Everyone loves a success story. I know I do. When I was learning Japanese hardcore, I looked high and low for stories of other people’s journeys. Anyway, here’s one from a reader who goes by the handle Awkward Map on this site. He’s finished RTK (Remembering the Kanji) and is now three months into sentences. The following are his own words:

To start with, I’d like to express my displeasure with classes. The only thing that I gained from my two years of Japanese at college is that it would take me 10+ years to get good at it if I continued on that path. The professors’ grasp of English was equally saddening, as clearly whatever methods they used to learn it were not very good. “If these people are what I’m going to sound like in Japanese, I’m in trouble,” I thought.

I picked up the pieces from my last attempt at Heisig and began searching around for the methods people used to learn Japanese to a fluent level. On a newsgroup I found a link to Khatzumoto’s website and was stunned at how quickly he was able to learn Japanese. I found out what an SRS is and if that was the only thing I found out I was already doing great, because that meant I was able to pitch 800+ cards that were already done up for Heisig’s system (pain in the butt, right there). My two months with that SRS before going into the sentences phase showed me that an SRS really can work for securing long-term memory.

At that point, I went AJATT. Goodbye friends, non-Japanese websites, all the things I used to love. “Headphones up, drown out the English,” was my motto for those last couple of months at school. I began working through Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar, mining sentences in concert with reading a bit from my Japanese textbooks from school (Genki I, II).

At the same time I picked up Death Note and starting mining sentences from that. Talk about repetition! 犯罪者 this, 死因 that, and some 病死 added for good measure. Amusingly for the first month I did it wrong and translated from Japanese to English. Amusing, I know. Also lead to extreme despair for the next couple of weeks as I fixed the sentences.

Anyways, I kept reading on there about “monodics” and thought “man, I’m only two months into this, can’t do it.” Instead of admit defeat however, I just started using Sanseidou for everything. It was tough, but not impossible to understand things and it did take a while. At the beginning it was perhaps 2-3 sentences per day (with maybe 3-4 hours available) with the monodic, which is hard to rationalize against the many more that I could be learning with a bilingual dictionary (bidic?), but the more I used the monodic the more it rewarded me with vocabulary seen over and over. Now on a good day spending about 8 hours working on sentences I’m able to put in 25-30 sentences using a combination of monodics (Sanseidou, Yahoo!, and Infoseek) to reliably check my understanding using different terminology.

(However, with the addition that the sentences should be the length you mentioned, this may balloon to more per day. I was doing sentences a wee bit bigger than that as an average for a while there…)

I still run into stuff over and over that I’m not able to decipher completely, sadly, but it’s just a matter of time. Using a monodic has given more perspective on how the language works and its incredible compact and condensed nature that kanji allows it to have. So… yeah. Right now I’m at 976 sentences, but I’m pretty confident that this is going to just get faster and faster the more sentences I put into my SRS. Just like how I was only able to put one sentence in per hour before and now it’s 3 or 4, pretty soon it’s going to be even more. The “back” sides of my cards are still friggin’ huge, however, what with the circular nature of definitions.

Right now I’m starting to read about the Japanese video game scene because they were a big reason for my interest in Japan (Pokemon, oh yeah! Dragon Warrior! Woo!). So, I’m picking up a lot of stuff that I already knew from one source or another about video games. Good ol’ Japanese Wikipedia has been my best source.

“Learning a language is not a linear process. The better you get, the easier it gets for you to get better. The more you know, the more you are able to learn. Knowledge, words, structure will get stickier ― but first you have to go through this sucky period, before the curve starts to shoot up.”

is also, like, such a great quote and so true.

Anyways, there’s where I’m at after three months of sentences.

以上。That’s his story. Do you have a story you’d like to share? Email it to me! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

Yo. There’s a lot of misconception out there about the supposed difficulty of Japanese. There’s a lot of misconception about Japan itself. And here I am preaching to you about misconception, but I grew up with kung-fu movies, too, just like you. I thought all East Asians knew martial arts, ate rice (wait, this one’s true!), meditated daily on the Analects, and were just generally superhuman. But Japan is, at the end of the day, a country of human beings, just like you and me. Lazy, candy-eating, comic-reading people who wish their parents would just can it so they could play some more PlayStation; who learn their own language like we all do — because it’s there. As Oscar Wilde once put it:

“The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.”

Way to bring us back to reality, Oscar Wilde. You go, boyyy.

Back on topic. Everyone loves a success story. They inspire us; they drive us; they let us know that our dreams are possible because someone’s gone done already done it. So here are links to stories of people who have had success learning Japanese.

