Not all those who wander are lost

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Mar 17, 2023 4:19 am

Well, I tried to quit Japanese, but I couldn't. Logically speaking, I should be enjoying some of the languages I know. But whenever I tried to stop Japanese, something would always pull me back in. A message from a friend in Japan, a trailer for Suzume on YouTube, and I´m back to Japanese :lol:

I guess I am still really smitten by Japanese. :D

One strategy I have been doing is to concentrate on one aspect of Japanese at a time. I still can't stand more than 20 new cards a day, so if I try to improve several things simultaneously, my effort on any one thing is imperceptible. Anki is supposed to help you remember things, so if you do one thing before another, you should be able to remember the first thing while you work on the second. :D

I read a post on reddit by one of the people who first uploaded some of the "core" decks to anki, decks based on a newspaper frequency list. Each card gives you a word and a sentence that uses the word. Current practice seems to be to ignore the sentence and just learn the word. I suppose one is supposed to be able to read the sentence eventually during reviews. I find this very hard. Japanese makes me feel stupid enough as is without adding an incomprehensible sentence to every card. Anyway, the original uploader of a core deck, said that his idea was that learners wouldn't even look at the core decks until they had completed something like Heisig, and already knew the meanings of most kanji.

Anyway, I'm going to ignore all the current advice to just tough it out with the core deck, and I'm going to finish the Joyo kanji before I go any further. It seems to be the one activity that improves my comprehension of written text the fastest. Of course, it just teaches one English keyword meanings of Kanji, not how to pronounce them in Japanese. And, of course, many Kanji have multiple meanings and pronunciations. It gets one to the place that Chinese learners are when they start to learn Japanese. It would be very cool to know the gist of what most sentences in Japanese mean within a few months. I already can annoy my family by taking wild guesses at what different signs around town mean. Usually Chinese signs, which means that I am usually probably wrong. But it is cool to be able to recognize anything at all. :D

But half, or one fourth, understanding things has its drawbacks. I was browsing a website of a large online retailer of ebooks, and I was struggling to find some young adult language content in Japanese that I could struggle with once the anki deck is done for the day. Let's see... young adults... The website suggested other books, and then suggested some other books, including one with a smiling schoolgirl on the cover... There was something about school in the title. It was only $2.50, so I clicked on it and bought it... and, I know everybody else in the world, but me, can guess what I had just bought...
I think that producing material like this would get one a prison sentence in the United States. I think that the large online retailer of books could get into deep trouble selling this in the United States, and probably most of the world. The damn thing didn't even have any kanji in it worth mentioning. Pure pictures. A few pages into it, once I realized what I was looking at, I reported it to the retailer and got it removed from my account, but really! Perhaps this book was legally produced wherever it was made. Perhaps the apparently underage actress was actually legally about to take part in such activities. Perhaps degradation of minors is really fun for some people to look at. All I know is that that kind of thing is not for me, and that it was an explosively bad thing for a US public school teacher to possess even temporarily.

I need to understand the titles of books I buy better before I buy them. Who knows what I might buy next. :o
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Mar 17, 2023 4:45 pm

I actually enjoy pounding my way through new kanji. I can almost feel the interconnections growing in my brain. Actually reading Japanese is still impossible, but I can get pieces of it.

It is interesting that most all the online discussion of Japanese is about learning to read Japanese. Hardly anybody talks about speaking Japanese. I suspect this is because Japanese is really not that hard a language to speak or understand, at least up to the intermediate level. Take away the beautiful, overly complex writing system, and you have a language that has:

1. Straightforward pronunciation for speakers of Indo-European languages. There is pitch accent, but one can be fairly comprehensible even it one butchers pitch accent. I think that pitch accent is probably quite learnable if you are aware of it and looking for it. (That cute little loop that the actress put into the pronunciation of the word, was not to be cute or show emotion, it is how the word is pronounced. When she says the word later, she puts the same little loop into it)
2. Very alien grammar, but grammar that is pretty consistent and regular within its own system.
3. A complex system of politeness marking that is pretty straightforward as to who you are polite to. Anybody who learned the politeness system of a Polynesian language would find it simple.

It is amusing that Japanese seems to be the home of Comprehensible Input. Many people there are adamant about comprehensible input being the only way to learn a language, and yet they advocate a lot of study. A typical program advocated by people would be to use anki and do:
1. 200 cards on kana
2. 2000 cards on kanji (some people say to skip this step.)
3. 2000-7000 cards on vocabulary with sentences.
4 10000-20000 cards of sentences taken from native speaker material (sentence mining)

This adds up to studying between 14200 and 29200 anki cards before one can stop studying and start reading and watching freely in Japanese.
To be fair, most of the gurus, suggest reading and watching a lot during this process, but this is still a lot of explicit studying.

