Constant Improvement

One thing that writing this blog has made me aware of is that I always seem to be hustling for new and better ways to do things. And, you can take that a bunch of ways, but I take it to mean that I have massive room for improvement. When I was just writing ex post facto about how I had learned Japanese it was easy for you good-looking, well-proportioned, intelligent people reading this, and even for me as the writer, to silently fall into the trap of thinking that the method had just dropped into my lap after maybe a tiny little bit of thinking, and that I spent the rest of the time simply cranking out this already-perfect method. This idea is so easy to fall into, that a reader named reineke made this comment on this post:

Is it still the old proven method? Are you watering down things a bit too much? I know you can do it, but is it wise?

Wow, like, I had no idea that I was already “established”, hehe. But, like I said in my response to that comment, there is no “proven old method”, at least as far as I’m concerned. There are just related iterations; you stay at one iteration as long as you know it to be the best choice for the scenario at hand, but once the scenario changes, or you find better choices, then you tweak or change things appropriately. So, it is still a 99% perspiration to 1% inspiration deal, only that some of the inspiration comes in at the beginning, and some comes during the perspiration.

Remember, also, that one of the stated aims of this site, in addition to providing an account of how I acquired Japanese, is to share: “new cool tools that I did not have, and that would have made things much faster and easier for me”. New methods fit that description.

SRS Image Hack

Anyway, back on topic, thanks to a couple of readers (like Saleem/Kid Ethnic), I’ve had the opportunity to rediscover some information to which I had actually been previously exposed, but on which I had never acted extensively. Specifically, this piece about using multiple senses when learning, and this article about how children learn (the latter originally from Slashdot).

And, it led me to make yet another tweak to how I do my SRS items. First my report on the tweak — it works really well for my active recall, much faster than ever before. Why? Because it all comes down to associating a specific image — one or more actual cartoons or photographs — with each SRS item. This is what it looks like (the format is exactly the same as that explained here, except with pictures added).

Example 1: Learning a proper noun without sentence/phrase context (name of a famous actor)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of XinhuaNet
[Audio]
ANSWER:
劉德華
[Actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
Lau Dak-wa
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio…I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 2: A sentence/phrase (newspaper headline about Hong Kong stocks tanking over 1000 points — the image is pretty close the audio/text content, but to the extent that it doesn’t actually give it away, it’s still good)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of Epoch Times
[Audio]
ANSWER:
港股暴跌逾千點
[Actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
gong gu bou dit yu chin dim
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio…I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 3: Sentence/phrase (article headline about whether or not microwaving food causes cancer)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of ENorth
[Audio]
ANSWER:
微波爐加熱食物致癌？
[actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio; this text is on the long side; you generally want to keep things shortish, even as you get better]
mei bo lou ga yit sik mat ji ngaam？
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio…I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 4: Sentence/phrase (”Shut up! I’m talking!”)
QUESTION:

Images Courtesy of 510q and Scott Hong
[Audio]
ANSWER:
你收聲! 我話事!
[actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
nei sau seng! ngo wa si!
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio…I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

So, anyway, like I said, it’s really helping me with actively remembering all this stuff, because the audio I’m hearing is being directly associated with actual concrete images. Now, when I think of Andy Lau/劉德華’s face, I can say his name; I would have been able to do that eventually, but this makes it all happen much sooner.

This sort of thing, I think (not my own all-original idea, by the way) is one part of what’s so effective about the methods children unknowingly use — when a kid learns something like “the glass broke” in her so-called native language, she almost always gets to hear something breaking (like glass), and see that cracked glass and feel the shock and have shards strewn all over the floor. When a kid learns about bee stings, cuts, “that smarts”, “pain” and “ow!” in a “native” language, she may be right in the middle of it. This is powerful stuff. And kids get this with everything — they don’t just get random words in a list, they get sentences, and not just sentences, but sentences with visuals and sounds and emotion. And these are the kind of things that are bound up strongly in memory.

