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

[golyplot]

But I also think that it's a case of what makes those other languages hard compared to Japanese. Beginner's Japanese grammar is really not that bad. No noun classes to worry about, plural formation practically non-existant, verbs are very regular, not many tenses to learn, no need to decline nouns or adjectives, conjugating adjectives is interesting but again, very regular. While something like Russian, Greek or German requires you to apply quite a lot of knowledge in one go to make a simple grammatically correct sentence, Japanese is surprisingly straightforward. The more difficult aspects of grammar don't really bite until you get to the intermediate level. And then the two other difficult aspects (kanji and vocabulary) are also a much bigger barrier at the intermediate level than beginner level.

Perhaps that's a production vs reception divide? Stuff like noun genders certainly makes it a lot harder to speak the language correctly, but they don't impede understanding at all since you can almost always just ignore the genders and still understand the content.

Meanwhile, the things that make Japanese hard make understanding really hard as well. Like the way that sentences are just phrased in completely alien ways and important details are either implied from context or else implied by subtle grammatical features with no analogs in English.

[garyb]

I finally caved in and resubscribed to Netflix. Between wanting convenient access to plenty of Spanish input before my trip, get plenty of German input and experiment with Migaku flashcards after the trip, and have dual subtitles with Language Reactor for when I watch things in Japanese, it just made sense.

Spanish

I've not done as much as I had hoped, due to a typically busy week at work before a holiday. But I watched one film (Diecisiete, chosen because it's set in Cantabria where I'm going), started another (El hoyo), checked out the animated series based on the Memorias de Idhún books (I enjoyed the books but the series didn't grab me, and I saw that it got a lot of criticism including from the author herself...), listened to some podcasts, did a bit of self-talk and writing, and started playing Skyrim with Spanish voice acting.

Okay, after listing all that out, I suppose it's not actually bad at all!

Skyrim had subtitles off by default, which seems unusual compared to more recent games, and I was tempted to turn them on (in Spanish of course) but then realised that there's no better motivation to pay attention and listen properly than to know what the hell is going on and I'm supposed to be doing in the game!

Japanese

Still working through Genki lesson 9. The grammar explanation part is short but the exercises are dragging on. It's important stuff though: use of short/informal forms in various situations and the past; more quoted speech; qualifying nouns ("the person who is wearing glasses", etc.); how to express already done and not yet done. Mou in Japanese, which was already covered quite well in Forbidden Speech, appears to be very similar to ya in Spanish in that the direct translation is "already" but it's used much more widely and can mean "again", "now", "anymore", etc.

I'd like to finish this lesson before I go on holiday, but it's not a high priority.

I'm onto WaniKani level 7, and it's still quite plain sailing. I'm trying to get more used to reading and processing full sentences in Japanese, so when doing vocabulary lessons I'm spending more time looking at the example usages and sentences. I didn't bother with that earlier on because there tended to be too much unknown language other than the word being illustrated, but now quite a few of them are fully or mostly comprehensible and it's valuable to see the words in context.

SRS has been taking up a bit too much of my time in the last week. WK is a bit less heavy but there's also Renshuu (vocab, grammar, Kanji) and Ringotan (for writing, so lower priority but these reviews still build up!). These things are all just supposed to be accessory work, but some days I've not had much energy left for textbook work after catching up on reviews so it feels like the cart is before the horse. I think I'll stop doing the Renshuu grammar exercises since they often have a lot of unknown structures and words in them so I spend more time trying to figure these out than actually practise the points they're intended for practising, and I'm already doing enough grammar practice with Genki.

Netflix has no shortage of Japanese material! I started watching a drama called Erased (the live-action one; I later found out it's based on a manga and anime) and I like it, but the Japanese in it seems very colloquial. Even when I recognise the "important" parts of a sentence there's often lots of unfamiliar detail and filler between them, and it seems like almost every sound in the language can be used as an ending particle if you know how. To state the absolutely obvious, realistic language can be very different from beginner-textbook language; but to state what should be obvious but might not be since it's so fashionable to bash traditional learning methods, beginner-textbook language is still the best foundation for starting to understand real language!

I am picking up some few bits and pieces of "real language" just from that sort of input. For example I was taught jibun (自分) in WaniKani as "oneself", but it seems to have a much wider usage and cover related concepts like I/me (almost like a substitute for the personal pronoun), my own, us/ourselves, etc. I was also hearing "wareware" so much in Yakuza that I just had to look it up, and it turns out to be a form of "we/us" that's typically used for a group or organisation: makes sense with the various criminal organisations in the game.