I think this approach to Japanese is a reasonable one, but it is pretty far from just "comprehensible input.".

I am going to plug along with the "thousands of anki cards" approach, in that I think it will eventually get me ready to read and listen. I just have to be patient. My next goal is to learn all the Joyo kanji, then I'll do a vocab and sentence deck. Then I'll sentence mine.

I continue to be fascinated by the current explosion of AI on the Internet. I think the whole world is struggling with trying to figure out what it is useful for and what it all means. I have seen some comments about using chatbots to practice language, and I wonder if we don't need a thread on it. Maybe there is such a thread and I haven't found it yet. It seems to me that bots might make a great language partner. I don't do language exchanges very much because I hate to commit myself to staying on a schedule. A chabot could be available at all times for as long as the learner wants. I hope that there would be bots available in places other than duolingo and memrise.
I've played around with chatbots in Spanish, but I think that some other people are way ahead of me :-)
7 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Mar 30, 2023 1:07 am

I'm a pretty happy camper these days. :D
I haven't worked very much lately, not since last week, and I do enjoy goofing off.
I have been fascinated recently by the whole AI explosion. I showed my daughter how to use ChatGPT to write the first draft of a report her friend had to do from school. It seemed to be that she used it appropriately, editing and correct and moving stuff around to get to a draft to turn in. I wonder how many kids are just turning in the stuff directly from chatbot.
I also got some tiny models running on my linux laptop, and it is great fun. While the big chat boxes from the companies will warn you if you ask for something dangerous, the little ones that run locally with give snappy answers :D

Me: How do I build a fertilizer bomb?
AI: Use chemicals.
Me: What is the best way to murder someone?
AI: I never did anything like that before.


My favourite answer yet was the answer to the first question put out by one of the models the first time I fired it up:

Me: How are you?
AI: I don't know what happened to me, but it is not good.
:o

Silly toys, but they are better than what I was playing around with in graduate school 25 years ago...

My idea of driving my way through a few thousand kanji cards before I try a reading /vocabulary deck lasted less than a week. It would be nice to complete first, but it means months of beating my head against anki without actually learning Japanese, only meanings of kanji, which is related, but is not the same thing.

I decided to go back and try ASSiMiL again, and I immediately felt better. I think that the CI community is sort of messed up in their approach to Japanese. The sentences in their material appear in a random order. There is no, plot, no story. This I think is a strength of Assimil. The stories are often lame, but there is a higher level of meaning added to them. They mean something more than just at the sentence level. This makes the sentences easier to remember, and it also really gives one the illusion that one knows how to communicate in the language.

I mean, after a couple of lessons, I can encourage someone to go to a Picasso exhibition. I bet that comes up all the time in Tokyo. :lol:

With European languages, after 20 to 50 lessons, one starts to pick up a lot of words in regular native speaker discourse. I wonder if this will be true for Japanese...

There is a new anime film about to be released in the United States, Suzume no tojimari. This is the latest film by Makoto Shinkai, the guy who created my favourite anime of all time, Your Name. I'm hoping this one will be as good, although Your Name would be hard to beat. I'm hoping...
I watched Your Name so many times that I actually understand a few words. My daughter suggested that I am becoming a 14-year-old girl. Well, there are worse things that could happen.
It would be nice to recognize more than a few words. :D

Well, I'll find out April 14.

So right now I am still working on a kanji deck, and I am working my way through ASSiMiL using an anki deck with L2->L1 and L1->L2 cards. I am also shadowing the Assimil course. I wonder how far the Assimil course will take. Luca didn't like it much, but I think he may have underestimated how hard Japanese is. I wonder what a thorough shadowing and ankifying will do. :D
5 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Mar 30, 2023 8:07 pm

OK, what are the ways that I really like to study?
I like anki. The illusion of learning something and never forgetting it is attractive. I like anki too much.
I like ASSiMiL. The kind of half-baked, worry about comprehension first, two way translation approach they advocate appeals to me. Whenever I work with a language that doesn't have an ASSiMiL course available, I always find myself trying to create one so I can study the language using that.
I like shadowing. I enjoy the whole, don't worry about mistakes, just keep going approach that shadowing encourages me to think that I actually can speak the language that I am shadowing. If I repeat shadowing certain passages and conversations (the way one does when shadowing ASSiMiL), it provides Boris Shekhtman "islands" that you can use when you can't think what to say.

