If you were to wait until you could read to start thumbing through Japanese books, you’d die waiting. If you were to wait until you could  read to start owning Japanese books, you’d die waiting.

False: can’t read Japanese ∴ own no Japanese books.
True: own no Japanese books ∴ can’t read Japanese.

See these non-Chinese Hong Kongers? They’re waiting until the Hong Kong SAR government teaches them to read ¹, to buy Chinese books.

They’re waiting to death.

The Japanese government is one of the more hands-on bureaucracies in the world, and I wouldn’t trust them to teach garden variety Yamato kids, let alone ethnic minorities. The HKSAR administration is one of the most laissez-faire in the world; they’re not going to come save the day on this one; that’s not how they work; that’s not what they do ².

Literacy cannot precede reading material: (access to) reading material must precede literacy. Before you pwn books, you must first own books.

Lack of Japanese knowledge does not cause lack of Japanese books. Lack of Japanese books causes lack of Japanese knowledge. Inability to read Japanese does not cause lack of Japanese books. Lack of Japanese books causes inability to read Japanese. Illiteracy doesn’t cause lack of books. Lack of books causes illiteracy ³.

Before you have the books, not only are you not on the playing field, you don’t even know what the sport looks like. How are you supposed to win at a game you’ve never seen? ⁴

When you start actually owning Japanese books (and by “own”, what I really mean is, “have instant, 24-hour access to” — that means the books are in the restroom, in the living room, in the bedroom, in the backpack, in the briefcase, by the desk), you give yourself a fighting chance at literacy.

Before you pwn, you must first own. Let yourself win. Get the books before you can read them if you ever want to grow into being able to read them. ⁵

“But I can’t read them yet!”

Yeah…that’s the point. That’s why you have to have them.

If you want Japanese words to be in your head, first you have to let them into your house…and then into your hands…and then into your eyes…and then, finally, they make it inside the head on their own. ⁶

‘The ph– do you want to be illiterate for anyway? That game sucks. Ask those nice folks in Hong Kong. Not cool.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

“You know the difference between you and me? I make this look good.”
知道你和我之間的區別嗎？我穿著更帥！

Audio: 我穿著更帥

“Cantonese is a difficult language to learn — not because of its sounds or syntax, but because it’s hard to find good learning resources”

– Eldon

Well, let’s remedy that one mini-transcript at a time, as has been the custom established by Edwin and CanteHK!

白卜庭議長: 要派Jedi{絕地}去救Jabba{賈霸}個仔
baak buk ting yi jeung: yiu paai Jedi {jyut dei} heui gau Jabba {ga ba} go jai
[We] need to send Jedi Knights to rescue Jabba’s son

魅使·雲度: 嗯 其實我真係 好唔想同呢個壞蛋打交道
mei si wan dou: ng kei sat ngo jan hai hou m seung tung ni go waai daan da gaau dou
Hmmm…I’d really rather not deal with that ruffian.

• Audio

Note: I’ve never seen Star Wars: Clone Wars in English, so…I don’t know what the original lines were. These are my re-translation back into English from Cantonese.

This is the fourth (extremely late) installment in a new (ideally) weekly series by Momoko, 「お巫山戯（ふざけ）、日本語で」, or “F***ing around in Japanese”.

お待たせ（またせ）！So sorry to keep you waiting for this week’s お巫山戯. The Khatz and I attended two big wedding parties last week, and, being the grungy T-shirts-lounge-pants-and-sneaker-wearing geeks that we are, it took a LOT of effort and focus and positive pep talks (and bribes from our friends) to get us off our lazy a**es and into formal attire. Anything formal…is like Kryptonite to us…but we did it…and it was actually incredibly fun, and we’re extremely lucky to have such awesome, patient friends. But, like I said, it took a bit of time and energy so that is why this is so late this week.

I’ve decided to take a short break from my recent obsession with potty training (I’m guessing you’d probably like to give your gag reflex a rest) and turn to something much more…pretty…and sparkling and cozy like pink hearts and glitter and fluffy bunnies!! So this week we’re going to take out our frilly Lolita umbrellas and frolic around in the magical Hello-Kitty-esque land of…

✭⋱⋆ღ♥ஐカワイイ!!!ஐ♥ღ⋆⋰ ✭

Just what exactly is 可愛い（かわいい）? Let me introduce you to some experts on the subject…

Kittens!

