So, there’s this new word out in Japan: 「どんだけ～!!??」(dondake). Well, it’s new to non-fashionistas like me, but it dates back to at least 2-3 months ago among the trendy, which means that some consider it “old”.

But I didn’t come here to discuss whether or not 「どんだけ～」is passé, I came here to share something even cooler.

So, last week, I’m hanging out with (Japanese) friends from the old company, and I’m discussing how every bookstore in Japan seems to have an anti-China section, with books that have titles that would get you sued in America. Somewhere in there, I busted out the word「どんだけ～!!??」to describe my internal reaction to the violently nationalistic drivel that this small-but-vocal minority of idiots seems intent on sharing with the world. We decided that every bookstore should have a 「どんだけ～!!??」Section, where all the crap books like this would be kept (I guess they already do, but we’re saying that it should be labelled 「どんだけ～!!??」.

OK, so my point is, I never made a conscious effort to learn 「どんだけ～!!??」. I don’t even remember the first time I heard it, what show it was or who said it (I just have this very vague feeling — not even a thought, just a feeling — that I heard it on TV at some point). Nor do I remember the last time I heard someone say it other than me. All I know is, I’m there speaking Japanese with my friends, and it comes out. This isn’t the first time this has happened, but it is the most impressive instance thus far of this phenomenon.

It would seem, then, that my Japanese has entered a new phase. I have already mentioned how I can correctly infer the meanings of new words I don’t know — even kanjiless words. What is now happening is that I am acquiring and using Japanese words and sentences without conscious effort. Sometimes it actually worries me a little because the word will come out, and I’ll think to myself: “wait, is that even the right word? I just said it because it sounded right…”. Invariably I go and look it up in my dictionary and/or online and it turns out that my usage was fine. I still learn words consciously; I still do SRS entries and repetitions, but it’s really exciting to know that just sitting around watching TV is helping me in such a concrete-yet-imperceptible way.

What a thrill to be enjoying/observing a “growth spurt” like this; I haven’t had one of these in a while (or ever, really — it’s all been pretty gradual up to now) and I wasn’t expecting something so sudden; I’ve just been coasting along building more and more vocab, faithfully doing my SRS work just like a beginner. I know that practice makes perfect and all, but this still feels like winning the lottery! It’s exhilerating stuff, and something I am sure is in store for anyone who just keeps at it. Anyway, I hope it doesn’t sound like tooting my own horn, but I thought it would be cool to share this new development with you.

This is a guest article by Momoko, Khatzumoto’s…how do you say…”special lady”. This was meant to be a regular article, but it unintentionally turned into a book recommendation. In keeping with the other book recommendations, we will later discuss the cons as well as the pros of this book…Probably. Maybe.

At first I was scared sheetless stiff at the thought of using a monolingual Japanese dictionary. My husband encouraged me from early on, but I was very skeptical. I didn’t think I knew enough vocabulary. I couldn’t even understand Japanese children’s books written for 2-year-olds without some serious effort…still can’t; [Note: I attempted to soothe her ego with a reminder that these books are either designed to be read to children by parents, or are written in all-hiragana -- which is really hard for even Japanese adults to read. Certainly I find them quite unwieldy -- Khatzumoto]. So the idea of looking up a word I didn’t know…only to encounter 10 times as many words I didn’t know in the definition…and then looking all those up only to encounter even MORE new words, and so on, seemed like opening a Pandora’s box of horrors. My husband tried to console me by telling me it would all come around in a circle to the starting point…there were only a limited number of words that could be used to describe a concept. But that just made me feel even more uneasy. If I didn’t understand any of the words in that circle anyway, how was that going to help?