I'm using dual subtitles, but following the action and reading the English and glancing at the Japanese is quite a mental effort! I can see how intensively working through a series using Language Reactor's "pause after each line" feature could be very productive with a higher level in the language and/or a video with simpler language, but for now it's a bit much so I'm happy to just watch for enjoyment, listen, and catch a familiar word or expression now and then. As I keep saying, this kind of input does have some value because I'm seeing the stuff I'm learning in context and the dual subtitles give it more value because it reinforces the written language too, but at my current level I think I reach diminishing returns pretty quickly so again I'm not really counting it as study. But it's fun and motivating, and it gives a small boost to the language learning.

I might still look out for something a bit less challenging. Maybe anime, or maybe Midnight Diner since it has a lot of everyday language and I enjoyed the few episodes I saw in the past before I started learning Japanese.

German

Almost nothing. My queue of unlistened Easy German podcast episodes is starting to build up!

[tastyonions]

I'm curious what you consider to be too much time spent on SRS. I know everyone's got their own limits. I spend about 11 minutes reviewing per day and it's been sustainable for me over the past few months.

When I hear about someone spending a couple hours each day in there I just shake my head and marvel at the endurance of some people.

[Sizen]

I am picking up some few bits and pieces of "real language" just from that sort of input. For example I was taught jibun (自分) in WaniKani as "oneself", but it seems to have a much wider usage and cover related concepts like I/me (almost like a substitute for the personal pronoun), my own, us/ourselves, etc.

Pronouns are weird in Japanese. Syntactically speaking, they’re not really different from nouns, unlike in most European languages, so often nouns are used in the same way we would use pronouns. You get interesting first person pronouns like “拙者　せっしゃ” which just means “inept person”, and 筆者　ひっしゃ, which means writer or author.

This is also why you get very common formulations in Japanese that sound like marked speech, or at least clunky, in English. Things like この私 "this me" or 愛するあなたへ "to (the) you whom I love".

自分 is, as you’ve pointed out, used as a first person pronoun. In fact, it was very common among military enthusiasts and lesbians for a while (don’t know about now). Interestingly, it’s used as a second person pronoun in the Kansai region, which is another fun quirk of the Japanese language. Sometimes the person changes. The most glaring example of this, in my opinion, is the first person pronoun 僕　ぼく, which is typically used by boys and men (or people of any gender in songs). However, it’s also used sometimes as a second person pronoun when talking to young boys.

[golyplot]

I haven't watched the live action version of Erased, but I did watch the anime (which is also on Netflix, or at least was as of Sept 2021). In addition to colloquial language, I think the past scenes incorporate Hokkaido dialect as well. In particular, the kids all say "shittake" to each other when leaving, which is apparently Hokkaido dialect, as also seen here and here.

[garyb]

I'm curious what you consider to be too much time spent on SRS. I know everyone's got their own limits. I spend about 11 minutes reviewing per day and it's been sustainable for me over the past few months.

When I hear about someone spending a couple hours each day in there I just shake my head and marvel at the endurance of some people.

It's actually a hard one to answer since this is the first time I've used SRS as a beginner, and I suppose there's a distinction between "pure" SRS like Anki reviews and resources that use SRS but also teach new material like Wanikani. In the past I've usually done around 10 to 15 minutes per day (in total for all languages) which has felt like the ideal, but with Japanese it's gone up. Wanikani reviews usually take up around 20 minutes per day (two sessions of 10 minutes), and Renshuu is maybe another 10 minutes if I go through it quickly now that I've binned the grammar exercises.

This can add up to the best part of an hour, which is on the high side especially if it's a day when that doesn't leave much time for other study. Yeah, a couple of hours per day is crazy and even if I did have more time for languages that's not how I'd choose to spend it.

Renshuu might have to be the first thing to go if it continues, although it would be a shame because having ready-made flashcards with audio and example sentences is very useful and I'd like to delay going down the DIY Anki route as much as I can. It's still asking me a lot of very basic stuff very frequently, and it's sorely missing Anki's "easy" and "hard" buttons to help to avoid that. I had a look in the settings and I think it's because of the "Study style" setting, which defaults to "Slow and thorough" meaning that all vectors for a word (EN to JP, JP to EN, kanji to kana, etc.) need to be answered before the word goes up in mastery. I've changed it to "quick and simple", where any vector increases the level: seems much more fitting for something I just want to use for a little extra practice and exposure. You can also tweak the intervals, but I don't really want to mess with that unless I have to.

Thanks Sizen and golyplot, interesting stuff! For pronouns, aside from "watashi" and "boku" which are taught early on, I'm figuring out a lot just from listening. I picked up "ore" from games and TV; it's the choice of the main character in Yakuza, even when he's being addressed politely, which I realise is to give a certain image.

