Not all those who wander are lost

[golyplot]

I've looked into shadowing a couple times in the past, since everyone always talks it up so much, but it wasn't clear how to do it or whether it was actually effective.

[sfuqua]

I just listen to a passage, with or without text, and try to say the same thing as is said in the passages, as closely behind the speaker(s) as I can. If the material is unfamiliar and the language is difficult, I get lost and have to just jump up to where the speaker is. If I repeat a passage many times, or if the language is familiar, eventually I can just "sing along" with the speaker(s).
I think shadowing makes me focus very closely on the what the speaker says and how they say it. It is a lot like reading aloud, but with an audio model rather than written text
For me, it seems to build smoothness and speed in articulating the language, I am less sure about how much it improves comprehension of unfamilar words and structures in the input. I suspect that it builds pretty low level phonological skills, not deeper skills about building novel sentences. With Spanish, I eventually spent a lot of time shadowing novels.
Everything I say about it is anecdotal. Since there are many procedures, the few papers about it are hard to cite as proof of its effectivess. I haven't done a literature search lately, maybe there is some good new research.

[DaveAgain]

I've looked into shadowing a couple times in the past, since everyone always talks it up so much, but it wasn't clear how to do it or whether it was actually effective.

For me, it seems to build smoothness and speed in articulating the language, I am less sure about how much it improves comprehension of unfamilar words and structures in the input. I suspect that it builds pretty low level phonological skills, not deeper skills about building novel sentences. With Spanish, I eventually spent a lot of time shadowing novels.
Everything I say about it is anecdotal. Since there are many procedures, the few papers about it are hard to cite as proof of its effectivess. I haven't done a literature search lately, maybe there is some good new research.

Sage Journals have a 2018 article that cites a number of studies, Shadowing: What is It? How to Use It. Where Will It Go?.

[golyplot]

Sage Journals have a 2018 article that cites a number of studies, Shadowing: What is It? How to Use It. Where Will It Go?.

Interesting, this implies that it *only* works for beginners.

First, shadowing focusses learners’ attention on the phonological aspects of what they hear. In shadowing, because there is little time lag between when they hear each word and repeat it, it is called an on-line task (Shiki et al., 2010). Learners attend to incoming sounds rather than meanings when shadowing. In contrast, repetition in which they repeat what they hear chunk by chunk or sentence by sentence is called an off-line task (Shiki et al., 2010). Next, the concept of cognitive resource (i.e. the amount of cognitive capacity available to process information) also supports the argument above. When the learner shadows something in L1, they may be able to understand it simultaneously (Carey, 1971) because of their automatized phoneme perception and adequate cognitive resource. In contrast, the small cognitive resource of L2 learners is devoted exclusively to perceiving the incoming sounds when shadowing. Consequently, they have little cognitive resource left for higher processes such us accessing meanings and comprehending the message (Kadota, 2007). Thus, when shadowing, L2 learners exclusively attend to phonological aspects of what they listen to, so as they continue to practise they will eventually improve at perceiving what they listen to (i.e. bottom-up listening skills).

[DaveAgain]

Sage Journals have a 2018 article that cites a number of studies, Shadowing: What is It? How to Use It. Where Will It Go?.

Interesting, this implies that it *only* works for beginners.

The suggestion is that it's more helpful for beginners' listening skills, but more helpful for advanced students production skills.

Conclusion
The accumulated research provides implications for using shadowing in the classroom. A key implication is that beginner level learners should start from standard shadowing for listening. Once learners achieve the upper-intermediate or advanced level, they are ready for shadowing for speaking.

[sfuqua]

Awesome article! I think I missed it before.

[sfuqua]

I continue to move steadily through the kanji. I'll skip the gory details.