• His Excellency James W. Heisig, Prince of the Kanji Realms himself. A lot of people give me guff and accuse me of making up all this Japanese fluency crap. But it doesn’t compare to the guff that Heisig has been getting ever since the very inception of his method. You go, boyyy. Speaking of which, there are two quotes from Heisig in this interview that I really love: “the only languages that should be learned in school are dead languages” — although, if this is anything to go by (thanks, quendidil!), maybe not even dead languages fit that rubric; I certainly don’t think they do. And then there was his thing about going to: “live in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, where he ‘played with the children there and learned how to speak.’” Good stuff.
• Manny Sultan, an architect from Egypt. In his own words, he turned his room/apartment: “into a Japanese language camp. There were kanji cards on the ceiling, the walls, all over the floor. It was a challenge. I had put myself into a corner; I had to perform or sink. I believe in that sort of situation, the human mind has no limits.” You go, boyyy.
• Arudou Debito (formerly David Aldwinckle), a naturalized Japanese citizen and political activist. Also a published author in Japanese. I love his, to paraphrase: “get the heck fluent before coming to Japan” advice. If you’re already in Japan but not yet fluent, don’t worry — just hurry up.
• Dr. Mary Sisk Noguchi, university professor and head of KanjiClinic. She learned kanji using the Heisig method, and then learned readings by reading (duplication duplication woo!) furigana books. You go…boyyy.
• Chris Houser, the guy who told me to use SuperMemo (an SRS) for learning kanji. I pestered the poor man with emails for weeks thereafter. He doesn’t actually have his success story up there, not in full anyway. Maybe you can pester him for it.

Your Success Story

But enough about other people. Now it’s your time to shine. I want to hear your success story, partly out of curiosity for myself, but more importantly, to help those like you who will come afterward. I’m going to put them up on this site, and people will read them and feel all warm and fuzzy inside. So, if you’ve been using the methods discussed on this site, and you’ve had success and you’re willing to share (you’d better be!), email me right now! Operators are standing by! “What operators?”, you say? — Shut up and start typing!

I saw this page from How To Learn Any Language a while ago (it might be that someone put it in comments) but neglected to link to it despite how cool it is: a headshot jackpot mother lode of Japanese audio materials with transcripts. They range from children’s books to some more, what’s the word, anyway, there’s a lot of range. What’s exciting to me about this is that it has links to all those European fairy tales you and I grew up with (yay!). I’ve been listening to Snow White and The Emperor’s New Clothes this morning. Anyway, give it try. AFAIK, it’s all free! Freeee!

First of all, an admission of guilt.

I have misled you.

In some of my SRS item examples, I have shown some reeeeeeeearry long sentences.

Wait, hold on, Kung Fu Hustle is on, and its the final fight against the Axe Gang and the frog guy. BRB…

…I love when he kicks the guys and it makes a bell-ringing sound…

K, I’m back. Yeah, so it’s all my fault. Part of it has to do with the fact that Japanese has the structural power to handle the creation of very long sentences. Since it doesn’t require the repetition and restatement of pronouns (what one might call “subjects” in English), it can create multiple, clause-length modifiers for a single “subject”, without confusing the reader. Or something like that, I dunno — I read this in a book about Japanese (a Japanese one, of course).

So, like, at some level, I thought it would be good for me to put long sentences in the SRS. Also, I probably wanted to show off that I could handle it, you know, prove how leet I was — I don’t like doing this as much as it may seem, but this is a website about how you can get reeeeeeeearry good at Japanese, so some amount of “demonstration” is probably a necessity.

Anyway, I was wrong.

Shorter Items

SRS sentence items. Yes they should be sentences, but you must kiss. That’s right, make out more. Get the tongue in there and…NO! I mean KISS: Keep It Short and Sweet. Sentences, yes; books, no. Break up long sentences if you must, I find that commas, pronouns, and particles/prepositions generally represent a good breaking point. If there is no clean, natural breaking point, then perhaps just break by length. Either way, you may or may not want to use ellipsis marks (…, ・・・) to mark your break. You might also consider incuding the original, full-length sentence in the answer section, for reference.

Right now (June 2008), I have an absolute hard upper limit of 10 characters on my Chinese sentence items, with most items being 6-8 characters long. It’s a bit more fluid for Japanese, but a hard upper limit 30 characters (kanji-kana mix), with most items being 10-15 characters long, seems about right. Earlier in your journey, you might want to go for even shorter Japanese sentences, in the 5-10 character range.

Remember: a long sentence is nothing but a bunch of short sentences stuck together. And even if a sentence looks simple, sometimes you need to make it even simpler for yourself.