This little kitten （子貓／こねこ） is 可愛い…

So is this extremely sleepy （眠い／ねむい） one:

And this kitten is SUPER kawaii (超可愛い／ちょうかわいい):

Awww, ain’t that precious. 可愛くない（かわいくない）！？ There’s only one thing more 可愛い than kittens…

School Girls!

Q: What do you get when you cross 可愛い with 女子高生（じょしこうせい） — those world-renowned Japanese high school girls in ultra-short-skirted (they really are, even in the winter…I’m totally in awe…no idea how they do it) uniforms?
A: 萌え（もえ）！！

And right now nothing is as 可愛い or 女子高生 or 萌え as the manga/anime series らき☆すた (“Lucky ☆ Star” — Yes, that is an actual star symbol in the middle. Get used to it! We’re not in Kansas anymore…)

Now, I’m warning you. The intro song, もってけ！セーラーふく (Work that sailor uniform!), is like 可愛い ON STEROIDS. Brace yourself, okay? Here’s the full/extended version, complete with Japanese lyrics (thank you tanigutanigu!):

(You can find copy-and-pasteable lyrics for the whole song here.)

I know, I know, I was a bit shell-shocked when I heard that song for the first time, too.

If you want a closer look at what hit you back there, here are the opening lyrics in all their stupefying glory. For the (rough) translation, I relied on the extremely helpful line-by-line explanation provided by a knowledgeable fan here (助かりました、パトリシア＝マーティンさん！）, the English subtitles from the video clip we’ll get to in just a minute (thanks gleipnir2!), and Khatz’s suggestions (ありがとう、ダーリン！　(^з^)-☆):

It’s like peering into the jaws of madness, no?

Guess what? Most Japanese people feel completely lost, too. Here is just a sampling of the online comments I came across when I was sweating blood trying to understand and translate the lyrics:

深く（ふかく）考えちゃ（かんがえちゃ）いけない歌詞（かし）だ
These are lyrics you just can’t think too hard about.

深く考えないで　まいっか（＝まあいいか）
Don’t think too hard about it. F*** it.

ぅん!!考えちゃだめだこの歌（うた）は!!聞く（きく）に限る（かぎる）！！
Yeah!! You better not think about this song!! Just listen to it!!

And of course, the predictable

萌えーーーーー

from a smitten geek.

I even stumbled upon this hilarious mock-conspiracy-theory “exposé” that reveals how the mysterious lyrics encode information about the coming annihilation of humanity （人類滅亡／じん・るい・めつ・ぼう） in World War III （第三次世界大戦／だい・さん・じ・せ・かい・たい・せん）! (It’s even illustrated like a manga with awesome ASCII art. If you need one reason to learn Japanese, this is it…)

Why is it so hard for even Japanese people to understand the lyrics? Because under the breezy surface of this cute little song lies a Pandora’s box chock-full of school girl slang, clever word play and sexual innuendo. Linguistically speaking, this is some dope shi**.

So let us take the advice of our Japanese betters. Just roll with it. (Or invent your own conspiracy theory.) Do NOT try to make it make sense. Just listen. Sing along. To preserve your sanity.

Now let’s skip past that really fast part to the chorus…

Wow. It doesn’t get much more 可愛い than “キャ？　ワ！　イイv” (“v” = the “v”-shaped peace/victory sign you make with your fingers…I think).

And, finally, here for your viewing entertainment and CULTURAL EDIFICATION is the first episode. In the main scene (starting at about 2 minutes into the clip), three of the four main characters — こなた （「こなちゃん」, the tomboyish one with blue hair), つかさ (the purple-haired one with a bow in her hair; her twin sister, かがみ, has pig tails), and みゆき (the overly polite, pink-haired one with glasses) — fret over the best ways to eat various pastries: a chocolate-filled cornet （チョココロネ／チョココルネ）; a cream puff （シュークリーム）; a piece of strawberry shortcake （イチゴショート）; a popsicle （アイス）; and a (soft-serve) ice cream cone （ソフトクリーム）. Enjoy:

(Is it just me, or is there something…a bit “Freudian”…about this scene? But, hey, it could just be me… I mean, what IS the best way to suck out the creamy contents of various phallic-shaped desserts? These are important philosophical questions!!)

The central question here, as posed by こなた, is which side you should eat the chocolate cornet from:

こなた：　ね、つかさ、チョココロネってどこから食べる（たべる）？

つかさ postulates that you start from the “head”:

つかさ：　頭（あたま）からかな。

こなた：　そうっか。

Okay… So the next logical question would be, which end is the head: the fat one or the thin one?

