Almost forgot! For you music lovers out there, there are several sites out there where you can get the lyrics to your favorite Japanese music that you no doubt are playing to the exclusion of English and other languages :). Here is an inexhaustive list:

• Lyricz.Info
• Uta-Map
• Uta-Net
• Google your way to glory for the rest!

1. How do you decide which sentences from your input to copy over to your SRS?
• This is a tough one! If you’re like me, you’re a greedy little hobbit who wants to know everything. So here are some tips:
• Pick the ones that stretch your knowledge slightly, not so much that you’re lost, and not so little that you’re simply tagging “です” on the end. One vague guideline when you learn, say, a noun, is to learn it with the verbs that act on it.
• Picking the ones you’d like to say or write one day is an excellent start. There are many sentences out there and you’ll have to get pretty selective. Don’t be like me and feel like you have to learn everything you see. Go for what seems the most valuable.
• The other thing about picking sentences from your input is that it takes a lot of mental energy. So the key there is to just keep going until you drop. Go until you’re tired of it, then take a break from picking sentences but never take a break from getting Japanese input. As far as possible, you should spend every waking hour (and maybe even sleeping hours, if you it doesn’t keep you awake) receiving Japanese.
2. Where do you get the sentences? (internet, etc?)
• The short answer to that is anywhere and everywhere that native Japanese is spoken and written. More concretely:
• When I first started, I got them from the Starter Oxford Japanese Dictionary. As the name implies, it’s very good for starters, but you will soon outgrow it.
• 2ch is perhaps the most famous Japanese forum site. It’s got a forum for every interest. Here, you can read a lot of the words of just regular Japanese people. There’s lots of both slang and more formal-toned discussion. As you may be aware, it was thstarting point of the Train Man phenomenon.
• Electronic dictionaries, like the Canon IDF-3000 and later the Canon V-80, have been key sources of sentences. These can be quite expensive, so do shop around a bit.
• Internet dictionaries. If you don’t yet have an electronic dictionary and/or a software dictionary, the Yahoo online dictionary is a decent substitute. It has tons of example sentences in both the bilingual Japanese/English and the monolingual Japanese sections, respectively. BUT!! BE CAREFUL OF ANY EXAMPLE SENTENCED LABELED “[慣用表現]” — these are awkward; do not use them.
• Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC is the place to look up the pronunciation of Japanese names, in the “Translate Words” section. However, the example sentences on the site sometimes contain errors. They are mostly good, but I would avoid them to be safe; you don’t want to go learning erroneous Japanese, and when sentences are your primary learning medium, you need to be able to trust what you read 100%. The Yahoo online dictionary is mostly based on highly-regarded, rigorously edited paper dictionaries that have been around for a while (decades?). WWWJDIC is a bit newer and more open source. Don’t get me wrong, though, I mean no disrespect to Dr. Breen.
• In February 2005, I installed the Japanese version of Windows XP on my computer. This was an important move. It is also a reversal of our typical idea of cause and effect in that: it’s not that you know so much Japanese that you can use a Japanese OS. Rather, it is by using a Japanese OS that you learn a lot of Japanese. If you use a computer a lot, consider turning it fully Japanese.
• And, of course, there are the usual suspects: movies, books, dramas (dramedies and soap operas), news and videos.
• Fuji News Network’s online newscast can be depressing, but it’s how I learnt to understand the news.
• Yomiuri Online recently (2005-ish) started podcasting a lot of both audio and video content for free. You don’t need an iPod to watch/listen to it. They also have a superbly written geek section.
• If you’re a fan of BitTorrent, then the good people of D-Addicts record shows from Japanese TV, sometimes complete with commercial breaks. uTorrent is a good BitTorrent client.
• When it comes to movies, I watched a lot of dubbed Hollywood movies, because (a) I knew I already liked the movie, and (b) I already knew the situation and what dialogue to expect. Dubbed Hollywood movies can guarantee you both enjoyment and learning.
• I love Star Trek, Seinfeld and Will Smith. You can find Japanese versions of these on Amazon.jp. These generally come with Japanese/English audio and Japanese/English subs.
• If you don’t have a Japanese DVD player, then a PC or a region-free DVD player will work for playing DVDs purchased in Japan. You can score a region-free player in the $50-$100 range (shipping included) without breaking a sweat. J-List and Amazon.com are good places to start.
• A word of caution: never use English subtitles. You won’t learn any Japanese, you’ll just depend on the English subs. In my case, I have watched Japanese movies with English subs but then had memories of watching it in English. So if you have English subs, turn them off and keep them off.
• As far as books are concerned, manga are the absolute bomb for learning real Japanese. Personally, I prefer stories that are somewhat grounded in reality. In fact, there is even some very good non-fiction manga out there, such as the “Life: A 4.6 billion year journey” series produced by NHK. Anything written by Kaiji Kawaguchi will be very interesting. Again, Amazon.jp will be happy to sell to you.
• Japanese translations of good English books abound. Just like with dubbed movies, they give you the advantage of having a clue what to expect going in. About half my book collection is Japanese translations, the other half is homegrown Japanese books. In college, I even got Japanese editions of my computer science textbooks. Once again, Amazon.jp will hook you up.
• It is important that, when you hear spoken Japanese, you get independent written confirmation of what was said. So if you hear a sentence in a movie, you want to confirm it with the Japanese subtitles. Of course, there aren’t always Japanese subtitles for you to confirm with, so some solutions are to:
• Ask a Japanese person to confirm.
• Get a dictionary, look up the words you think you heard and use the dictionary’s example sentences, instead of the sentence you think you heard.
• Here’s a little dictionary trick: if you ever come across a word that you want to learn but that has no example sentence, then use the definition itself as your example sentence.
3. Do you make example sentences for grammar points or just vocab?
• Yes. (Both). One of the best books for that is Naoko Chino’s All About Particles. Back in the day, I learned at least one example of every grammar point in the book. For a solid foundation in Japanese grammar, few books can be more highly recommended.
• Tad Perry’s legendary, free Quick and Dirty Guide to Japanese Grammar is also a keeper, in terms of the example sentences. Read the explanations, but don’t bother to memorize them and don’t worry if you don’t understand them. Focus on getting the example sentences.
• Last but absolutely not least, Tae Kim offers brilliant, lucid explanations of Japanese grammar in his Guide to Japanese. Great for example sentences, and a good place for you to go find out stuff that I had to figure out.
4. I have a decent level of skill, do you think I should jump into the J-to-J cards?
• Yes! Absolutely! Start as soon as possible and reap the rewards! Or sow them :). Or whatever farming metaphor you like best.