Like one of my teachers once said, most Americans can remember where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001 because that was my sister’s birthday and the news was carrying it like crazy, everywhere you looked: “Khatzumoto’s Sister Turns 31″, “The Big 3-1 for ‘Moto Sibling”, “Over 30 for the First Time: Khatzumoto’s Sister Moves On”, “Nine Years to 40: Khatzumoto’s Sister Ripens”; and then the appointed President of the US was like “Well, we’ve got to celebrate! You only turn 31 once!”; it was a huge deal. The shock of realizing my sister was turning 31 helped bind what people were doing at the time, to their memory. Now you don’t always have to use shock — humor, grossness, and even just a good, decent, appropriate image (like a picture of a wireless router with a sentence about wireless internet), will also do. But don’t take my word for it — read that biologist’s stuff.

So, anyway, lots of words to explain a little tweak, but there you go…such are the inefficiencies of human communication/my writing.

Anyway, go ahead and give it a try…it may sound counter-intuitive, but you might be pleasantly surprised. And feel free to share your results with it.

By the way, the pictures are just googled. They’re for personal study so, you know, whatever, just download them.

うっす.　So, it’s been a while since I posted one of these, but anyway here we are all the way at #10. I’m going to try to keep this one short (I’m not just saying that!) because these suuuuuuuuuuuck to edit afterwards. Actually, they’re a lot better since I started using Microsoft Word a word processor from a certain major software manufacturer. But still, I’m tired of ending up with sentences like “you nee’ a use SRS-lah. I’s so simpo!” in long posts. OK, here we go!

A lot has changed. A lot. And I haven’t been telling you jack. Not because I’m a bad person, but because I don’t like to talk about things I’m not sure about. Because, generally, one of two things happens when you do this:

a. People get too excited, try it, but if it doesn’t work (since it wasn’t fully tested), then they feel bad, and maybe they tell you that you suck.

or:

b. People shoot you down before you’ve even tried it, and (if you’re delicate like me) it kills your will to try, and we all know that not trying is the source of all failure. But I digress.

This “not talking until the doing has been done” thing is one of the main reasons why I didn’t put up AllJapaneseAllTheTime.Com at the start of my Japanese journey. I left it till the end, when I had nothing left to prove as such, and any barbs directed at my person, real or imagined, would be functionally useless, since they cannot negate the simple fact that I have near-native Japanese ability now. You know, kind of like how only people who don’t have money are hurt by people thinking they don’t have money? Or something to that effect…I’m sure you understand what it’s like - the Internet is full of the most negative, demoralizing, borderline-to-overtly racist crap when it comes to East Asian languages, and normal, sensitive (see Fig. 1) people are easily harmed by it.

By the way, the other main reason is that making a website used to be annoying. Blogs have been around for a while, but I honestly thought that blogs were just for keeping diaries for a limited audience because that’s all that people used to do with them. That is, until I saw someone using a web log other than for logging, with articles actually written to be read by non-insiders, and that changed the game for me. Speaking of logging, Momoko encouraged me to keep a log of my Cantonese progress, even if I don’t actually post on it for a while. I am more or less doing that.

But you didn’t come here to hear that kind of beanbag philosophy (”dewd, like, isn’t it amazing how..”), back to the article.

Crap…what was I gonna say. OK, first stop is Anki and Text-to-Speech (TTS).

Text-to-Speech (and Anki)

In Chinese Project Notes # 8, I discussed changes I had made to my SRS entry format. Based on the effects of those changes, I have made even more alterations. Some I will discuss in this article, some may have to wait for later; there’s seriously that much going on.

First, why did I make these alterations? Well, I discovered that while the Chinese Project Notes # 8 changes were definitely a step forward for my handwriting - I can produce hanzi/kanji from memory with great speed and accuracy and exactly when I want them - the changes have not (yet?) given me the aural benefits that I had expected. My Chinese writing advanced to pwnage level, but my listening comprehension was not being all that it could be.

