Log: ryanheise tries to solve Japanese grammar

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ryanheise
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Re: Log: ryanheise tries to solve Japanese grammar

Postby ryanheise » Sat Jul 04, 2020 2:34 pm

Week 15 - Day 7 (wrap up / reflections)

Since I have more or less completed my grammatical analysis of this story, I will use the last day to simply journal some of my reflections on the experience.

1. Peppa Pig was fun and captivating (for me)

I understand this won't be bearable for everyone, but for me, Peppa Pig was fun, even though I listened to a single episode over and over again for a whole week. I laughed at the jokes, and in my opinion, the voice actors did a great job of being really expressive which made it more interesting, and subconsciously enticed me to shadow the intonation/pitch. I also found myself admiring the story writers and the great job they did at exposing the listener to different types of useful expressions for different types of social situations.

2. Social situations supply a LOT of helpful context

The way that I have been figuring out the function of particles, suffixes and other similar grammatical elements is to read into the context and situation surrounding a sentence. I try to notice as many things as I can about the context (e.g. the emotions, the place, what came before and after the sentence, background information of the characters, etc.), and then associate those contextual features to each word in the sentence. Doing this repeatedly to the same word in different contexts builds up a pretty good feel for how that word should be used. But the real question is how difficult it is to actually make these contextual observations.

I have to say that the social situations Peppa Pig gets into make it very easy to read the context, much moreso than a monologue might. The visual aspect to it also provides more context, particularly reading the facial expressions, although I would say most of the context can be gleaned from the audio (which is primarily how I've been consuming it this past week).

One example of this is when I was trying to figure out ったんだ. Literally, it seems to read as "it is the case that ..." which is logically redundant, but looking at the context of both situations where it was used in this story, once when Peppa was speaking confidently about how she danced like a swan, and again when Daddy Pig confidently described his past ballet skills, this is common contextual information that I read into both situations and associate with ったんだ. Thus, my feeling that this is a device they use to speak matter-of-factly about something. Of course, my understanding could still be inaccurate, and may yet need some more refining, but my point is that this sort of contextual information is abundant in Peppa Pig, which makes it a lot easier to make these observations.

So I think if trying to just figure out something like ったんだ through observation seems difficult, it may be a matter of using more appropriate input that provides more context.

3. Material with ≈ 100% known words helped me notice the grammar

Outside of Peppa Pig, I tend to listen to a variety of different audio material not aimed at any particular level. A big chunk of my focus has necessarily been on looking up the new words that I don't know the meanings of, and that somewhat has the effect of diverting my attention away from grammar. smallwhite's recent forum topic on Focusing on Comprehension vs Focusing on Production also did a good job of pointing out that if we were to only focus on comprehension, we may tend to focus on the key words and verb stems, and not so much the verb conjugations and other non-key elements.

But I have found that with Peppa Pig, where I essentially know all of the vocabulary already, my attention is not distracted, and I can give my undivided attention to all of those grammatical details that I don't normally pay attention to.

- - - - -

So that's it for the daily updates, my next update should be in a week.
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ryanheise
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Re: Log: ryanheise tries to solve Japanese grammar

Postby ryanheise » Sun Jul 12, 2020 2:06 pm

Week 16 (And taking a break for a while)

This week was a week of consolidation. I decided to go through everything in my log so far and put it into a structured document with all of the conjugation rules, grammar points, and example sentences mentioned in this log. While writing it, I did also manage to fill in a few more entries in the conjugation tables.

This document shouldn't be useful to anyone else since it's not coming from an authority, but for anyone curious as to what my note taking method looks like, I have shared the document here. As I encounter more examples for a grammar point or pattern, I'll be able to look it up in my document, add the example, and then refine my theories a bit more.

With that said, at this point, I am going to put this effort on hold.

I certainly don't think I've finished the job, but I think it would do me better to take a break from my theories and just get a whole bunch more input for a while. My thinking is that once I write a theory down, it is easy to get stuck in that way of thinking and I might be blind to alternative theories. If I do happen have any incorrect theories at this point, taking a break from those theories will give my brain a chance to think afresh and not get stuck in one way of thinking.

So where to from here?

At the moment, I want to devote more effort to memorising short audio stories and developing fluency in language exchange. I've noticed a few other forum members also incorporate memorisation into their language learning, so that does give me some confidence that there might be some benefit to it, and with my initial experience with it so far, I feel as though I may have had a breakthrough. So that's something I would like to explore more deeply.

Aside from that, I will continue listening to new podcasts daily just to get a more diverse range of input (extensive "listening"?), and also try to keep picking up new vocabulary (extensive listening?).

So that's it for this log (for now).