I think there aren't that many other 70 year old beginners to Japanese, or at least I haven't heard of them. Other people may have different experiences,but this is what it has been like for me, trying to learn Japanese with an old brain.
First, may general functioning outside of language learning:
1. I forget more things than I used to. I always was an airhead, even as a 20 year old, but now I need shopping lists more than I used to. I was never good at names, but I am really bad now.
2. I have more bad days physically than I used to. You know, those days where you just want to get back into bed and go back to sleep. Low energy days. Nothing goes right. On a bad day, Japanese is a slog. I can do it, but it isn't fun. However most days are pretty good.
3. I have a tendency to talk too much or too little. I have to watch myself or I will regale people with stories about how we used to do it back in the old days, when they didn't really care about how we used to do it. On the other hand, I also can get cold and quiet when I hear people repeating the same old nonsense once again that has never been true. Know-it-alls are tiresome, and I'm not usually interested in listening to the latest over simplified answer.
Next language learning. I would say that I am running at about 80% of the speed I could run at when I was 30. There are several reasons for this:
1. I am generally less of a fanatic about things than I was when I was younger. High fever? Language learning? HaHa. I'll do a couple of minutes of it, and then stop when my eyelids get heavy. I used to be pretty silly about working whether it made sense or not.
2. I really do work better the earlier in the day that I study. After 9PM, language learning is not very effective or fun.
3. Less transfer between skills. This is just an impression, but I feel like I really need to practice things in order to learn them.
4. Bad vision. I need bigger fonts and effective colors to read Japanese. I've really got to see unfamiliar script to read it.
5. Maybe, just maybe, I have a reduced ability for straightforward memorization. I'm unsure about this. Perhaps my abilities are just more variable from time to time and from day to day. I definitely have more problems learning things in Japanese, but I have never tried to learn a beast like the Japanese writing system before. I am really not sure if this is a real problem.

Finally, can you learn Japanese as a 70 year old?
Absolutely. No question. I enjoy studying it.
Is my learning the same as when I was 20.
Absolutely not. In some ways I study more effectively now, but I would never claim that I can learn as fast as in the old days.

[sfuqua]

I'm very happy the past couple of days. I have been sick, but I have discovered that my readinng is up to the point where I can study using the Core decks or the JLPT decks from AJT. This was just too difficult until recently.
Nice.
It is important if you study Japanese to look at what the educated estimates are about how long the process will take. FSI labels Japanese as one of their hardest languages, and they suggest that it would take 3 or 4 times as long ot learn Japanese as it would take to learn French or Spanish. This seems pretty reasonable to me.
The estimates online about how many hours it takes to prepare to the different JLPT levels, suggest that I am doing about as well as I could expect. I'm at around 500 hours of study now, which would really get you somewhere with a language like Spsanish, but which probably just about get one ready for the lowest level test in Japanese. The beginner N5 test which means that you can't hardly do anything with the language.

This language is a beast.
But I love it.

I think that the sentence based vocabulary stuff I can do now should let me move faster and learn more. I'm going to finish my run through the kanji too.

I remain very psyched. I just wish I had started Japanese 10 years ago instead of one year ago.

[sfuqua]

I have had a very interesting few weeks. One thing that was interesting, but was sort of a disaster was a family trip to New York City.

