ryanheise's experiment log - Experiment 5 (Japanese)

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Adrianslont
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - Experiment 3 (Japanese)

Postby Adrianslont » Wed Nov 20, 2019 10:05 pm

I have used the cartoon Thomas and Friends for learning French and Indonesian and a number of the episodes use that device, like The Three Little Pigs, of repeating an element of the story a total of three times, with slight variation.

As you say, it’s really helpful. Goldilocks has this device, too if you’re looking for another story!
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - Experiment 3 (Japanese)

Postby ryanheise » Thu Nov 21, 2019 11:00 am

Adrianslont wrote:Goldilocks has this device, too if you’re looking for another story!


Good idea! It's a pretty effective device, and I wonder how many other stories there are like this.
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - Experiment 3 (Japanese)

Postby devilyoudont » Sat Nov 23, 2019 12:59 am

Repetition is a basically ubiquitous element in any story that originated from the oral tradition. I don't know if the reasons are known.

(The queen tries to kill Snow White three times, Hansel and Gretel make multiple trails thru the forest, Jack climbs the bean stalk more than once, etc etc etc)
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - Experiment 3 (Japanese)

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Nov 23, 2019 6:06 pm

A series of three events, three sisters, three brothers, three items, three wishes... the list goes on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - Experiment 3 (Japanese)

Postby Christi » Sun Nov 24, 2019 12:24 am

jeff_lindqvist wrote:A series of three events, three sisters, three brothers, three items, three wishes... the list goes on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)


Cool. I wonder if this is a universal literary element or a Western one. Does anyone know?
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - Experiment 3 (Japanese)

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Nov 26, 2019 12:01 am

Certain numbers are more common cross culturally than others. 3 would probably be the most common. I imagine 3 is probably a near universal with a few outlier cultures somewhere-- Just like the vast majority of languages have the sound represented by the letter "m," but not every single one.

As a random example, Kitchomu from Japanese folktales is stopped by a government official who checks his luggage 3 times.

There are other numbers which are fairly common cross culturally (7 as an example--see the 7 lucky gods for a Japanese example), and others which are more limited to certain regions (13, 108).

The significance of these numbers (especially 3) is by no means limited to literature... We also see it everywhere in religion (the christian trinity, Buddhist triads, 3 lines to make a Bagua, 3 fates, and the triple goddess to give some examples)
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ryanheise
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - 2020 resolutions and plans (Japanese)

Postby ryanheise » Thu Jan 16, 2020 5:09 am

My 2020 resolutions

I'd like to level up my immersion and spend more time with the language.
I'd like to travel to Japan.
To create more time for Japanese, I will both work less, and consume less English media replacing that time with the consumption of Japanese media.

My 2020 plans

I would like to experiment with overlearning.
I have some ideas for experiments to do on the Japanese equivalent of chat roulette.
I have some ideas on how to automatically analyse and sort Japanese podcasts by language difficulty, and creating a lesson plan/sequence.

Thanks for sharing in my journey so far!
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ryanheise
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - GOOD podcasts for learning Japanese (Japanese)

Postby ryanheise » Thu Jan 23, 2020 1:33 pm

I wrote a script to automatically analyse podcasts and estimate their language difficulty. My thesis was that there is so much native/authentic, freely accessible content out there in the form of podcasts that would be awesome for me to use as Japanese listening practice, much of it at my ability level, but it's just difficult to find it. Google has let me use their natural language processing tools for free for a little while, so I'm going to use this opportunity while it lasts.

Here's the graph plotting the estimated difficulty of individual podcast episodes of 10 Japanese podcasts:

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It's interesting that "News in Slow Japanese" covers such a broad spectrum of difficulty, and even though they speak slowly, the vocabulary can be very advanced in some episodes and not in others. So this will help me to pick and choose which episodes of different podcasts I want to listen to for listening practice.

I've been working my way through the ALFA 5 minute stories, but based on this graph, I've been exploring some episodes of different podcasts at comparable difficulty and it's good for a change to get some variation on the mode of speech.

The next priority on my 2020 list is to increase the amount of immersion I'm doing. Last year I probably averaged only around 30 minutes per day of Japanese, which is nowhere near where I'd like to be at. But I've adjusted some life priorities and plan to increase this to multiple hours. I don't want to burn out, so I plan to first increase my daily immersion to 1 hour per day, and then gradually ramp it up as my mental energy adjusts.
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ryanheise
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - GOOD podcasts for learning Japanese (Japanese)

Postby ryanheise » Thu Jan 23, 2020 2:38 pm

Out of curiosity, I made another chart specifically looking at episodes of the JLPT Stories Podcast which contains a variety of graded stories at the different JLPT levels (N5 to N1). This actually provides a cool way to check and calibrate my estimates:

Image

So, one N1 story "seems" to be easier than the hardest N5 story, although probably not. There can be errors introduced by Google's algorithms, and also this estimate is based primarily on word frequency and not grammar frequency. So it's only an approximation of the full picture (still, it seems on listening to the stories, a fairly good approximation).

Also, it's definitely significant that JLPT does not grade its vocabulary for levels N5-N1 based on word frequencies. That is to say, they haven't designed their levels so that all of the vocabulary covered in N5 is more frequent than N4, and so on. Looking at the JLPT website, they wrote:

N4 and N5 measure the level of understanding of basic Japanese mainly learned in class. N1 and N2 measure the level of understanding of Japanese used in a broad range of scenes in actual everyday life. N3 is a bridging level between N1/N2 and N4/N5.


So, in N5, you get a lot of vocabulary useful in the classroom, related to high school and study. But a lot of the terms used in relation to high school subject matter are not actually as frequent in everyday language, and so you can get an N5 story that uses words that are really not that common day to day, and an N1 story that uses more everyday words.

I might share a sorted list of these Japanese podcast episodes under the "Learning Resources" forum in case any other Japanese learner finds it helpful to have such a list. It could be useful, for example, to know which would be the best order to listen to all of the N5 stories in for a beginner.
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ryanheise
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Re: ryanheise's experiment log - GOOD podcasts for learning Japanese (Japanese)

Postby ryanheise » Fri Jan 24, 2020 3:10 am

Just shared the ranked episode lists over here in the Learning Resources forum.

My brother's learning German so I'm probably going to create a similar list for him.
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