Here are some examples, mostly from Momoko (source sentence and resultant sentence only shown):

• Source Sentence: 「マハティールとアブドラの対立は激しさを増し、マハティールは５月１９日、自分が３０年かけて作ってきたＵＭＮＯを脱退し「アブドラが辞めないかぎり復党しない」と捨てぜりふを発した。」
• Resultant Sentence:「捨てぜりふを発した。」
• Quoted From: Tanaka News, 国父の深謀

• Source Sentence: 「中村によると、我々の現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」
• Resultant Sentence:「現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」
• Quoted From: スロー・イズ・ビューティフル―遅さとしての文化

• Source Sentence: 『「もう、今を犠牲にするのはやめよう」という彼らの感覚は、必ずしも「今さえ良ければそれでイイ」という投げ槍な刹那主義と同じではない筈だ』
• Resultant Sentence:「必ずしも・・・投げ槍な刹那主義と同じではない」
• Quoted From: スロー・イズ・ビューティフル―遅さとしての文化

• Source Sentence: 「 21世紀初期，先進機械人的發展步伐越來越快，其中日本更是機械人科技的領導者。」
• Resultant Sentence:「先進機械人的發展步伐・・・」
• Resultant Sentence:「發展步伐越來越快」
• Resultant Sentence:「其中日本更是・・・領導者。」
• Quoted From: 2077日本鎖國

• Source Sentence:「アンパンマンが島に下りて見ると、岩の割れ目の中から泣き声が聞こえて来ます」
• Resultant Sentence:「アンパンマンが島に下りて見る」
• Resultant Sentence:「泣き声が聞こえて来ます」
• Quoted From: アンパンマンとあおばひめ

Delete (or Edit)

Sucky sentence items. They’re different for everyone. But everyone has them. You’ll know them when you see them. You’ll feel it. The dread. I see you looking at that sentence item. Yeah, you struggled to find it. Yeah, you entered it. Yeah, it seems important to know. But you know what? You’ve gone your entire life up to now not knowing that sentence; if it really matters, it’ll come up again. Right now, all it’s doing is sucking up your time and energy. Remember, you want to get QUANTITY of repetitions here. An item that’s sucky is a weed — feeding off the nutrients intended for all the other sentences. Delete it. Edit it if you really feel like it. But if editing feels like a waste of time, and for me it often does, then deletion is definitely the way to go.

Think of deletion as pruning or weeding — cleaning out a minority of overly burdensome items so that the majority can flourish. With sentence items, utilitarianism really works: the greatest good for the greatest number.

Length is not the only reason to delete a sentence item. Sentence items you just don’t quite “get”, or that you’re afraid might be wrong or awkward, also make good candidates for deletion.

This is Supposed to be Fun

Remember, sentences is not S&M. If it hurts, then it’s bad. No means no. Doing sentences should be like…popping bubblewrap. Requiring conscious effort, while being relatively easy and SUPER satisfying. Not to mention begging for repetition in an almost addictive way (addiction’s not the problem — it’s the object of addiction that matters). Doing sentences should make you feel like doing other sentences. If it doesn’t, then be aware that the fault probably lies neither with you nor with the language in question, but in individual items causing you dread. Get rid of them like you did your ’80s clothes.

…Not really. Not yet, anyway. But, see, the thing is, this site was written as a blog. Which was nice in terms of allowing it to be written incrementally, but sucky for reading once it got really big. It definitely needed some logical linearization (rather than the chronological kind that comes by default). So here it is: stuff for you to read. In order. Kinda. Sorta. More or less.

Do you like how I’ve been overusing tricky, catchy titles lately?

Anyway, it lives here. You can also get to it by clicking on “Newcomers Start Here”. It’s basically just a table of contents for the site, with an extra diagram and a rant. It doesn’t quite touch every article, but it touches the important ones. I will keep updating it for almost 100% coverage (time-sensitive announcements won’t count).

Enjoy . Oh yeah — please share any ideas or comments or point out any mistakes on it if you see any.

Hey, so, lately I’ve been looking for a portable, region-free DVD player…Don’t know if I’ll end up actually choosing one or not. But anyway, I used these websites to do some (well, all) of the research. And they’re in Japanese. And it seemed like it would make great reading material. So here are the links:

• Original Google Search
• M1: probably my favorite collection of player specs and info
• DVD.co.jp: nice players
• Region-Free.jp: the product I saw sucked, but I haven’t looked at everything yet…anyway, it’s still good for reading
• Kakaku.com: helps you find some of the lowest prices in Japan