I feel that Erased might not be the best choice for a beginner, although at my level anything is a big challenge. It's annoying when someone asks a reasonale question about what media is good for beginners and some smartarse replies that the best media is whatever engages you the most, but there is some truth to it! The anime doesn't show on Netflix for me, but maybe it's a UK region thing.

[golyplot]

Realistically, you're going to want to watch everything with subtitles, so it doesn't really matter what you watch, just pick something fun. Heck I still watch anime with English subtitles. Even if I could probably understand a decent amount of it on my own, it's still nice to just get everything effortlessly when you're watching for entertainment.

[garyb]

I'm back from Spain!

Naturally, I spoke and heard lots of Spanish. I feel like this trip was a sort of milestone in my language journey, not in terms of competence but of avoiding perfectionism and not being afraid to try. There were times when I quite deliberately used language that I knew was incorrect because I couldn't remember or didn't know the correct form but I knew I'd get my point across, wheareas in the past I might well have paused to think (and probably interrupted the flow of conversation or missed my turn to speak) or just avoided saying it entirely.

I was keeping in mind the idea of "language for communication, rather than art for art's sake" from that Cure Dolly video that I mentioned recently, and also my experience in Japan with my partner at the time who wasn't shy about speaking at every possible opportunity even with an incomplete knowledge of the language. I was still being realistic: I accept that by nature I'm a more reserved person so I wasn't trying to measure myself by that bar, but still, seeing what is possible gave me the encouragement I needed to step a little more out of my comfort zone. I had a friendly chat with the receptionist every morning at breakfast; I spoke a lot with a guest from Mallorca who was takging surfing lessons with me; and in customer service interactions I tried to go a little beyond the necessary where appropriate by adding in a comment or a question or a joke.

The lessons and the conversations with the instructors tended to be in a mixture of English and Spanish since some attendees were Spanish speakers and others not. I'd say I can now quite confidently talk about sea and wave conditions, which is useful since if someone is considering going surfing and sees you walking back from the beach they might well ask you about that!

Switches to English did happen a few times, but similarly to my experiences in Germany last year I felt that it was usually justified: I had had a couple of "strikes" like not understanding something or not being able to say something, and the other person's English was good enough. There were a couple of cases of more French/Italian-like behaviour of switching as soon as they could tell I was non-native, but they were the exception.

I was very aware that my Spanish has many gaps and weak points and I'm not quite at an advanced level yet, and I do feel encouraged to improve it. Especially since I see myself spending a lot more time in Spanish-speaking areas in the next few years: I'd love to go back to see more of the north of Spain and surf more, and maybe I'll finally make it out to Latin America. And I'm sure I could get to that level: just a few hundred more hours of input, some speaking and writing practice now and again, and patching up some grammar points and verb forms that I'm still a little shaky with.

But my language-learning routine is quite full already and I'd have to make sacrifices if I wanted to improve my Spanish while continuing to progress in Japanese and German. Either slow down in those languages (not that German could be much slower at the moment!), or carve out time at the expense of other things in my life, or be a bit more "extreme" about listening (have headphones in more of the time, avoid watching things in English, etc.). At least my Spanish level is high enough that working on it isn't too mentally demanding and is more just about putting in the hours, so I'd still have brainpower to spare for the lower-level languages.

My German premonition didn't really come true; there were a couple of Germans there and I spoke a lot with one of them, but she was a young student with near-perfect English. On the other hand, there was a huge group of Italians for the first few days so I heard and spoke some of that. Which just resulted in a lot of confusion and mistakes in both languages! There was a group of Dutch-speaking Belgians too and I wondered if my German knowledge would help me understand them, but it didn't much apart from a few words like "echt?" ("really?").

TV and film

I watched a few more episodes of Idhún and of Erased during my downtime. Idhún is fine really, it's not demanding and the short episodes are convenient. Given my ambitious learning goals, I think it's best to focus on stuff that's convenient and easy to consume rather than on quality, and that's where Netflix comes in. I also started a German series, Dear Child. I might even have to resort to dubbed series if I want to have my cake and eat it too (quality + convenience)... Input is input and desperate times call for desperate measures

Last night there was a one-off screening of Battle Royale at my local cinema, and since it's Japanese and I had seen it recommended in various places I couldn't refuse. I don't have much new to report in terms of understanding the language, but it did have a lot of on-screen text. Sometimes I even knew most of the characters, but the text wasn't on the screen for anywhere long enough for me to process it all! It also included a lot of names (like in the reports of who had been killed at each point) so it was interesting to see how names are written in Kanji and which ones I recognised the sounds and readings of.