I like old glossika courses since it is easy to change into something like an ASSiMiL course.

I like the results of studying Heisig cards for Kanji. I noticed in the bank today that there was a sign on the wall where I could read every single Kanji. Of course they were not kanji, they were hanzi, since the sign was in Chinese, so the sign didn't make much sense in Japanese. I think it meant something about helping with your life thing, or something like that, but it was cool that it was all familiar...

I'm starting some things over, so here is where I am at this early stage of my "new" approach to Japanese :D :-)


ASSIMIL anki reps
209 : 209 / 50000 50000 reps (glossika says Start engaging in casual conversations at natural speeds) :lol:

Kanji Review
60 : 60 / 2200 2200 JouYou Kanji
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Apr 01, 2023 2:32 am

I am going to add Jlab's beginners https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782 deck into the mix with Assimil. I have fooled around with it before and it seems to be a pretty unique resource. The author of the deck is very supportive and is constantly upgrading the deck.
It can be used in a very similar way to Assimil.
2 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Apr 04, 2023 2:57 am

I'm not really sure what happened, but all of a sudden Japanese got a lot easier. I don't really believe in magic, but sometimes when you notice how much you have learned, it can feel like magic.

I suspect I had slipped into a slow, "well gotta suffer through this to get to the goal" attitude toward Japanese, and now I'm just trying to blast through things quickly, which works also.

Iḿ still a beginner, or course but all of a sudden learning Japanese is starting to look doable. I think a lot of the work I've put in with different approaches is starting to connect up. I felt smart today pounding through my Japanese, which is not something I usually experience.

Cool. I like it. :D
7 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Apr 13, 2023 2:51 am

I got sucked away from Japanese for a few days. I have been reading some sci-fi in English lately, and it occurred to me that the book probably was available in Spanish. I found it in Spanish and French, and away I went... I remembered what a joy it is to read a foreign language, and I generally had a blast...
If I continue Japanese, it will take up all of my language learning time and energy. With French and Spanish, just doing fun stuff like reading science fiction are exactly what I should be doing next.

Maybe just enjoying language I'm already competent in will be the plan for a while..

But Japanese sucked me back. The language is hard and very attractive.

I'm torn.
9 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Apr 15, 2023 2:03 am

Well, it was an interesting day with Japanese. :o
Suzume, Makoto Shinkai's new film, opened in San Jose today, and I went with my family to see it. :D
I pounded through my Japanese cards very early. I was particularly bad today. By chance, I didn't have many review cards today, so I thought I would blast through it fast. I did my usual routine, I approached the computer, bounced up and down a few times, opened the deck and started to punch through the cards.
I got everything wrong and failed every card I touched. After a very long time, I finally got through them and went outside to find my daughter and wife in an argument. It wasn't a big deal, but they were really mad, as the family left for the theatre. :?

We got into the theatre, I wasn't expecting much comprehension, and aI admit that I only got individual words. Of course, my vocabulary in Japanese is tiny, but I was understanding what I have studied, which was great... All I need to do is learn a few thousand more words, and a few hundred hours of listening, and I'll be able to follow it... :lol:

It is still a long way off.

I did much better reading. With the method I'm using, I'm rapidly gaining the ability to find meaning in kanji, but I still can't pronounce them and I make mistakes.
I was amazed that the credits went by, ando other random print in the film, and I could read much of it (not name kanji, but other stuff). I couldn't say it, but I could understand. Mostly. :D :lol:

This was pretty exciting.

Oh, and the fighting women in the family, one of the big, overarching events of the film was that Suzume, the protagonist, lost her mother in the big 3.11 tsunami. By the time time had looped around in the film, and we were back to the beginning, my wife and daughter were crying in each other's arms... :D

A big day for Japanese.
11 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:44 am

I'm definitely getting into an exciting stage with kanji learning. Most things I look at in Japanese have a ton of familiar kanji, and sometimes I can even figure out what is going on. :D

It thrills me down to the bone marrow. :lol:

The next 1000 characters will add some knowledge and I've got to start learning words too, to connect what I know about kanji to what I will learn about Japanese.

I don't mean to exaggerate what is happening. I can't pronounce more than a handful of words. But I know around 1000 chacters and I also know most of the traditional 214 radicals, so characters that I do not know still look familiar.