10,000 sentences is a lot. But the way we’re doing it, you can easily learn about 50 every day no sweat, and even more if you want to. Don’t freak out if you only do 15-25 every day. The important thing is to learn every day.

You will need:

• Computing device(s) (PC, electronic dictionary, PDA, etc.)
• An SRS (KhatzuMemo, Mnemosyne, etc.)
• One or more sentence sources (dictionary, movies, music)

In order to have learned a sentence you need to be able to do 4 things:

1. Read it in full, aloud, with kanji, no furigana.

Furigana are great for when you’re reading comics and such, and I heartily recommend you use books that have them, but you need to learn to function without them.

2. Know the meaning of every word in the sentence.

I don’t suggest you over-analyze the sentence, but you should know the function of each part of the sentence, otherwise you can’t truly be said to be understanding it. You don’t need to provide an exact translation when you give your answer, in fact, don’t bother translating at all. Of course, early on, you will be using Japanese and English together (later, Japanese only), and you will need probably get translations of the sentences, so put those translations in the “answer” field of your SRS; use them as a check of your understanding. But again, you just need to remember the gist of the translation (not the exact wording) for it to count as knowing the sentence.

3. Understand the meaning of the entire sentence
4. Write (copy) out the sentence by hand

This is so you get practice writing Japanese — you don’t have to do this for every sentence, but do at for as many as you can. You should do this on graph paper (one square per character). If you have no graph paper around, do without until you get some. By our definition, if you cannot do any one of these 4 things, then you have not learned the sentence. Notice how:

• This does not involve looking at an English sentence and translating it into Japanese. Do not translate from English to Japanese. Why? Well, because there are so many possible translations for a given sentence, how are you going to say which is right and which is wrong? Are you only going to count the one you’ve got written down? That’s too restrictive and too failure-prone. What’s more, if you get the Japanese sentence wrong, you haven’t just made a mistake, you’ve sown the seeds of bad Japanese. Good Japanese starts with mindlessly imitating good Japanese. Don’t go inventing your own Japanese; no one will understand you. You’ll be doing the Japanese equivalent of “all your base are belong to us” (Japanese discussion of the same) “全ての貴方のベースは私に属する”. It sounds weird…off.
• Nor does it involve saying or writing the sentence from memory. Do not memorize the sentences. That’s too complex and too failure-prone. If you’re like me, you can barely memorize words, let alone sentences.