I've also seen that there's a Spy x Family film and another Japanese drama called Evil does not exist showing later this month, and they're showing The Teacher's Lounge (German) soon which again was already on my list, so more cinema trips will be coming up!

I did keep up a bit of Japanese learning while I was away. I did WaniKani lessons and reviews, although a bit haphazardly and with only a few new lessons per day since I found it a bit hard to focus on them and do them at consistent times. I'm finding that Level 7 has quite a few words and characters that are easy to confuse with each other. I kept up with the other apps too; apps never beat proper learning resources, but they're sure handy at times like this when I'm away and just want to keep up some form of study. I'm looking forward to getting back into Genki this week.

General feelings

As I hinted at, I might be biting off more than I can chew since I want to put more time into Spanish but don't want to slow down with Japanese or Spanish. As usual I think I'll just see how it goes. The Spanish motivation might just be a temporary post-trip effect.

I'm tempted to consider Spain again as a place to live. I like Berlin and all, but I'd love to be near the sea now that I'm getting more into surfing, and I have mixed feelings on big cities. But remote working and easy travel options from Berlin might also be an option to get the best of both worlds.

[garyb]

Small follow-up (edit: apparently I don't do small )...

I feel that my Japanese motivation has dipped a little, which I think is a natural consequence of my visit to Spain boosting my motivation for my other languages. You know, the ones that are much easier, much more immediately useful, I already speak much better, and I could improve much more quickly. Plus my very imperfect Spanish ability reminded me of how difficult speaking is, even in a language that is in the easiest category and that has related languages that I speak well.

On the other hand though, several people I know are currently in Japan and having a blast (and I was originally supposed to be there right now too, but after the trip last year I changed plans since I didn't want to go back again so soon between the money and the long flights so I went to Spain instead) and I'm a little envious. Maybe I'll go back this time next year for the music festival in Osaka that I had planned to attend, and make a big trip of it. And my interest in the culture and media is still there, and I've got back into Genki in the last couple of days, albeit just for half an hour per day or so.

So I think this is just a sort of natural "rebalancing": I'm taking my foot a little off the pedal but keeping it moving, and allowing a little more time for the other languages. If I can keep up with WaniKani, do a little bit of Genki most weekdays, and catch up at weekends, I'll still be going at quite a good pace.


My trip to Spain, plus my thoughts about moving to Berlin or elsewhere, plus the discussion about Erasmus here, prompted me to re-investigate my options and the possibility of getting Greek citizenship by descent. I had a good look into it a few years ago (or at least I thought I did!) and it was looking like it would be very difficult and even if I did I'd likely have to do military service: not quite the kind of intensive language-learning experience I had in mind! But I looked again yesterday, and I'm not sure whether the policies have changed or the information has just become more easily accessible, but it now looks like theoretically I'm entitled to it and if I prove that I've lived outside of Greece for the last 11 years I could avoid the army, as long as I don't spend more than 6 months per year there until I turn 45.

I need to understand the ins and outs of it better (like whether the 11-year rule applies to new or just existing citizens), get in touch with the consulate/embassy, and try to get the ball rolling ASAP, but it's sounding like a real possibility and a faster, easier, and more flexible route to an EU passport than living in Germany for three years (if that policy even passes). Which could really open up future options, both for places to live and temporary remote working since you're supposed to have work authorisation for that and companies are becoming stricter about checking.

It doesn't change my immediate plans, since the process could take a long time (anything from a couple of months to a couple of years) so if I go for Berlin etc. I'd still pursue work authorisation through my company.


Also, I signed up and paid for Migaku with the intention of using it for German. I'll report back.

[Sizen]

Also, I signed up and paid for Migaku with the intention of using it for German. I'll report back.

I know the word order in German can be wildly different, so I'd be interested to hear how your experience goes. Japanese is kind of "backwards" compared to English, so the cards often have mismatched subtitles, making them somewhat unusable unless you take the time to go back and edit them, which kind of negates the purpose of Migaku, I feel.

An example from Delicious in Dungeon I found quickly:

The Netflix subtitles:

かつて永華を誇ったその国は
He states that the once glorious land

狂乱の魔術師によって地下深く
continues to be held captive deep underground

今なおとらわれ続けているという
by the hands of a mad magician.

Reordered to match the Japanese subs better:

かつて永華を誇ったその国は
The once glorious land,

狂乱の魔術師によって地下深く
by the hands of a mad magician, deep underground

今なおとらわれ続けているという
continues to be held captive, so he states.

Even if the subtitles were properly aligned like in my reordering, the way the sentence is broken up makes each part unintelligible without the rest of the sentence being included.

I think emk has the right idea with substudy and including the surrounding context.