At first I dipped my toe into the swimming pool with the Sanseido dictionary—a ‘concise’ Japanese-Japanese dictionary for adults. But I still found the definitions to be a bit wordy and confusing and difficult to navigate, since the search box works best with hiragana and I didn’t know the furigana on all the kanji. I went back to the trusty kanji-reading “Translate Words” function in WWWJDIC and contented myself with its wealth of English definitions. Once in a while I would salve over my guilt by cutting and pasting the simplest Japanese definitions from Sanseido (that I never fully understood and never cross-referenced). I’d stick them in the bottom of my SRS answers, telling myself that someday I’d know more words and those cryptic definitions would make sense…

But I have finally seen the light. My husband helped me select a Japanese-Japanese dictionary from the bookstore that is made for Japanese children: チャレンジ小学国語辞典（チャレンジ-しょう-がく-こく-ご-じ-てん）/The Challenge Elementary School Japanese Dictionary, published by Benesse, and edited by 湊吉正（みなと　よしまさ）, fourth edition. It has furigana on EVERY kanji in the book (woo hoo!), so I’m never lost in how to pronounce what I am reading or in looking up new words I encounter. The definitions are concise and clear, and there are helpful example sentences for each entry. I’ve been surprised at how much I already do understand, despite my limited knowledge of vocabulary. Sometimes I check my understanding with a Japanese-English dictionary, but usually I’ve already guessed right from the context—the multiple synonyms and the way the word is used in the example sentence(s). [Note: By having simple definitions and furigana on every kanji, this dictionary makes up for not being electronic -- Khatzumoto].

And best of all, I no longer see the cross-referencing process as a burden…it’s a bonus—a way to easily and quickly mine new sentences for my SRS. Whenever I look up a word in my Japanese-Japanese dictionary, I enter the example sentence. Then I look up a word that’s new in that sentence (or from the definition) and use the example sentence(s) from THAT, and so on… Life is sweet.

Here is a sample page (click to enlarge):

Today, July 20, 2007, I crossed the Rubicon and went fully monolingual in Chinese. I do sometimes look up a Japanese word to find Chinese example sentences for it. So I guess this, makes me a mix between Steps 3 and 4 as outlined in this post on how to make the transition. As far as I’m concerned this counts as monolingual; any connection to anything but Chinese for Chinese quite tenuous.

Feelingswise it’s really liberating. Learning a language through another language is so mentally burdensome. It always seems like you’re doing translation in your head. From what I know of Japanese and English, I can confidently say that running a J-E translation in your head every time you want to say something is being recipe for これは is a disaster of Engrish proportionです . Plus there’s all the time and brain cycles spent (wasted) reading ABOUT your target language instead of actually USING it. After all, I’m not in this game to discuss or analyze Chinese, I’m in this game to become the best durn Chinese user since that other guy. If that analysis is IN Chinese, well and good — otherwise, as Ludacris might say: “move, beach! get out the way” [dang, if my sisters read this blog, they'd have a stern word or two for me...].

As for the number of sentences I do per day, I’m not worrying too much about that. I was initially doing 100 per day, because I wanted to be a trailblazer like Wan Zafran. However, it took too long per sentence, and hate to admit weakness, but I haven’t quite built up the mental strength to go for 100 Chinese-Chinese sentences in one day (Chinese-Japanese and Japanese-Japanese would be fine…but even though the quantity would be higher, I think the quality of doing Chinese-Chinese is greater — ultimately, the lack of a crutch (Japanese) is making me use my own “muscles” more). Earlier in my life, this would have led to me feeling bad or even giving up altogether, but that would be silly.

There’s an article written a while back in the Scientific American that discusses what makes someone an expert in something. I found a lot of parrallels with learning sentences (these are the small chunks/quanta that the article discusses) and spaced repetition. You shouldn’t be reading English , but do check it out for some quick insight or whatever.

In the spirit of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is, Ihave set a $40-$50/month Chinese media budget, which allows for about 4-5 books or DVDs. So, today (July 18, 2007) I was learning sentences mined from an order confirmation notice I got from 博客來 (books.com.tw) where I had bought the stuff, and it struck me how much quicker I was at this now than the last time I tried.

It really demonstrates that the power of an SRS isn’t really on that first day, but weeks and months down the line when your constant practice has given you a gift that is as powerful as it is under-appreciated: familiarity. Perhaps it’s not so much that we “learn” a language as it is that we become familiar with it; we get used to it. Or not, I don’t know.