To the chase I am cutting. My calculations indicate that at this time it would not be economical to add free sound support for everyone on KhatzuMemo. Plus, Anki is a really good SRS, so why not try it out, right? That’s what I did. After tons of pride-swallowing, trial, and error, my Cantonese (and some Mandarin) SRS items essentially consist of:

• Question:

[Audio of sentence]

• Answer:

[Text of sentence: this is what you have to write out, given the audio]

[Dictionary definitions, as necessary]

[Translation of sentence, if necessary]

[Phonetic reading for clarification, if necessary]

Here’s an example:

• Question:

[Audio of sentence]

• Answer:

你去邊? [Text of sentence: this is what you have to write out, given the audio]

你去哪裡? [Translation of sentence, if necessary]

Néih heui bīn[Phonetic reading for clarification, if necessary]

The process is basically that I am both chorusing (or parroting, or whatever) and taking dictation at the same time. I think dictation is one of the best language-learning exercises out there in that you are connecting the verbal and written parts of a language, something that a lot of people fail to do. It’s a hybrid input-output affair that puts almost all the skills that matter on the line - you have to understand what’s being said, and you have to know how to write it out exactly correctly. Chorusing, or what I am calling chorusing, is really good, too — listening to (native) speech and imitating it. Step-by-step it goes like this:

1. Play audio (as many times as necessary).

2. Say audio.

3. Write down text, based on audio (audio may be repeated).

4. Compare my text to the correct answer.

Where do you get the audio? I use text-to-speech (TTS) software. It set me back a bit, but I like to think of it as an educational expense. The TTS software I got comes in two parts - a reader, and voices. As far as I know, you need both. My reader and voices are:

• TextAloud - the reader. It does cool things like managing text and converting it to MP3. I believe it comes with a basic, default English voice, but good voices and voices in other languages need to be purchased separately. There is a free trial version of TextAloud available here.
• Voices. I use Lily for Mandarin, Sin-Ji for Cantonese and Misaki for Japanese. I chose female voices because I found them easier to understand. Maybe it’s a high-frequency thing? Or maybe it’s just my imagination - I don’t actually know for sure. Currently, I only use the Japanese one for reading me long articles, like the ones from this site.

TTS has been around a relatively long time. Why am I only now getting into it? Well, it used to suck; it was a running joke. TTS is much better now than it was 5 years ago, and while the voices are not yet perfectly human, if you’re a beginner, they’re almost certainly much closer to perfection (accurate pronunciation) than your voice is in your target language, which is what counts. The Japanese voices are especially blowing me away [audio sample of the first paragraph of this article].

There is also something special about the nature of Chinese that drove me to TTS. Other than Bopomofo/注音符號, there are no satisfactory phonetic systems for representing Chinese. By “satisfactory”, I mean “consistent, easy-to-understand, and will lead to native-like pronunciation if followed”. Pinyin sucks. Jyutping sucks even harder. Yale Mandarin is decent. Yale Cantonese is an improvement over Jyutping but still not all the way there. I needed to know how to pronounce Cantonese without, like, balancing an equation every two seconds (because that’s what tone numbers turn life into). The tone markers had no meaning to me - I could not differentiate them - until I actually heard a lot of Cantonese. I needed to focus on what Cantonese sounds like, because that’s what matters, not some trainwreck of a Romanization system. This is what led me in the direction of TTS. The results are good so far - one Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong on Skype accused me of lying about not being Chinese, despite my insistence that “it’s not that good…yet”, so I had to borrow a friend’s webcam (see Fig. 2), and then the Skype guy made me undress. It just goes to show that watching and/or listening to Cantonese dubs of American cartoons 18 hours a day doesn’t not have an effect. And, yes, I do randomly find Cantonese speakers on Skype to talk to. I learn a lot from them if I shut up. Skype chat records are automatically saved, so you can go back later and sentence-pick, and also to absorb the corrections you no doubt asked for.

One annoying problem with the Chinese TTS voices I use is that they cannot pronounce certain characters correctly or at all, especially ones used in written colloquial Cantonese, even some commonly used ones. Not only that, but they have no “learning” ability - you can’t “teach” (customize) them to pronounce certain things correctly. Misaki does have such ability; she can even be “taught” intonation…I look forward to a customizable Cantonese voice. At any rate, TTS is still a great tool, and I imagine many people could benefit from using it.

Note - you could try just cutting sound samples by yourself instead of using TTS. I have tried this; it’s good but it has its limitations - it takes time to do and it obviously won’t have the same vocabulary range as TTS. I primarily use TTS, but a mix of TTS and manual sound-clipping seems like it would be a great combination.