こなた：　ところでさ、頭ってどっち、太い（ふとい）方（ほう）と細い（ほそい）方（ほう）？

つかさ opts for the thin end:

つかさ：　私（わたし）はこっちの細い方が頭だと思う（おもう）んだけど。

This suprises こなた, who has always thought the fat end was the “head”:

こなた：　あっそうか。あたしは太った（ふとった）方（ほう）が頭だと思った（おもった）よ。

When こなた asks つかさ why she takes the former position,

こなた： でも何（なん）で細い方が頭？

つかさ argues that the chocolate cornet looks like a seashell:

つかさ：　だって貝（かい）みたいじゃない？

And when つかさ turns the question back on こなた,

つかさ： こなちゃんは何で太った方？

こなた offers the counter-argument that the cornet looks like a caterpillar (literally, “potato bug”),

こなた：　だってさ、芋蟲（いもむし）みたいじゃん。

grossing out つかさ:

つかさ：　えっ！芋蟲！？

Upon which こなた agrees that the seashell model is much more appetizing:

こなた：　まあ、でもそう考える（かんがえる）と貝の方（ほう）がイメージいいね。

This model turns out to be more elegant in theory than in practice, however. When Konata bites the thin end, the chocolate filling squeezes out of the fat end, and she has to keep turning it around to lick the extra chocolate before it falls out.

At which point, the perfectionist Miyuki has to intervene…

みゆき：　あ、あの・・・
こなた：　ん？

She offers a third, compelling (if perhaps complicated) solution to the problem:

みゆき：　細い方が千切って（ちぎって）、余った（あまった）チョコを付けて(つけて）食べるという食べ方（たべかた）も・・・

You can also break off the thin end and dip it in the extra chocolate (from the fat end)…

つかさ：　なるほどね！

Eureka! Seems to make sense.

But after a detour into how to eat curry rice （カレーライス）, what condiments to use on what dishes, and different ways of eating egg and meat dishes, Konata realizes

こなた：　あっ。ところで、太い方と細い方、どっちがチョココロネの頭？

she still isn’t sure which end of the cornet is the “head”…

So, comrades, let me turn this dilemma over to you: what do YOU think the best way to eat a chocolate cornet is? And which end is the “head”?

Next up, the only thing more 可愛い than school girls is:

School Boys!

(to be continued next week…)

On your site, which is awesome, you mention that you should spend 18-24 hours a day doing something/anything in Japanese. I’m in high school, grade 10. I have school Monday-Friday. I worked it out on a piece of paper, and the most time I can spend listening to Japanese is about 10 hours, and I was a little generous.

Anyways, I was hoping you might have some suggestions on how to listen to more Japanese each day. I don’t like to make excuses, but I’m wondering how often you had college classes. In other words, how did you find the time to “get used” to Japanese.

It’s not just with listening, at most I can review about 5-15 kanji a day. At that rate it will take ages get through the kanji phase.

Life is very busy, and school is just terrible for Japanese, since everything is in English (the E word!) and it’s loud and hard to have your headphones on in, and also, the worst, school issues hours of homework!

Sorry to ramble, you may have heard it all before. It just seems like learning to understand this language is gonna take a lot longer than it has to.

If you have any suggestions, please please please write them to me or post them in some immersion article or something.

Khatzumoto’s one-line answer:

Just focus on the time you do control, rather than on what you don’t.

The government and your legal guardians practically force you to be in school, but no one’s forcing you to watch English TV in your free time, and no one else but you controls the contents of your iPod, and no one’s got a gun to your head telling you to read English websites.

Control what you can control. No one reasonably expects any more of you. Do all you can when you can. And you’ll be surprised by how much you do progress and do get done.

Limits are not always a disadvantage. What seems like friction can actually be traction — just as professional runners use spiked shoes that actually get stuck into the ground (which would seem to suck) to give them more power to push off. In fact, people with all the time in the world can be very unproductive, unless they start to give themselves some self-made traction.

All your friction can be traction. All your friction can be a gift — a brand new pair of shoes . Limits are your friend.

Think of Japanese less as something to “get through” and more as something to “be”. Japanese is just who you are. As long as you’re doing even the smallest thing in Japanese, there’s nowhere you need to be other than where you are. The thing with AJATT is that you’re not directly forcing growth, you’re just ensuring good “nutrition”, knowing that growth will naturally take care of itself.

