A few days ago, a reader of this site sent me this email:

The problem I’m having is that it takes me an awfully long time to add these sentences. Even when I just copy and paste them from the Yahoo dictionary into a Word document for later transferral to Mnemosyne - it takes ages! I use the Rikaichan Firefox extension to learn the readings before I can type up the kana answers to the sentences and then I add in the English translation because I’m not up to Japanese-Japanese interpretations yet.

So, I was wondering, do you know of any techniques to speed up this process — is there any program you use that makes formatting all the data an easier process? Do you enter all your question and answer sentences straight into your flash card program?

As enjoyable, effective and simple the 10,000 sentences method must be - the work thus far of adding all these sentences is horribly boring and repetitive and slow. So, any suggestions?

With the length of time I’ve been doing Japanese sentences, a lot of the process has become unconscious to me. And somehow, I never get bored with it, nor find it slow and repetitive repetitive. So, a while ago, I would have told this kid to suck it up. But, now that I’m on the Chinese project, I have tasted this, this, “boredom” thing people speak of. But I have found out a way to overcome the boredom, restore fun to sentence-collecting, and bring balance to the Force. Here is my advice for making your study more enjoyable:

1. We’ve been calling the process “sentence-mining”. Looking back, it was fun sort of coining a new, cool-sounding phrase, but unfortunately, it’s a misnomer. Mining is so industrial, so rough, like carpet-bombing and massive smoke stacks. So not Toyota Prius. A better name would be sentence-picking, or even clause-picking or phrase-picking (since you don’t necessarily have to pick an entire sentence). Picking. You know, like berries — you go for the big, red/purple juicy, ripe, sweet ones. Mmmm…Remember, selectivity is key. Your goal is not to collect every sentence to which you have access, your goal is to collect sentences that are interesting to you. Think of it like baseball cards or stamps: unlike Pokemons, you don’t have to get them all. You only want the cool ones. Only pick sentences that are interesting to you at that moment. Only pick sentences that contain something you REALLY, ACTIVELY want to learn immediately. Not something you think you “should” learn. Not something that you think you “have to” learn. But something you really really really want to learn RIGHT NOW. RIGHT HERE. Those are the sentences you should pick to enter into your SRS. There are too many sentences even in a single dictionary for you to pick them all. Only pick the ones you care about right then. And feel free to change your mind — maybe yesterday, you wanted to learn that sentence, but today you can’t be bothered. Throw it out, find something cooler, and enter that cooler sentence into your SRS.

I can hear the complaints already: “but Khatzumoto, if I only learn what I want to know, how will I learn what I need to know???”. Trust me. By learning what you want to know, what you need to know will come naturally. I mean it. You can go through the entire process only learning things you want to learn and still succeed: I did. In fact, the best path to success I know is the path of most enjoyment. It may not be the shortest path, but it will definitely feel like it. Boredom can only kill your will to learn, and endanger the very success you are seeking.

2. Unless you habitually automatically import files into your SRS, you are probably doing your entries by hand. So, to reduce your workload, remove as many intermediate processes as you can. As far as possible enter directly into your SRS. Writing things in notebooks or compiling Word files for later addition has its place, but it does get really boring and it creates extra work for you since you have to go back and look at those notebooks or whatever later: Look at it this way: if a sentence is important enough for you to learn, then it’s important enough to go straight into your SRS (the reverse is also true — if you can’t be bothered to put that sentence into the SRS, then it wasn’t worth it in the first place), without any intermediate steps. Removing intermediate steps also reduces the probability of errors creeping in during those inter-step transfers (typing in, extra copy-and-pasting, etc.)

3. Use online or software dictionaries. Sentence-picking is not a typing exercise. Reduce your typing load as far as possible. Software dictionaries allow you to copy and paste: this will save you oodles of time which you can put towards learning more sentences (that you want to learn), and ultimately help you get better in less time.

Could life be better? I submit that it could not!! No, I know it could, but DANG…it’s pretty good right now. Why? Why, you ask? Because you can buy the entire script (yes, the actual text as spoken by each character, plus a little bit of scenario/stage direction for clarity) of Tiger & Dragon [plus the prequel] in book form! Woohoo! My local library had it, and I’ve been reading it today, and it is, what is the word — the bomb.

Anyway, it sounds like good fun for all you drama lovers out there. By the way, I think other TV dramas also have book-form scripts/screenplays. However, you should be careful to actually confirm the contents before you buy these, since I noticed that the book-forms of, at least, American dramas like Prison Break and 24 are more like novelizations (less strict on rendering character dialogue exactly as it was said in the show) than scripts.

I can’t believe it took me this long to find out about stuff like this…

By the way, the collective name for these is シナリオ本(ぼん） — “scenario books”.