Cantonese: What’s Up With That?

As you may be aware, Cantonese has been “on my radar” for quite some time. When I made the decision to learn it, I was already focusing on learning Mandarin. The reasonable thing to do, and what I initially chose to do, was to continue doing Mandarin until my Mandarin got really, really good.

So I started building a Mandarin immersion environment. That involved getting Mandarin dubs of my favorite American cartoons — stuff like 蝙蝠俠/Batman, 飛天少女驚/Powerpuff Girls, almost all the Disney/Pixar movies. As it turns out, almost all of these DVDs had a Cantonese track as well. Occasionally I would switch to the Cantonese track for laughs — it sounded so funny!

Anyway, this “funny-sounding” language or dialect started to grow on me. The Bruce Lee effect and the fact that (until recently) the Chinese that most non-Chinese people heard was in fact Cantonese, certainly played a part. Cantonese is even more “magical”, more BS-ed about, more Orientalized, more feared, more hyped than Japanese; this, I am sure, tickles my reverse-BS glands.

So it got to the point that I was just trying to “get through” Mandarin in order to get to what I really wanted to do - Cantonese…After much, much, much, deliberation and gnashing of teeth, I decided to go all Cantonese all the time; Momoko had gotten fed up of hearing me whine and worry compare and contrast. I continue to learn token amounts of Mandarin out of a feeling of necessity, no, duty, even. But I do Cantonese out of love and therefore Cantonese gets all my time now. If Mandarin and Cantonese are in danger of drowning, and I can only save one, Cantonese gets saved every time. There is so much Cantonese playing in my house that Momoko sometimes randomly says things like “開開心心”/heppy, whether or not she understands them. Repetition will do that.

Victory Calendar

Everyone who reads this site is incredibly good-looking and positive. And that helps. In fact, most of my fears and doubts are self-induced. But anyway, to keep me from sinking into fear, doubt and I-can’t-do-this-ism, I have made myself what I call a “Victory Calendar”. Wait, before I tell you about the calendar, let me just say this. I finally understand the sheer disbelief that I sometimes read from people who read this site. Because the method explained on these pages is so simpo. Just DO it. It’s THERE. You CAN. It’s so simpo that it would seem that anyone could do it, right? And anyone can. But if it’s so simple, why isn’t everyone doing it? Why are there people who have been living in Japan for 20 years and can’t even read hearmegana? Can’t even write one kanji?

Because, it’s just like Jim “the Rohnster” Rohn said - “the things that are easy to do, are easy not to do”. It is just as easy to eat fruit as to eat a candy bar. Just as easy to watch Powerpuff Girls in Cantonese as to…not watch Powerpuff Girls in Cantonese. What the Rohnster is saying is that the results, the achievements (or lack thereof) of our lives are the sum total of tiny, “insignificant” decisions. “Surely it couldn’t hurt just this once”, they say. “Even Jesus drank alcohol”, they say. “You need to let your hair down a little bit once in a while; it’s just not healthy to be so healthy”, they say. We kid ourselves with these little lies that seem to make sense, that seem so reasonable, and then someone comes who has been making the right little decisions for a long time, and we call them “talented”, we say they were “lucky”, it was “in their blood”, or maybe we outright accuse them of lying. Expletives cannot describe how angry that makes me - so angry that I can’t even get angry at it…because arguing with people who refuse to see sense only makes you stupider.

Anyway, back to the calendar, it’s basically a list of 18 months of days (540 days in total), dating from when I started Cantonese. Every day has a space for me to evaluate my SRSing, listening and reading, respectively. My task is merely to honestly evaluate and record whether or not I did my SRS reps, added SRS items, read some Cantonese/Chinese material and listened to Cantonese for the greater part of my waking (and maybe even sleeping) hours. X is “did nothing”, circle is “did it fully” and triangle is “half-done”. Doing SRS reps and additions takes 90 minutes or so, listening counts as “full” when it amounts to 10-12 waking hours or more, reading is 60-90 minutes. Listening can overlap with everything else, but for my purposes I consider SRSing and reading to be separate, if related.