“But wait, if I don’t memorize it, how do I know I know it?”. Oh-ho. That’s where the SRS comes in. When you first learn a sentence, of course you’ll “remember it”. What counts isn’t so much that first time, as 2, 3, 10, 52 weeks later. Thanks to an SRS, you will be given the chance to truly test your knowledge, by reading that sentence several times over several weeks and months. By doing that successfully, that sentence will be in your brain, pretty much like white on rice. In other words you will memorize the sentence just by seeing and reading it repeatedly over time. The SRS will take care of things to make sure that you see new sentences or sentences you keep forgetting, more often than old sentences that you know well.

Seeing and reading things repeatedly over time is just how advertising works; you can remember sentences like “You can’t beat the feeling”, some 15 years after Coca-Cola stopped even using that slogan. It’s also how it is that you can memorize the words of an entire movie (Independence Day, anyone?) But, yes, it takes time, and for a while you don’t believe you’re learning because you (apparently) have nothing to “show” for it. This is part of why classes are so bad. Classes are generally too focused on output—on display—but not on what is really going on inside.

So, even though just being able to read short sentences aloud is so easy, you are learning. Recently (October 8, 2006), I had to stand before a Japanese audience and read aloud some documents that I had never seen before （祝電＝しゅくでん）, and it was no problem at all; I can read the same as your “average” adult in Japan, and I’m not smarter than you.

While you will eventually memorize a lot of the sentences, you will almost certainly not memorize all of them. But if you were to hear or read them (or sentences similar to them), you would understand them. This is important. Why? Well:

• In every language you speak, your passive vocabulary (what you understand) always outstrips your active vocabulary (what you say/write)
• It is generally far for more important to understand other people, than to make yourself understood. It’s fine if you can ask for directions, but if you can’t understand the response…might as well take the next train to Whatsthepointville. More broadly—the simple fact that you are outnumbered 1 to several billion, means that you’re going to spend much of your life receiving input;; there are more people, books and videos than there are of you. If you are to function as an independent, mature adult in any society, then it is imperative, I mean, really, really, important, that you fully understand the written and spoken input of the world around you.

So, remember input precedes output. ALWAYS.

Readings of Kanji

As you know, in Japanese, a single kanji generally has two pronunciations (readings), sometimes less, sometimes more. Something that this method implies is that readings of kanji will take care of themselves just in the sentences you read. You don’t need to go learning the readings separately—learning things completely out of context like that has always been too boring, meaningless and ineffective, at least for me. Learning to read aloud thousands of sentences you will eventually get the feel for when to use which reading in any given situation. And you will also learn the exceptions; and there are plenty of exceptions. Not only that, but learning kanji readings in the context of a sentence is just easier—perhaps because a sentence connects everything in it with some rhythm or meaning. I don’t know the real reason just like I don’t know why electromagnetism works, but I know that it’s effective.

Examples

Look at these examples of sentences in the typical question-answer (Q-A) form flashcard. Note that the answer is not always necessarily the full “answer” that you give, it’s more a clue—definitions of words, etc.

QUESTION (FRONT):

これは例文です。

ANSWER (BACK):

これ　は（わ）　れい・ぶん　です。
This [as for] example-sentence is. (PL3)
*This is an example sentence.

QUESTION (FRONT):

お前は何者だ？

ANSWER (BACK):

お・まえ　は（わ）　なに・もの　だ
おまえ【御前】同等または､目下の相手をゾンザイに､また親愛の情を込めて呼ぶ語｡
現代では､多く､男が使う｡対等の親しい関係では｢おれ｣に対し｢お前｣と言う｡
なにもの【何者】姓名･身分などの分からない者を指していう語｡どういう人｡だれ｡何人(ﾅﾆﾋﾞﾄ)｡｢昨日の君の相手は何者かね｣。
めした【目下】地位または年齢が自分より下であること｡また､その人｡

Update: I’ve made some major improvements to this, discussed here.

Observe the following things:

• The direction is from Japanese only.
  • Initially you can go Japanese-to-English, but eventually, you should start going Japanese-to-Japanese only. For me, this was at about 500-1000 sentences. The effect of using only Japanese to discuss Japanese is pretty phenomenal; it’s like your Japanese becomes a self-sustaining reaction. You will probably have to do a lot of looking up, such that your answer area may contain definitions of definitions. That’s super! Because everything you are doing is exercising your Japanese skills.
• It’s important to either access to an Internet dictionary or a software dictionary installed on your computer. That way, you can look up at the push of a button. A paper dictionary is fine for browsing, but for looking up an actual, specific word, it is BMT: brutal, medieval and time-consuming.

