Wish it were fun -- Learning Japanese

[Eryxo2]

December 4, 2015

How to have fun learning a language

I remember when I was a kid and I was learning Japanese learning was fun and easy. I used to buy books, flip through, write down sentences and try to make my own sentences. I would write down grammar and study it and it was fun. I didn’t have any hang ups about how fast I was learning or what method I was using. It was during that time that I learned basic Japanese. I want to re-live that learning environment. I want learning a language to be fun and easy again. I think that if I re-create that fun I had and continued it I would be able to learn a language much better than worrying about methods and tools.

One thing I did as a kid was to create my own sentences. I would find a sentence in a grammar book and make my own sentences based on what I read. I would make my own sentences using the vocabulary I had just learned. I remember doing this a lot.
Another thing I did was buy a lot of books. Things like travel phrase books, grammar books, books with categorized vocabulary. These really made me excited to learn. I flipped through and read all of them even if I didn’t memorize everything. I still picked up something from having the books.

Nowadays I noticed there are ways I’m learning Japanese even though I’m not trying. I noticed that I can pick up a lot of words watching Anime WITH subtitles. There are a lot of phrases that stand out and are easily recognizable from the gibberish I’m hearing. Sometimes I will look it up to make sure I have the precise definition but often the subtitles are just fine and the context of what I’m watching is enough.

Another thing I notice is that just after I’m learning a batch of new kanji or even vocabulary I will start hearing and seeing a few of those vocab/kanji everywhere. I then say to myself: “Hey, I know that! It means X.” And from there I hardly ever forget it. Because of this I think listening and reading in the L2 is really important. In this case it’s also important to watch the L2 without subtitles every once in a while so I can do recall practice.

The reason I want a fun “method” to learn languages is because I have spent years on and off trying to learn Japanese. I really would love to learn this language but I really hate much of methods that I tried in order to learn it and I gave up often and would forget all my gains.
I really hate flash cards for instance, especially electronic ones. I hate forced repetition in general, so that also includes going over vocabulary lists over and over again or writing the same thing over and over again, the “rote” way. I like having fresh, new information. I get bored easily. Who wants to say the same things over and over again about a word they may never actually use themselves but only hear on the news?

So, if I can do this language learning thing in a fun way I’ll never have to do repetition of stuff I don’t want to. I can learn what I’m interested in and what’s relevant to me.

If this doesn’t work well I’ve already spent years not learning the language but at least this time I can say I enjoyed myself.

I think the real challenge here would be making myself unlearn all the bad habits/thinking I’ve acquired. Can I really not make a big deal about how much vocab I’m learning per day, or how long it will take me to learn, or worrying how I’ll remember vocabulary?

So fun is awesome but what am I going to do?
I’m going to do what I did as a kid. I’m going to do that because it was fun. What I consider fun will be different for other people. What is fun to me is to play with the language not make it feel like a chore. I want language learning to be a part of my life that enhances my life.
I plan on reading books that I like; making my sentences and playing around with creating my own sentences; writing and looking for new words and phrases I can use; looking up words I find in my L2 books. I don’t plan on ever opening up Anki again. Just thinking about copying pasting and using keyboard shortcuts makes me feel anxious. I do plan on using RTK when and IF I feel like it that day. I do plan on making lists that I have no intention of reviewing.
I have a thought though. In order to really learn a language it’s quite important to have “comprehensible input”. This I believe I can do and have fun with as long as I keep enjoying reading books and still have a passion to know what I’m reading. And as long as I keep having fun opening textbooks and having fun making my own sentences. That’s my only “rule”. I’m really writing this last line for others. You can’t learn Japanese by only watching Anime with subtitles. Look up the words you hear and try reading some manga. But don’t go overboard either. It’s not fun to spend all day in a language you only understand a little.

[Eryxo2]

December 5, 2015

Stephen Krashen and Comprehensible Input
He says that acquisition is more important than learning. I have felt that most of my knowledge in Japanese has come from acquisition.

“We acquire language when we understand messages. When people speak to us in another language and we understand what they say or we read something in another language and we understand the message language, acquisition will take place.”

Messages we understand = comprehensible input
Note: It happens subconsciously.

Like I said in a previous article. One way I’ve noticed how I learned vocabulary is that if I studied some words and kanji then saw or heard them later and they would stick better. The problem though is I didn’t see or hear the other words frequently enough or at all and would quickly forget unless I studied again. Studying them was very boing as well. What I wished was that I would hear the words I studied more often that way I didn’t have to worry about flash cards to increase frequency or that the manga I read had a vocabulary sheet to go with it that way I could read it and pick out all the words.

I must encounter words and phrases I know frequently. I need to look up words from books and anime and hope I hear them enough.

Perhaps though I can stop worrying about hearing every single word and have my vocabulary simply build up gradually. That is, once I learn a few words I’ll know those words and there will be less and less words I have to look up and remember each time.