I’m noticing that whether or not I do/live/play Cantonese has nothing to do with how busy I actually am, and far more to do with how organized I am that day. In fact, on my “perfect” Cantonese days (all circles), I have been berry, berry busy with other commitments and projects. Also, keeping Cantonese on while I sleep really helps. For one thing, it ensures that there’s no “morning warm-up”, whereby I forget to start doing my Cantonese immersion until, like, midday. It also gets me listening during my half-awake states (like just before falling asleep and just before waking up).

The last day on the calendar is fluency. Giving my fluency a date really makes a difference; it brings it from the realm of dream to the level of an actual calendar event. Maybe you can try making your own Victory Calendar .

Indeed, one thing that drove me to go all the way with Japanese was that I had to be ready to go to a technical career fair at the 18-month mark, where I would have job interviews in Japanese. Money had been paid, air tickets bought and a hotel room reserved, months in advance. Cash and face were on the line. Through the Victory Calendar, I am trying to bring some of that “encouragement”, and concreteness, to my Cantonese process.

That was seriously me keeping it short.

Big thanks to Mark for that Disney phone directory!

So, I called the dubbing department, the Disney Department of Dubbing, and spoke to a lady named D-star (not kidding…all D’s). D-star was really nice but said she had no clue about exact transcripts, since they are handled locally (French in France, Chinese in China, etc). But she did say to try “Character Voices”. Character voices were looking for actors…No dice.

Went back to the Disney main switchboard, spoke to a really nice operator named J-star. Asked for the phone number for Disney Hong Kong. He only had the number for Hong Kong Disneyland. Snap. Plus it’s the ungodly-dead-of-night in Hong Kong just like here in Japan. Double snap.

Down but far from out, I called Pixar. The Pixar operator was like “dude, what the Dreamworks are you talking about?”, but she very kindly directed me to Pixar PR. A-star, the lady at Pixar PR, was super-kind, and directed me back to Disney, not just to the switchboard, folks, but to an actual person, name (L-star) and everything.

I have called L-star and reached her answering machine, where I left a message in my best English…I are been learning. Now waiting for her reply. But not passively - I’ve googled (and googled) translation companies in Hong Kong that appear to have done work for Disney. These guys may have those magic Word files of dialog for which we so thirst…thirst…thirst…Durst (dude, German just sounds thirstier). They will be hearing my resonant baritone in the very near future.

Will let you know more as the situation develops. Hey, it’s like this is one of those blogs where things talked about are actual current events! Haha…weird. OK, lates.

OK, I’ve had it! There’s got to be a way of getting a copy of exactly what was said in a movie. I could go through some movies myself, painstakingly copy down every word of dialog, and then post it here, but who wants to do that, when:

1) There may or may not be copyright issues, and
2) Someone, somewhere, already has an actual copy of that script anyway; because something had to be written down to give those (voice) actors. So in the overall scheme of human work, I am doing unnecessary duplication unnecessary duplication..

So, today, I’ve decided to call Pixar and find out who has the scripts for the Cantonese dubs of all those Disney/Pixar movies, and how I can get my hands on them. I already tried the Disney corporate websites for both Hong Kong and the US, but no phone numbers were to be found, anywhere…it’s almost as if they don’t want to talk on the phone (!) . I love Disney and they are very nice people. And kind. And good-looking. And forgiving of snide remarks. And good-looking. Anyway, I’ll let you know what happens as it happens.

So, I was sitting at the train station, about to go to the starting point of one of my epic walks, listening to my meager collection of Cantonese hip-hop which consisted (consists?) entirely of the few LMF songs I was able to scrape together. But I was really enjoying it, and realizing that I understood a lot of the words, like 開開心心(hōihōisāmsām)、唔該(mhgōi ) and cetera. And it struck me that rap was “nothing but” words attached to music. I thought of making and recording my own Cantonese raps, but then that seemed like too much trouble, and I wouldn’t want to get creative yet, for fear of picking up bad habits. Then I realized that I have Cantonese words — audio made for Mandarin- and Japanese-speaking learners of Cantonese. And I have music — lyricless electronica from the likes of The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, The Daft Punk and The Soundtrack to Ikebukuro West Gate Park. Why not, eh, how do you say, combine them? So I did . Now I have more Cantonese “rap”. And I have a way to get me to listen to those useful but by themselves rather bland language-learning audio tracks. So, I’m pretty 開開心心(hōihōisāmsām) about it. Just to give you an idea of what I made, here are some 30-second samples of my simple sound-mashing.