[New information: w00t! You don’t have to buy the book! Many TV drama scripts are available online here. Here’s the Tiger & Dragon one! [all main episodes…no prequel in sight, though…]

As you are aware, this site is called “All Japanese All The Time”, reflecting the fact that I shoehorned Japanese into every little crack and corner of my life in an effort to get fluent at it.

I don’t know the full extent of the effect that this immersion project had, but I read a forum post somewhere where someone had suggested that the immersion environment was merely motivational and didn’t matter as much as doing sentences. With this I must respectfully disagree. Let me discuss just a few of the reasons why the immersion environment is so important.

Before I get to that, let me note that I don’t think that there’s such a thing as “just” motivation. What I mean is, it’s not simply this nice thing to have, like one of those compressed-air spraycans for cleaning your keyboard (those are nice things to have :D). Like it or not, humans are made and broken by their emotional state and belief in and about themselves — or lack thereof. It’s not some magical cosmic thing (even if it were, it doesn’t need a magical cosmic explanation). Things like the Pygmalion and Placebo Effects, respectively, have been empirically observed and testify to the importance of mental condition. Your thought patterns matter; your state of mind, matters. People who are motivated and thus expect to do well, tend to do well, one way or another.

Back to a more concrete discussion of immersion, let me first note that the immersion environment was itself a source of sentences. Furthermore, I got used to hearing Japanese spoken at native speed with native intonation, native pausing, native mumbling, native bridges, native nuance and all that good stuff. This is priceless, and even if it’s not explicitly contained in the sentence collections I made, it had an effect. I am a HUGE fan of people focussing on text, non-native illiteracy in Japanese is inexcusable, but there is more to this language than text.

Finally (getting to the main point of this post), one thing I am noticing in the Chinese Project is that the environment shapes the way you learn the language. Simply put, it’s a usage thing. It’s the Pareto principle at work — in any language, some words and phrases get more usage than others. So, like, maybe 20% of the words and phrases get used like 80% of the time or whatever (do you like my fuzzy statistics?). This means that the more Chinese you read and hear, the more the same things keep popping up over and over and over again: even if you don’t know what they mean, you eventually HAVE to find out because you KEEP hearing them; they force themselves to your attention. Things like “根本” as in “你根本不知道・・・”, things like “別作夢了！”. I wouldn’t have realized the importance of these words/phrases if I were just looking up random sentences. I am learning them and learning to use them because I hear/read native users of Chinese (in my Chinese immersion environment) use them all the time. As a result, my Chinese will become more native-like — I am not going to learn every word in the Chinese language, just like I don’t know every word in the English language, but I am going to learn the words that matter and I am going to use them the way Chinese people use them — I won’t be falling into that non-native trap of using words that have the right meaning but that are inappropriate because they are either too obscure and formal, or too colloquial and informal, or carry a bad connotation in the situation at hand. This won’t be a conscious or effortful thing, it will be the natural and effortless result of being surrounded by Chinese-like Chinese.

It’s too easy to learn a version of your target language that is twisted by your base language. Many English speakers try to learn an English-centered Japanese. Many Japanese speakers try to learn a Japanese-centered English. I have had this desire myself — you want to use that word you have in your language in that other language, right? Guess what? It won’t work. The target language has its own way of expressing meaning and feeling; quite often, it may not even have a word equivalent to the word you are wanting to express. The immersion environment can help you let go of that desire to force your base language’s patterns onto your target language, by constantly showing you how the target language is really used.

So, as you know, I make a lot of recommendations for items at Amazon.co.jp. Most of these items are books, so you can have Amazon.jp ship them for you directly. However, there are some items (like video games and dictionaries) that Amazon Japan chooses not to ship abroad. For these kinds of situations, there is a service in Japan called Danke Danke. I haven’t used them myself, but from reading the website, the idea seems to be that you order items, have them shipped to Danke Danke in Japan, and then Danke Danke can combine them and ship them to you internationally. Anyway, I don’t know if they’re any good or not, since I haven’t used them myself, but you might want to give them a try.

People, I can’t freaking take it any more. Everywhere I go, left and right. “Japanese is the hardest language in the galaxy”. “Japanese people themselves cannot read Japanese”. “Japanese uses thousands of characters, TWO syllabaries and even Arabic numerals and Roman letters from time to time”. “Even the Vulcans had trouble with Japanese”. Double u. Tee. Eff.

