[tangleweeds]

I actually gave Renshuu a try yesterday…. …But it had gamification aspects that turned me off and I just found the user interface far too busy and cluttered… …I come back to my thoughts on resources, especially digital ones, doing one thing and doing it well..

I gotta say, I’m totally with you here. The clutter makes the app a lot more exhausting to use than it needs to be. I was able to sidestep the gamification and I really appreciate the textbook support, but they really need to figure out how to clean up that interface. As stands, their app isn’t the kind of clean, well-lit space one wants to hang out in.

[garyb]

Not as much language-learning progress this week. I knew it would be a busier one so I didn't set the bar too high for myself, and I did say quite recently that I knew I'd only be able to sustain my pace of working so actively on two languages for so long until life got in the way, but I still feel like I've started to get a little burnt out. My motivation for Japanese is still high; German not so much although I still enjoy it when I get into it.

Finished Genki lesson 5, which was all about adjectives. Fortunately my other materials have also been covering a lot of adjectives recently so neither the words nor the conjugations were really new to me, but it was still good to consolidate and practice them. All these present and past suffixes are easy to get mixed up so it was worth taking my time on them.

I got curious and checked out Cure Dolly, an (in)famous virtual YouTuber who talked about Japanese grammar. I was just about able to look past the strange animation and voice, but man I'm sick of resources that sell themselves by trashing other resources, claiming those other resources teach the language the "wrong" way and theirs is the One True Way. It's the most cheap and nasty marketing strategy. I did however think there were some good points in her headline video; it's mostly the usual clichés about avoiding perfectionism and not being afraid of making mistakes (while simultaneously pushing a method that claims to teach grammar the right way the first time... sigh) and immersion being the solution to everything, but I thought she tied it together very nicely with the point about how English learners mostly see the language as a means to communicate and meet their needs while most learners of Japanese (and many other languages, I'd say) see it in an "art for art's sake" way that's too focused on the language itself.

I can definitely see how I've seen it that way in the past and how it's encouraged perfectionism. And a reminder of the clichés isn't a bad thing since it's so easy to get caught up in that way of thinking. But I also think that it's very easy to get into that mentality she describes, between the dominance of English and the attitudes of native speakers of other languages.

Anyway, the general opinion on Cure Dolly seems to be that the grammar explanations are very good in spite of the presentation and the attitudes towards other learning methods, so I'll make the most of it for what it is.

I watched 5 Centimeters per Second, which brought back some memories! The very first scene takes place in a small street in Tokyo that I just happened to walk through when I was there because it was on the way to Yoyogi Park from a nearby station, and that was followed by some detailed depictions of Shinjuku Station and the JR metro lines.

Earlier this week I went to see Zone of Interest, a film mostly in German (and very worth seeing). I was thinking that if I just saw a target-language film in full, with no distractions, once per week or so it would probably do wonders. I used to keep a closer eye on cinema listings so I'll try to do that more again. Back to the subject of working actively on two languages, I did see someone on here (I don't remember who, sorry) post recently about having phases of working on one language actively at a time, which might be sensible at times when I don't have the time or energy for two. That would probably look like working actively on Japanese and keeping up German with some quality input. I do feel bad that every time I try to get serious about German it just soon falls by the wayside again, but maybe that's just how things are going to be!

At that showing I also saw a trailer for a Japanese film, Perfect Days, which looks like something I'd enjoy so I'll try to catch it.

I suppose it's a good thing that my Japanese level for now is far too low to be getting into massive input, while it's probably one of the best things I could do for German, so at least the two languages aren't competing for the same activities.