• [sample] 香港広東語会話 feat. Gustav Holst - 早晨+木星
• [sample] 香港広東語会話 feat. Mussorgsky - これは何+Promenade.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. Daft Punk - 簡單問句+Aerodynamic.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. Mr. Oizo - 約會+Flat Beat.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. The Prodigy - 簡單答句+The Way It Is.mp3

I used the program Cool Edit Pro to do it. I’m sure there are free programs out there that can do the job for you. If you’re reading this and you know of such an app or apps, feel free to let the rest of us know. Also, if anyone knows good Cantonese music of any genre, feel free to share. 唔該(mhgōi ).

OK, sometimes I hate writing these. Not because I don’t like you :), but because they’re kind of a distraction from actually doing the doing. Nevertheless, I do have progress to report, so here goes:

Cantonese Early Start

One week before Thanksgiving last year (2007), I began some experimentation with Cantonese (but did not inhale? What? 1960s hippie references not funny for you?). The details are going to have to wait, so don’t ask — I’m still experimenting. It did however necessitate a change in how I learn Mandarin.

SRS Question-Answer Pairs Flip/Shift

The way I had been SRSing Mandarin (and Cantonese) was like this:

QUESTION (FRONT):

您要是不恥下問的話，兄弟是知無不言的

ANSWER (BACK):

nin2 yao4shi4 bu4chi3 xia4wen4 de0 hua4， xiong1di shi4 zhi1 wu2 bu4 yan2 de0
あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

xiōngdi【兄弟】
（３）〔同輩に対して自分を謙遜していうときの称〕私．
③[謙]友人または聴衆に対する自称．

〔不恥下問〕bùchǐ xiàwèn
下問を恥じず．
[成]自分より下の人に教えを請うのを恥としない．〔敏而好學，～〕（論語·公冶長）敏にして學を好み，下問を恥じず．〔您要是～的話，兄弟是知無不言的〕あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

zhī wú bù yán【知無不言】
〈成〉知っていることは何でも話す．
【補足】“言無不盡bù jìn”（話せば餘すところなく語り盡くす）と続ける．

かもん【下問】 〔貴人などが〕目下の人に問いたずねること｡下聞(ｶﾌﾞﾝ)｡

Chinese sentence front, reading and meanings on back. I’ve flipped that slightly to look like this:

QUESTION (FRONT):

nin2 yao4shi4 bu4chi3 xia4wen4 de0 hua4， xiong1di shi4 zhi1 wu2 bu4 yan2 de0

ANSWER (BACK):

您要是不恥下問的話，兄弟是知無不言的

あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

xiōngdi【兄弟】
（３）〔同輩に対して自分を謙遜していうときの称〕私．
③[謙]友人または聴衆に対する自称．

〔不恥下問〕bùchǐ xiàwèn
下問を恥じず．
[成]自分より下の人に教えを請うのを恥としない．〔敏而好學，～〕（論語·公冶長）敏にして學を好み，下問を恥じず．〔您要是～的話，兄弟是知無不言的〕あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

zhī wú bù yán【知無不言】
〈成〉知っていることは何でも話す．
【補足】“言無不盡bù jìn”（話せば餘すところなく語り盡くす）と続ける．

かもん【下問】 〔貴人などが〕目下の人に問いたずねること｡下聞(ｶﾌﾞﾝ)｡

Phonetic reading[here, green] on the front, actual text representation[here, red] and definitions[here, black] on the back. My task is to produce the Chinese text (and of course know its meaning[here, blue], not give a translation per se but just know what it means), given only the phonetic reading. So far, it’s working VERY well. I’m finding that the readings basically memorize themselves if I’m able to produce the hanzi given only the reading.