One inch counts. One kanji counts. One minute counts. Try holding your breath for one or two minutes (ok, don’t), and you’ll quickly see that it is a very long time.

P.S. When I was kanjiing hard core, I found my daily upper limit was 25 new characters per day (plus about 100 reviews), no matter how much time I had.

P.P.S. SRSing your school subject material could help you save time. The key is to make sure the format of your SRS cards is as good as possible a  reflection of your exam style.

P.P.P.S. Anyone with any suggestions — especially people who’ve faced and solved a similar problem — please feel free to share your advice.

One of the more apparently “controversial” pieces of advice I’ve offered is to simply immerse in audio – keep listening whether or not you understand L2 (the target language). It’ll all just start to make sense. No doubt I am not the first person to have suggested this. At best I simply pushed the idea to its logical extreme…

And it all seems like a bunch of voodoo, especially to people who’ve spent the greater part of their waking lives in school, in a mostly abiotic urban or suburban environment, playing short-term memory games [online preview], prohibited from observing and participating in natural growth and learning processes. People like you and me. Perhaps if you and I grew plants more regularly, we would know that advice like: “just add soil, sunlight and water and this seed will one day grow into a long, thick, hard plant” is quite sound. We would know that growth often involves a period of continuous high investment for nearly zero visible returns, but that it cannot happen without this investment.

A lot of the theoretical background for the language learning advice on AJATT comes from the work of the dashingly handsome Dr. Stephen Krashen, particularly his Input Hypothesis. One piece of advice that people seem to have locked onto with great fervor is that input needs to be “comprehensible” and “i+1″ (where i = your current level of full comprehension); they viciously defend this idea to the point of branding the “keep listening to L2 whether or not you understand” advice invalid “because Krashen says that…”.

I haven’t actually read Krashen in a while and I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but, as I recall, he suggests input be fun, freely available in large quantity, and, yes, comprehensible in an i+1 way. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. What I’m saying is that the “comprehensible” part is just a way to make it more “fun”, so it’s more a bonus option than necessarily a hard requirement. The hard requirements are the input x fun x large quantity. Or something like that? I don’t want to get too wrapped up in theory since I don’t know what I’m talking about anyway…Besides, Dr. Krashen is probably down with this already.

So, the two main reasons why the “listen to it, just listen, 10,000 hours” advice was so controversial are because (1) there is no instant gratification, and (2) no one in academia was pushing it that hard, so it seemed unfounded. Both of these concerns are entirely valid: why believe some random guy on the Internet when you see no proof and no one authoritative-looking seems to be saying the same thing? It would be perfectly reasonable to doubt the guy.

The reason I used and recommend the “listening all the time” technique in the first place was partly to remove any and all excuses involving the words “you’ve just got to live in the country”, and partly because I strongly felt that the universally high level of proficiency we see in native speakers of a language is entirely due to their environment and behavior. It follows that if I were to replicate conditions of environment and behavior, then surely I could expect to replicate the results…that was my thinking. I felt that native speakers enjoyed what I like to call an “incubation period” (perhaps “gestation” period would be more accurate), where they simply passively listened to their language for obscene amounts of time, and that this period was essential to their prodigious linguistic awesomeness.

Anyway, finally, academia got my memo (“Where the heck were you, academia! That one was right to you!”), and the cognitive science people are now getting with the program (they’re all: “We were with the program the whole time! We ARE the program!”), and starting to explain what goes on in the lives of every native speaker of every language; taking our hunches and giving them some level of experimental rigor. Enter Dr. Paul “All Russian All The Time” Sulzberger from Victoria University of Wellington in Brand Spanking New Zealand, who was interested in:

“what makes it so difficult to learn foreign words when we are constantly learning new ones in our native language.”

Paulちゃん came to the realization that:

“Simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.”

And the way to build those neural structures is…?:

“by lots of listening-songs and movies are great!”

In fact…

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that…”

Listening, listening, listening. Lots and lots of listening. Like, hundreds and thousands of hours of listening.  Some classes are already working with this, not allowing students to say a word of their L2 until they have listened to at least 800 hours of it. My personal take on it is to let output come when it comes, which is after some “critical mass” of a given set of inputs is reached. If you hear something enough times, you’ll eventually be able to say it aloud quite effortlessly, whether or not you try to remember it; it’s true of commercials, it’s true of TV theme songs, and it’s true of “foreign” language.