The other thing this shows is that sentences/phrases can and do come from anywhere and everywhere. The whole world is there for you to learn anew. This is part of why I enjoy learning new things (such as Chinese or ice-skating), because it takes you back to being a child — everything is for the first time again, fresh, waiting to be discovered. I mean, nothing could be more mundane than an order confirmation email — until it was IN CHINESE(!!!). Chinese text is almost magically…charming, wondrous, cool to me, just like Japanese text once was (until I got so used to seeing and reading it that it’s pretty much just text to me now…hmm, actually, it still is charming, just slightly less so).

As it happens, the email contains English, but I successfully averted my eyes from the dreaded Roman script. Plus I used a mixture of Chinese-Chinese and Chinese-Japanese dictionary lookups, with a bias towards monolingual lookups. This only strengthened by belief in monolingual dictionaries — I found a much clearer, more detailed, more accurate explanation of the word ” 則” (ze2) in the monolingual dictionary than in the bilingual. It seems to me that a language is best explained/analyzed “in itself” — or, rather, the best explanations/analyses of any language are generally found “in itself”.

By the way, here is a list of what I bought, to give you an idea of what I’m doing:

• 吃了那隻青蛙 (Chinese translation of Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog. I already own the Japanese version) NT$153
• 動物星球頻道：貓霸王 (A Discovery Channel Documentary on Cats) NT$199
• 玩具總動員-10週年平裝紀念版 (Toy Story, 10th Anniversary Edition. At NT$365, it’s pretty pricey, but then it’s to be expected of Disney. I like getting Disney movies because the vocab is really simple).
• 頭文字D (Initial D, starring Jay Chou!) NT$199
• 模特兒的故事 (A Korean soap opera dubbed and subbed into Chinese. I got it because it’s cheap at NT$199, and it’s the entire show, all 20+ episodes)

Shipping to Japan was an extra NT$353, making a grand total of NT$1458, which comes to JPY5,405 or US$44.40, according to Yahoo.co.jp today.

So, 1 book and 4 movies. All the movies have both Chinese audio and subs. Some have Cantonese as well, which may prove useful down the line. As you can see, it’s a mix of foreign media dubbed into Chinese, and some pure Chinese stuff.

A couple of months back, again at books.com.tw, I bought Chinese translations of Japanese comics. I also got a Chinese comicization of the famous trilogy 無間道 (Infernal Affairs), which was remade into a Hollywood film, The Departed. I haven’t seen the Hollywood version, but for my money, I wish they’d just promoted the original movie in the US; it was already a really, really well made film: great acting, great story, great production values. Maybe someone thought American audiences weren’t ready to make the cultural jump, but that’s not giving American audiences enough credit. 周 潤發 (Chow Yun-Fat) and 呉 宇森 (John Woo) have already successfully shown the world outside of the Sinosphere that there’s more to Chinese action cinema than martial arts.

Well, we’re not here to talk about movies or use English, so off I go back to work.

A lot of you have posted various quite valid concerns about monolingual dictionaries. Perhaps you’re too slow with them. You have to look up words in order to understand the word you looked up in the first place.Et cetera.

To me, all of that only underscores why we need to be using monolingual dictionaries. If you can’t understand it, it means you need to work on it. Now, sometimes the best strategy with something you don’t understand is to skip over it and pick some other low-hanging fruit. But this is not entirely the case with monolingual dictionaries (monodics? can I call them that?　monodics?).

If it still hurts your soul, all that extra dictionary time you are spending, just think of it this way: at its core, a monodic is nothing but a book — a book written in the language you are wanting to learn. Since, presumably, you are wanting to learn that language, being able to read books in that language is also something you want (need) to do — the fact that a book is in entirely in Japanese is reason enough for a Japanese learner to own it and be reading it. And guess what else? This book, the monodic, is not like other books: it’s self-referential. A self-referential book that contains many if not most of the secrets of the language you want to learn. Sounds like magic — indeed, in a very real sense, it is.

Dude, you’re getting a monodic.