It seems though that since I don’t have a class or a program to provide all these looking up tasks for me or repeat the words frequently enough for me it might mean I’ll have to look up words myself as well as read and listen much more. I don’t mind this since I really like doing both activities. I don’t mind looking up words that seem interesting to me and I don’t mind not knowing everything on the page or skipping pages either. Even with anime/movies I can always write the word down and look it up later.

“Such input also needs to be directed to the learner and pitched to their level so it is comprehensible, so learners can extract meaning and as a result acquire form.”
I’m still trying to understand Stephen Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis. The above quote was from the forum How-to-learn-any-language.com. It seems like Krashen’s hypothesis only seems to be directed in a classroom learning environment. For a solo learner you’d have to find text on your own that is simple and easy at first then gradually adds a few more words and forms so you can acquire more and more of the language in an unconfusing way. But why couldn’t you use native level books and media and simple have a dictionary on hand? Then skip over stuff that is not yet at your level? I think you can but at first it may require a lot of skipping and looking up stuff which might use up a lot of time and effort. I’m not sure.

“I should point out at this point that I do not consider it important that the language be understood by context. Consulting a translation, a wordlist, grammar notes, or a dictionary are all perfectly acceptable. The goal is to get to the point where you can understand the dialogue or reading text without these aids and without translating or thinking in your native language.”

Here’s another quote from the forum. I think that is what I’m going to do as well. I probably don’t fully understand Krashen and his hypothesis but I understand the basic idea I guess. Regardless my intention is not to fully follow his way anyway. I plan on reading books and watching media, looking up stuff, reading grammar books and making my own sentences or writing down the sentences from the book as well as. I’ll make my input comprehensible from the language resources I have.

I think the most important thing is to not give up. Leaving a language and not studying it for weeks has been the most damaging thing to me acquiring Japanese. Making this journey a little more fun and not worrying so much I hope will keep me learning every day.

[Eryxo2]

While watching Anime today I noticed something. There were words that stood out and I was able to understand because of the subtitles. However, wanting to remember the word later (now) I can’t remember how to say it. I do this a lot actually. The solution? Write it down for future reference. That way when it comes up again and I say “Hey I know that! What’s it mean again?” I can just look it up real quick. The struggling to remember it is important though. I shouldn’t look it up right away however. Every time I struggle to recall and I look it up it strengthens my memory. I know this because I learn the word “inbou” (conspiracy) that way. I first heard the word in NHK ni Youkoso, an anime. It was repeated many times in that Anime. Some time later I heard the word again in a movie called Gantz. It only occurred once in that movie as far as I can remember but I realized I heard that word before and the subtitles helped me with the meaning. I heard the word again, far later this time in some other movie or anime but this time I remembered the meaning but not exactly how it was pronounced. Again I looked it up, rewinding the video to hear it again. Today while trying to find an example of a word I learned without vocabulary lists or an SRS I remembered the word conspiracy (Inbou). This time I remembered it out of context using the right pronunciation and remembering the meaning. I hope I can learn a lot more words this way. I simply don’t note down many of the words I hear or bother to look them up when I hear them again. This time around I will. I’ll keep a notebook just for that. My own personal dictionary or something.

[emk]

This sounds like a really fun project, and I'm glad that you're looking for methods that you can enjoy for more than a few weeks.

There are two language learning experiments which might interest you:

1. Victor Hart's Mandarin Experiment. This is based entirely on watching Chinese television, without making any effort to artificially boost comprehension. This has been an interesting experiment, but progress has been slow.
2. Judith Meyer's Japanese subs2srs project. I know you're burned out for life on Anki, but this is nonetheless a very cool project, and Meyer went from no knowledge of Japanese to enjoying a single TV show in under 30 hours. I don't think the average language learner will reproduce her results in 30 hours, though—I tried with Spanish, and although my progress was remarkably rapid, I couldn't duplicate her results, despite getting a huge discount from English and French.

I think the big difference between these two experiments is that Judith Meyer took steps to make her input comprehensible. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean using Anki. You could, for example, use bilingual subtitles, or some kind of bilingual view (like the one I've been experimenting with):

lang-que-hay-de-cenar.png

The exact techniques don't matter—there's a lot of space for choosing an approach that pleases you personally. But as language learners, I think it's definitely worth looking for ways to make our input more comprehensible.

[Sizen]

Welcome to the forum! I'll definitely be following your log with great interest as I have found myself countless times in a similar situation to yours: I used to study Japanese for the fun of it and never worried about efficiency or deadlines. Ever since I passed the N1, however, I've been in language-limbo and have been studying it on and off for 3 years. Part of me just wants to go back to when it all happened so naturally, but I don't really know how.

I'm currently focusing on French since I have more reasons to be learning it (family, friends, etc), but I do plan on getting back to Japanese maybe in a year's time. Until then, I'll just have to live vicariously through lovely people such as yourself.

If there's one piece of advice I'd have for you so far it's as follows: the more creative you are in finding ways to make your materials comprehensible to yourself, the better. You're never "cheating" if the end result is your understanding it.