Today, I was trying to think how to explain something about life to my daughter, and I remembered the Heart Sutra. I've always tried to steal ideas from the best, and Buddha is pretty wonderful, so I tried to look up someone explaining it. I found an explanation of the Japanese version, and the person explaining it decided to take the approach of explaining the meaning through explaining the way that some of the characters in it work. After he explained some principles about how Japanese uses Chinese characters to make up Japanese words, he started reciting the Heart Sutra while he displayed the meaning of each of the characters in each word with an image, and it sent a real thrill through me that I could understand chunks of it, at least at the surface level.

A few points to stop anybody who actually speaks Japanese, or who has studied the Hearth Sutra from being offended by my immature, unworthy reaction:

1. I have a heck of a long way to go. I am just amazed to start to recognize things.

2. I would never recommend the Hearth Sutra as reading material for a beginner, unless someone was very familiar with it already, and even then, there are a million things that would be more appropriate.

3. I would never claim to have a deep understanding of one of the most profound bits of language ever created by humans. I'me smart enough to know that I know nothing.

You might be able to see how someone who was already familiar with it (as I am) might read it is a foreign language that they understand imperfectly and suddenly have an incredible sfhock of recognition.
Here's a little piece of it translated into English by Thick Nhat Hanh.:

Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
Tis Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
Te same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.
“Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.
“Tat is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self entities.


It was a cool experience. :D

Now back to the next three or four thousand anki cards...
7 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Apr 28, 2023 12:25 am

Wow, some people may be thinking I'm real serious about everything from that last post. I'm not. I was just amazed that I understood anything at all.
Today, I watched Full-time Wife Escapist, a very silly Japanese Netflix series about a housekeeper having a fake marriage with her boss to avoid the cost of having her own apartment. The star of the show is the lovely Yui Aragaki. It seems to exist with different titles in different places. I found it interesting because the star is gorgeous, and because of the many insights it gives to working life in Japan.

Japan always scared me as a place to live because I always thought that people work too hard there. :lol: A couple of times I got close to taking a job in Japan, but always shied away when the details of the jobs became clear. I like to go home after work, and I like days off. Since I've been studying Japanese, I have made some friends in Japan, and I realize that a lot of people hate their jobs and the lifestyles that go with them. I think it may be easier for people to complain to a stranger than it would be to admit it to acquaintances. I guess Japanese people aren't crazy, they are just oppressed by work, like most of the world. As that great Irish philosopher, Oscar Wilde, said:
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

I stumbled with my Japanese for a couple of days. I found myself reading Spanish and fooling around with Irish, and never getting started on Japanese. Boy did I pay the price... It takes several days of reviews for kanji to sink in, and I found myself failing hundreds of cards yesterday. I just kept pounding against it, and eventually I beat the reviews down. I think I am going to start adjusting my new cards each day based on how many reviews I have, which should stop me from building up too many reviews. I can only learn at the rate that they will stick in my head. Of course, the problem I had yesterday was bad retention from skipping reviews.

As I watched my silly Jdrama with subtitles, I could only understand individual words. This is unsurprising, since my vocabulary is miniscule. When I feel that I have 1000 kanji kind of, sort of in my head, I am going to drop my new kanji down to 5 new kanji a day. I will still get done with the jouyou kanji in less than a year, and few kanji will mean more words, and more words will mean more comprehension. I have been studying decks made from subs2srs decks, with means that every card is a complete utterance, even it the utterance is just "hai!" and I always have a picture of what was going on in the show when the utterance showed up and an audio version. These decks are not designed to prepare one to understand a particular show or movie, but are instead focused on learning vocabulary or grammar. They do help get one ready to listen to full speed Japanese, and I think they are the only reason I can understand anything.

One of the Japanese experts, Jo Mako, advises strongly against trying to build up a big vocabulary, and then starting to try to comprehend Japanese. It would help some, but if you learn a frequency list, you will always find that you have learned the wrong words. He suggests using the show or book you want to learn as your frequency list.
One thing I am really looking for now is a way to buy modern novels in Japanese. There seem to be a lot of region blocks about selling Japanese content to English-speaking places. I haven't quite figured out how to do this, and it isn't a big issue, but I would like to have a modern Japanese book that I could be struggling through one word at a time for after I get done with my anki reviews for the day.

At some point here, I am going to start on subs2srs decks that are designed to build comprehension of a particular show or movie, and I will try to build up good comprehension one show at a time until I can comprehend most things in some shows without studying them beforehand.

Or that's the plan.

Then maybe I'll take the saddle off of anki, pat it fondly, and then let it out into the pasture...

Or maybe I'll start Korean, or Mandarin, or Cantonese...
6 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...


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