Why did I make this change? Well, for one thing it was more fun. I like writing Chinese. But in terms of more “practical” reasons…it prevents confusion for me between Cantonese readings and Mandarin readings in the cases that a Mandarin and Cantonese text are the same which they are when it comes to Written Cantonese. What I mean is, I have this kind of relationship going with kanji/hanzi:

Hanzi→[Cantonese, Mandarin]

But there was too much overlap between the Cantonese and the Mandarin. To prevent that overlap, I have done this:

Cantonese→Hanzi
Mandarin→Hanzi

But, I find that I am still comfortably able to do this:

Hanzi→Cantonese
Hanzi→Mandarin

Not in spite of, but because of flipping directions. I really can’t explain it beyond that. Another interesting thing that I’ve found is that the characters where I was continually having issues with the Chinese reading were also ones where I was actually a bit shaky on the writing. Interesting, huh? [However, I still do think it’s advisable to learn meaning and writing before and to the exclusion of the reading, a-la-Heisig. This is because while there are phonetic patterns in hanzi, there are too many exceptions (I think) to make them useful, to an adult at least(?), until after you know the writing. For example 購(gou4) and 構(gou4) sound the same, but 講(jiang3) sounds completely different, despite sharing the same component on the right-hand side].

Another motivation was that I found my Chinese listening relatively weak. But literacy is crucial and I love text. So, what this does is both use and build strength in both writing and listening at the same time. Given a phonetic representation of Chinese, you have to produce the text (and of course in order to produce the text correctly, you have to have understood the phonetic representation). In that sense it’s like taking a dictation.

Could you do this for Japanese sentences/phrases, too? My first answer was actually, “no”. But Momoko said “yes”. And after trying it, I would say, “yes”, too. So, yes. You definitely can, and in fact I would heartily recommend you try, because I think it would do wonders for your kanji production skills and your listening comprehension skills (remember, there are no subtitles in real life). And of course if you can write it given the reading, you can read it given the writing, no problems. So, here’s an example of how you might do things for Japanese:

QUESTION (FRONT):

くさなぎ　もとこ
しんちょう：ひゃくろくじゅうはち　せんち
こうあん　きゅう　か　の　じっしつてき　りーだー。

ANSWER (BACK):

草薙素子
身長：168糎
公安９課の実質的リーダー。

That one’s from the Ghost In The Shell SAC 2 website. One exception to this style of SRS pairs in Japanese is personal names outside the context of a sentence. The number of plausible kanji variations for names like Hiroyuki (e.g. 弘之, 広幸, 裕幸, etc.) and Keiko (e.g. 啓子, 桂子, 慧子, etc.) runs into the dozens and hundreds. You know how it is — everyone wants unique-ish characters for their kid. So, in these cases, I would suggest doing things the “old-fashioned way” for names. Specifically:

QUESTION (FRONT):

中山廣幸

ANSWER (BACK):

なかやま　ひろゆき

That’s the primary method I used to learn how to read Japanese personal (and place) names, and it’s worked very well for me.

Am I going to go change all my Japanese sentences in my SRS? No, too much trouble. But, my Chinese SRS pairs have the property of having full pinyin, so it was easy enough to flip them.

Nota bene: this flipping we’ve discussed is not the same as producing (translating into) Chinese/Japanese given English. I found that that sucked for me, not least because the same phrase can be translated multiple, multiple, multiple ways, so who’s to say what’s correct? One key feature of truly useful SRS question/answer pairs, I think, is to have a very limited number of reasonably possible correct answers — preferably only one plausible correct answer. That way it’s a good, “fair”, useful test. Translation does not allow for this. Plus it ties one to another language too much, which is not a good thing unless you’re laddering…and even then. But I digress.

Make Your Own Books: Printing Out Webpages

This is going to go down in history as a “flash of the blindingly obvious”, but…printing web pages is to a great way to give yourself more or less free reading material in a target language. Especially when you don’t have access to things like newspapers. You can just go to a news website or even the Pedia of Wiki, print yourself and article and carry it around. Best of all, unlike a book, you don’t have to be kind to it, you can mark that thing up with crayola like there’s no tomorrow. Then, when you pick sentences out of it for your SRS, you can just copy-and-paste and save yourself some typing. Yay!

OK, that’s all from me. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other .