I was all ready to hate New York City; after all, it is a big soulless monster of a place, without all of the wonderful nature and friendly, pot smoking, free loving people we have here in California. Instead, I loved it. I know I am talking once again about something that many of you know more about than I do, but if you haven't been to New York, give it a chance. It is big, and it is old, and it is full of loud, friendly people. If you can pay, you are more than welcome. And it is so big. And there is so much more to see. I was shocked to see how much New York City is just a part of American (perhaps English speaking) culture. My daughter gave us instructions on how to get to Broadway and said, "take the A-Train" and I remembered the Ella Firtzgerald song of that name (although she was going to Harlem). I realized that my daughter-in-law (that lovely San Francisco Chinese woman who married my son last year), was talking about going uptown and downtown while she was pointing at the subway map, and uptown was up and downtown was down (the map was tilted from north south). Some people claim that the terms uptown and downtown refer to the map of New York (I think that this is probably not true).
As a Californian, I am proud of our lovely mix of races and languages here. I am also proud of our decadent, cannabis infused lifestyles (or at least the availability of such lifestyles if one is interested). I have never seen a place that smelled of cannabis more than Brooklyn at night. A lovely mix of people speaking different languages all going about their business. Brooklyn is more African-American than San Jose, and there were fewer Indian people, but there were a ton of other Asians . I heard Mandarin and Japanese more than once and I also heard some Vietnamese. Of course there was a ton of Spanish (of different kinds) and I also heard French and German.
Somehow the city reassured me. The city is a living organism, all around you. Food is arriving here. Trash is leaving there. Police are closing this road for repair and changing lanes on that road to balance the traffic. People are on strike there, and people are stopping to talk to them. That sidewalk is being cleaned. Call an uber there and one is there in 3 minutes. The trains run everywhere and are always close. And you are outside a lot walking from here to there. Are you getting lost? Random people will help. The whole Earth seems like it is a 20 minute ride away.
I had never spent any time in New York before, and this was a nice surprise. I will go back.

My son and daughter in law moved there three years ago before COVID, and they love it. They will never leave, they say.

The disaster of the trip is that my new grandson, a brilliant 6-week-old baby, had not had any vaccinations yet. I got a big sore throat the second day of the trip, and so I was exiled from the baby's presence after only one visit. I was covid negative in several tests, and I was eventually put on an antibiotic, but I felt crummy for two weeks. Nasty.
My grandson does all of the things that babies do with flair and style. Clearly he is an amazing child. His mother is speaking Cantonese to him and his father is speaking English. Cool



I rarely talk about Tagalog, but I use Tagalog daily and watch TV in Tagalog for at least an hour a day. It is getting close to 40 years since I first started working on Tagalog and I have long since fossilized at an advanced level. If language learning was as simple as exposure, I would be a native speaker by now.
The quality of production of teleserye from the Philippines that is available over the Internet has improved a lot visually, but the plots still lag the quality of the imagery. I think that this is exactly what the audience wants. One of my favorite shows of the new set is "Batang Quiapo ''. I mentioned it before but the show continues to roll along, a little more divorced from reality every day. They have a crew of veteran actors who make up the ensemble. With all of the plots and subplots the progress of the show is slow, but I think that their audience wants it to go on forever. My family has always been an ABS-CBN family and what is left of that company is available on the Internet at https://www.iwanttfc.com/#!/ . It costs money, but it would be a good way to study Tagalog if you are past the beginner stage. Also it would be a good way to learn about Filipino culture and ways to avoid some of the common problems that Filipinos face:

1. When you arrive in the Philippines, immediately get a DNA test. You might be related to anyone.
2. After you get back the results of the first test, have another DNA test. Bad guys often fake DNA results to take advantage of people.
3. Be extra careful to avoid amnesia. It is not as common as it was a few years ago, but it is still pretty common.
4. While the incidence of amnesia is down, the incidence of coma is greatly increased. You can go into a coma for a few months or years at any time, so be ready.
5. Women who have sex before marriage, always get pregnant, usually the first time they have sex.
6. Married women who have an affair have a greatly reduced life expectancy. Accident, random driveby shooting, whatever, they never live happily-ever-after.
7. If you go to a wedding in the Philippines, expect excitement. Often old boyfriends or girlfriends will show up and run away with one of the participants. This can be great fun to watch.
8. Remember, many weddings end with gangs of thugs arriving and shooting many people. Avoid being shot.
9. Remember also that if you are a good guy, there is no need to duck if someone is shooting at you. Just look at them and shout curses.

With the life language skills you learn from watching teleserye and the life skills you pick up, You can actually slip right into Filipino culture if you visit.

Oh, I have studied Japanese every day since I last posted.

[DaveAgain]

6. Married women who have an affair have a greatly reduced life expectancy. Accident, random driveby shooting, whatever, they never live happily-ever-after.

Messrs Starsky and Hutch had a similar effect on their romantic partners