Signing off!

P.S. I haven't decided yet, but I might try logging my progress with memorisation and language exchange. E.g. How many brain freezes I have over time in language exchanges, how many memorised sentences I'm actually able to employ in a language exchange conversation week to week, how many minutes of audio I managed to memorise week on week. Or at the very least, I want to be logging this information in a private journal to see if there is any real progress.
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ryanheise
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Re: Log: ryanheise tries to solve Japanese grammar

Postby ryanheise » Mon Jul 20, 2020 3:28 pm

(Psst. Don't tell anyone, but I'm sneaking in to make another log entry. Week 17?)

I wasn't planning to spend any time studying Grammar this week, but I was transcribing the next episode of Peppa Pig, "Secrets", and although I'm only 43 seconds in, something just jumped out at me:

(04:47) https://youtu.be/RLg94_HJclQ?t=285
Narrator: ミービッグがペッパに特別な箱をくれました
Mummy: ペッパ、この箱はあなたのために作ったのよ
Peppa: ありがとうマミ
Mummy: これは秘密のものを入れておく秘密の箱なの
Peppa: それってどんなものいればいいの
Mummy: それはあなたが決めるのよ
Mummy: あなたの秘密の箱だもの
Peppa: 私何を入れるか決めた
Mummy: そうでも言わないでね
Peppa: うん。言わないよ
Peppa: ジョージにもダディにも だって秘密なんだもん
Peppa: ジョージ。これ淫夢の箱なんだ
Peppa: 空っぽなの
Peppa: だからこの中に入れるもの
Peppa: 探さなくちゃ

So in a very short period of time, this "もの" or "もん" gets used several times in different contexts which is enough to make it finally click. And coincidentally this comes after just recently encountering this sentence in Week 15:

そうだよ。私が一番上手だもんんん

for which I had written in my journal: "Contextually, we know that Peppa Pig is (1) being boastful, (2) answering why it's better to leave the dancing to her. If I see this used again at the end of the sentence, I will look out for these two markers for overlap."

So, what's common in ALL of these examples is that the person saying it is giving a reason for something. In the week 15 example, Peppa is giving the reason why Daddy Pig should leave the dancing to her (because she's the most skilled dancer). In the following sentence:

あなたの秘密の箱だもの

Mummy Pig is giving the reason why only Peppa can decide what to put in the box (because it's HER secret box). In the following sentence:

ジョージにもダディにも だって秘密なんだもん

Peppa is giving the reason why she won't tell George or Daddy what's in the box (because it's a secret). And in the following sentence:

だからこの中に入れるもの

Well, this one doesn't quite seem the same because there are several ways of interpreting which part is the reason for which other part. Reason is still involved, but even excluding this example, that's 3 out of 4 examples which are highly similar (maybe that's also because 3 out of 4 examples have a だ before もん, but I'd like to believe that there is probably commonality between all 4 examples).

So, my other observation here is that the fact that I saw this sentence ending used in 3 different contexts in a short span of time will probably help to strengthen my memory much more effectively than any spaced repetition. I almost wondered whether the story was intentionally crafted that way, but then it is a Japanese dub of an English cartoon, and there is no English equivalent of もの. I think it's more inevitable that this sort of concentrated repetition will happen in a children's story where characters are put into different social situations, even if the story is translated into a different language.

Now, I had another interesting experience recently with a Japanese language exchange partner who has also started going through the English version of the same story at the same time. Looking at it from an outside perspective, I can really see how useful it is to study a story where you already know all of the words because it forces you to pay attention to other things like grammar. As an example, 4 sentences into the story, and trying to recite this sentence from memory:

"It's a secret box for you to keep secret things in."

It came out as "It's secret box for keep ....", then "It's a secret box for to keep" and so on. I should say, she knows a LOT of English words, and clearly she knew every word in this sentence, but trying to recite it sort of helped her to notice there was more in this sentence yet to be learnt, and that was the grammar. Incidentally, just try thinking about the grammar in the above sentence. If English is your native language, it will feel very simple, and yet the deeper you look, the more you realise it is not very simple at all.

OK. So I did say I was going to stop weekly grammar analysis for a while, and I do want to step it down a notch to focus on my memorisation experiment, but I think actually these two activities go hand in hand. As I repeatedly listen and repeat the same episode over and over again, I think I am bound to notice more grammar. I don't necessarily want to commit to updating this log consistently since each Peppa Pig episode may take a different amount of time to memorise, and there may therefore be longer or shorter periods where I go without noticing any new grammar, but there might be the occasional, sporadic grammatical observation posted here. (Either that, or I'll sneak back in here precisely at the same time of the week out of habit?)
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