Credit

It would be nice if the sentence idea were my own, but the truth is that it belongs to a small group of Poles who learnt English to native-level fluency before ever leaving Poland. They even built a website about their work in learning English. The great thing about their site is that what’s true for learning English is largely true for learning any other language, including Japanese. Warning: I heartily encourage you to read their site. But unfortunately, while a former SuperMemo user/evangelist myself, I cannot recommend the SuperMemo software as they do. Fortunately, there are similar programs out there that do what SuperMemo does, for free. One of those is Mnemosyne.

AntiMoon Homepage

AntiMoon Sentence Article 1

AntiMoon Sentence Article 2

Right then. The focus on sentences is perhaps what makes this site unique. So what is the whole deal with sentences? As I’ve mentioned before, I used (and continue to use) sentences extensively in my learning of Japanese. Sentences are far better than individual words or grammar rules, because a correct example sentences is nothing other than a set of words arranged according to grammar rules with the added benefit of showing the “sense” in which to use the words. This is crucial. It’s no good knowing the word for something if you misuse it.As you know, a lot of words in Japanese actually mean similar things, they might even be translated to the same word in English. But they are not the same; knowing when to use what is the difference between sounding native-like in English or Japanese, and sounding just a little bit “off”. Correct usage is that je ne sais quoi, what the French call the…I don’t know what. For example, the words “place” and “site” mean almost the same thing. But look at these two sentences:

“A building site”

“A building place”

One of these sounds correct; it feels right. The other is just…off.

Now, am I suggesting you need to learn every possible sentence in Japanese? Of course not, not even close. You don’t know every possible sentence in English, but you seem to be doing fine at that. What I am suggesting is that learning thousands of real Japanese sentences will eventually give you a “feel” for what is and is not correct Japanese. Your human brain’s fuzzy logic will start to make the connections for you.

If you give it a moment’s thought, isn’t that how you write and speak English? Especially speaking. You don’t usually think “hmmm, well, I’m wanting to express the subjunctive mood here, so I should use ‘were’ instead of ‘was’”: there’s no time for crap like that. You just say it out. And you’ve been doing that as long as you can remember. Three, four and five year olds routinely speak correct English (and Japanese), so it’s clearly not that intellectually taxing (not that kids that age are stupid). And ignore that crap about “it’s easier for kids”. It’s not easier for kids; they just don’t have years of experience in making lame excuses.

I will projectile vomit on the next person that comes to me and uses their age as an excuse for (not) learning or being able to learn. Let me tell you a secret: you’ll never be the “right” age for anything. You’ll always be too young or too old or too poor or too rich or too obscure or too black or too white or too tall or too short to do something. You should always have started when you were younger—if only your parents had paid for you to have lessons in it, right? Wrong. Just do it! Break the age, height, money or reputation barrier and just do what you have to do. Let me tell you another secret: even if you suck now, even if you only know a little, that’s fine! Because, my friend, guess what— you would have sucked back then, too. No matter what the endeavor, sucking is what you do when you’re new at something. I mean, I could go on about this all day. For example, have you seen babies attempt to walk? They suck! My grandma can walk better than that. ‘Freaking babies can barely go two steps without falling. It makes you wonder, I mean, since babies just suck so badly at practically everything they do, perhaps human beings were just never meant to walk, or talk, or play Counterstrike…If you forget everything else, dear reader, remember this: when you begin something new, you are a baby. So cut yourself the same slack you would cut a baby, because like them, you’re just starting out, and you will eventually get good at it. Now, I’m not a Hindu, but as the Bible says: in the beginning there was the sucking. And it was good.

If you want, think of Japanese like drugs. All drug addicts and Japanese learners started from nothing, they were “just trying it out”. When you’re in the early stages of Japanese/drug addiction, you’re not as affected by it. But do it every day, and pretty soon you’re giving wedding speeches/selling your body in order to get a fix. But all along the way, you were only saying “just one more hit; it’s just one hit; no one ever got hooked from one hit; I can quit anytime; one hit has hardly any effect”. Japanese is a drug. Just one hit. Just one more kanji. Just one more sentence. Just today. At some point even if you wanted to quit, even if you wanted to be bad at Japanese, you couldn’t.

The full technical explanation of why sentences are important is for another time. I’ve wasted enough of your time already! Next, let’s just see how to use sentences in learning Japanese.

OK, so the reasons this website is being written as blog are (1) because it’s fashionable: I mean, even your grandma probably has a blog (2) because, through your kindness, I can earn some cash, and (3) because it’s easy to grow a lot of content incrementally. Did I mention cash?

As you know, I spent 18 months learning Japanese hardcore (still learning it softcore now that I live in Japan), and in that time I learned a lot about both Japanese and just life in general. I have lot to throw at you, and it’s best to do it piecemeal.