First of all, if you want to whine about complexity, English isn’t that simple either. A phonetically complex Germanic language using the writing system of its Roman colonial masters (who used a phonetically simpler, Romance language) that itself was a derivative of the Greek writing system which was in turn derived from the Phoenician writing system? If they’d only asked me first, I could have told them that this was a bad idea. There aren’t enough letters in English to represent its sounds: there aren’t. The only reason you and I can even read (reed? riid? ried? reid? rwd?) English successfully is because we do all kinds of pattern-matching and crap to bridge the gap between text and sound (oh my gorsh — just like IN JAPANESE!?!?!). And not only that, but there aren’t “only 26 letters” in the Roman alphabet as we now use it. There are at least 52 (since uppercase looks nothing the heck like lowercase), not to mention punctuation and Arabic numerals. As for handwriting, how many people can correctly spell any English word? I don’t know about you, but “Massachussetts” always trips me up (I think I’ve got it wrong even now) and Matt Claridge and his mum make fun of me for it ;).

More importantly, the Japanese and Chinese writing systems do not use “thousands of characters” as such. A kanji is not just a character or letter: it is closer to a word. Indeed, many individual kanji are words, even though the past couple thousand years have seen a trend toward two-kanji compounds. Each kanji is made up of logical components [all kanji are made from a subset of the same set of 190-200 or so logical components; all those logical components are made up of the same 7 or 8 strokes] those that indicate its meaning and, to some extent, even its pronunciation. And guess what, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan have some of the highest literacy rates in the world. Some experiments have shown that kanji are processed faster in the brain than phonetic systems; I certainly find that kanji pack a lot of meaning-per-pixel. Meanwhile, many countries that use the supposedly simpler Roman alphabet — even Romance-language-speaking countries that don’t have the phonetic gap of English — have crappy literacy rates. Don’t even get me started about adult illiteracy in the US.

So, whoever you are, stop scaring the children! Stop whining about how Japanese is “so complex”. Stop trying to intimidate people with horror stories about all the homophone bloopers just “waiting” to happen to a learner of Japanese. Stop doing the modern equivalent of putting “here be dragons” on a map!!! And stop going on about “thousands of characters”: those characters are WORDS, and English has a ton of words, too — hundreds of thousands — without nearly the recombinative power of kanji. You can’t measure the kanji system with the same ruler as you would an alphabet and then give people the impression that “it’s like having an alphabet with ten thousand letters!”. It’s not; the two systems are entirely different and it’s really apples and oranges to attempt to equate them in any way that would permit comparison. For your own good and for the good of the children, don’t conflate having something to do with having an obstacle; don’t confuse difficulty of task with crappiness of method. This is not Kansas: paradigm shift, people.

Just because someone is (or even a lot of people are) having trouble with a task, that doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically hard — more often than not, it could just be that the method sucks. The method sucks, not the person. Often we can be trying to walk across a tightrope while fencing left-handed and eating steak with a plastic spoon and frying an egg with a magnifiying glass all at the same time and all without even being aware of it. That kind of situation would make steak seem hard to eat, and eggs hard to fry. But they aren’t. So, find your way of making it easy: it’s out there. Find a sharp knife and fork for that steak; get off that tightrope; acquire a pan, some oil and fire to fry that egg. You’re smart enough to do it.

(Steps off soapbox). And now I leave the floor to Fabrice and Elizabeth Baba over at Reviewing the Kanji.

The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper from some random, wind-swept island in the North Sea, has this really cool article by Nick Hornby about how to read. I find it interesting because it applies directly to Japanese study in particular and language study in general. A lot of people sneer at manga readers and anime watchers; they’re not “serious” learners; they’re not doing “real” Japanese. First of all: WTF? I can’t think of a more important reason to learn Japanese than to read manga. Secondly, what the intellectual snobs fail to realize is that it actually takes a steaming BUTTload of intelligence, background knowledge and kanji competency to be able to make one’s way through a Japanese comic. It’s fun (for me, at least), don’t get me wrong, but it took the largest single self-directed mental effort of my life thus far to get to the point where I could just enjoy a manga, and Japanese kids are no different — you actually have to be pretty forking smart and literate to read a comic book. So not only is reading for pleasure the only reading that’s really worth your time, but it’s also a serious(ly fun) and worthy intellectual exercise. I wish the “if it’s not boring then it’s not good for you” camp could see this, but I really don’t care if they ever do, as long as I can keep getting my Keroro Gunsou on in peace…

BTW, my favorite gem of Hornby advice comes when he suggests that we change books just like we change the channel — when the TV channel is boring, no one suggests you keep ploughing through it because it’s “good for you”. Similarly, if the book is boring you, close it and open a better one. Or, skip the boring part and go to the fun section. Life is too short and there is too much information out there for for you to be attempting to process all of it — you must be selective, and the best selection criterion is what you like. I know, heresy right? But it’s true; Hornby is right.