Here’s what’s going to happen—when I write something new, it’ll be up on the front page (“Latest Updates”) of the blog in chronological order. And it will also be here on the right-hand side in hierarchical order. That way, you’ll always know what we’re talking about.

Right, let’s give you an overview of the method I used to learn Japanese to fluency in 18 months.

Phase 0: Belief

Start believing you can do it (you’re thinking “that’s stupid; Khatzumoto has been eating stale sushi again; how is this a phase?”, but you’d be amazed how many people set off on the noble journey of learning Japanese, but forget to first believe that they can reach their destination: what a dreadful way to begin a start off!) But not you. You’re going to start believing that you can and will become fluent in Japanese.

Believing in yourself is essential, but by itself it obviously won’t get you anywhere. We know that ability is useless without motivation, but motivation is not a substitute for knowledge and knowledge is gained through daily practice.

Phase 1: Get the equipment for daily practice

Language learning involves lots of memorization, and if you want to memorize large quantities of information over a long time, then drop the flashcards, mate. You need an SRS: a spaced repetition system.

An SRS is a program that tests you on electronic flashcards (which you make), at a frequency that it determines is best for you. The goal is to make this frequency high enough that you don’t forget, but low enough that you don’t waste your time. So the system will show you the card as infrequently as possible. Sounds like common sense? You could even manage it with paper cards, except that that would be a beastly, medieval amount of work to do. Trust me, I have tried managing paper flash cards in this way and it takes too much time. Let the computer do it for you.

There are many SRS around and many are free. The one I recommend to most people is Mnemosyne. I use it myself. It’s free (woohoo!), no-frills and low on features, but it’s high on doing-the-job-it’s-supposed-to-do-ness, which is what matters most. I used to use one called SuperMemo, it is the oldest but unfortunately its user interface is buggy and complex; I have a degree in computer science so that gives me the right to make authoritative comments on stuff like that :D. Haha, not really, but let me hit you with some knowledge: SuperMemo costs money.

If you don’t know already, then you’re going to learn how to input pieces of information into your SRS in a way that is most effective for learning Japanese.

Phase 2: Remembering the Kanji

Learn at least 2046 general use kanji in English, using James Heisig’s seminal book, Remembering the Kanji, Part I. You don’t need the other parts.

Yes. Given a single English keyword learn to write out every general use kanji from memory. Don’t argue with me, just do it. You’ll thank me later. What you do is input the stuff from the book into the SRS. If you think that’s tedious, then you’re right. But the data entry itself may help you remember. If you want to avoid the typing, you can join the Remembering the Kanji Yahoo Group, people there have typed the stuff up for you.

Do not: pause in your kanji study. Do not: start learning Japanese grammar on the side. Learn your kanji. If you’re going at like 25 kanji/day, then it will take 3 months. At 12 kanji/day, it will take 6 months. And that’s fine; if you’re a busy person with other commitments, then it’s going to take that much time. Stay the course. If you start today, you will thank me 6 months down the line.

Phase 3: Remembering the Kana

Learn the 46 hiragana and katakana respectively using Heisig’s Remembering the Kana. Why do this after kanji? Well

1. You won’t have needed kana until this point, because you’ll only have been studying how to reproduce kanji from English keywords.
2. After learning 2046 kanji, you will see the 92 kana for what they are: a walk in the cake.
3. You can learn kana in as little as a few hours. Probably a day. At most a week. Kanji will take several weeks. Do the task that takes longer, first.

Phase 4: Sentences

Learn to read aloud 10,000 Japanese sentences (confession: I only learned ~7500 in the 18-month period, but you are better than me).

• Do not: learn individual words. Learn sentences
• Do not: translate sentences. Understand them instead.
• Do not: learn grammar rules. Do get a feel for grammar, do read about grammar if you feel like it, but learning grammar rules in order to use a language is like learning quantum physics in order to drive a car. Sure, grammar rules are the rules of a language like quantum physics is the rules of the physical world. But it’s not practical.

You’re not a computer compiler, evaluating expressions based on rules. You’re a human being, and humans use a different logic. When you speak your native language, you generally are mixing and matching entire sentences. That’s what you want to do in Japanese — learn sentences, because not only do they give you the grammar, but also vocabulary and usage.

There you go, it’s that simple. Read on to find out more about each of these phases.

OK, so the site went down, and headless chickens were running, and then I tried to use a different platform for site. In principle, not a bad idea. In practice, it was painful. It looked ugly, it was beast to manage and did I mention it looked ugly?

Anyway, I promise to be back, big and strong with new content for your enjoyment, so please stay tuned, and please keep sending your emails, comments and condolences.

Warm regards,

Khatzumoto