In kidhood, like all male children of sound mind, I enjoyed kung-fu movies and fighting games. I still do. When I was 15, I wanted to go to a monastery and train in martial arts like Jin KAZAMA/風間仁 from Tekken/鉄拳, so I could have fire come out of my punches by the time I was 19. Things have changed a bit. I took refuge from the over-macho-ness of sports by jumping onto the “intense training required for sporting excellence = a risky investment of time and resources, with a brief payback window, an ever-present threat of injury and overdependence on factors outside one’s control…plus after all that work everyone is just gonna say you have magical fast-twitch muscles anyway” bandwagon. But also, something deeper happened. I was drawn into the words and texts in which these kung-fu ideas had been expressed. And it dawned on me that the ability to comprehend and manipulate the language of kung-fu movies (Cantonese), or indeed any language, was a skill easily as personally rewarding, economically valuable, and plain out freakin’ cool, as being able to catch flies with chopsticks like Kwai Chang Kane. In short, language is kung-fu; your weapons are your books and computers and media players, your skill is built into your body, your “opponents” are the people you listen to, read, talk to and write to. And you can get into fights with anyone you want without anyone ever getting injured. Like Sulzberger said:

“Language is a skill, it’s not like learning a fact. If you want to be a weight lifter, you’ve got to develop the muscle – you can’t learn weightlifting from a book. To learn a language you have to grow the appropriate brain tissue…”

Once in a while, just to feel cool…I sit in cross-legged dignity, pick up my mouse like unto a katana with slow-motion reverence (I even make the sounds)…place it on my beanbag…jiggle and click the link to open up a movie or a book or my SRS. Try it. Better yet – feel it. Sports and martial arts only seem cool because they’re so well fetishized – movies, merchandising, instant replays. Arguably, learning a language is just as deserving of respect, time and attention…Don’t ask me where I’m going with this because I don’t know either. Suffice it to say that you should feel free to have a healthy respect for the work you’re doing in building your language muscles.

You can see the full article on Sulzberger here.

To start, I was faithfully served by a pair of Sony MDR-G42 behind-the-head headphones for almost the entire duration of the hardcore phase of my Japanese.

After that, for a year and change I used a pair of Sony MDR-NC22 noise-cancelling earphones, the first earphones that had ever fit my ears — I often forgot I was wearing them! They’re pricier, and I only justified buying them because it was for “educational” reasons. They were great back when I was using trains a lot — you know how loud that can get.

Currently I use speakers quite a bit at home (since my living arrangements allow it), supplemented by some Pioneer SE-MJ5 headphones.

On the road, I use a pair of Phillips SHE-9500 earphones. Good sound, nice small size…The cable’s kinda short though, so I often need to use the extension they came with. One thing that’s really amazing about these headphones is that you can actually sleep in them comfortably, despite the fact that they’re not marketed for that as such. Plus they don’t look as ridiculous as the actual “sleep headphones” that are on the market right now. When I’m sleeping, I want to know that I look good.
[Update 2008/12/4: It turns out these were making my ears itch...earphones and I just don't seem to get on -- so I went back to basics, to neckband-style headphones: Philips SHS8200]

Headphones are a peculiar product. For one thing, above about $15-20, there seems to be virtually no correlation between quality and price; my less-than-$40 Pioneers (SE-MJ5) destroyed all the $100-$300+ pairs around it at the store I went to — so you can’t just spend a lot and be guaranteed a good unit. Nor is there always a strong correlation between make and quality. While all my headphone choices so far have skewed to industry leaders, all the industry leaders produce both gold and duds [I don't mean go get a no-name brand: those will almost certainly suck. I mean that you still need to find a good pair within a good brand. It seems like brand definitely matters in headphones, but by itself it only offers the possibility of quality, not a guarantee]. Moreover, headphones need to be equal parts good-sounding and comfortable; neither condition takes precedence over the other. Speaking of sound, if you listen to hip-hop, make sure your headphones have a good frequency range, especially at the low end (they should at least be able to go down to 8Hz [or, as close to single digits as possible] if not lower).

So, the best advice I can give you is not a single product recommendation; it is this: TRY ‘em. And if the shop won’t let you try them, make sure they accept returns in the event of suckage. Try the headphones. Bring your player and play the things you listen to. Real, live experimentation is the only way to really guarantee getting something that’s worth it. Given the amount of time you’re going to be listening to audio to produce an immersion environment, the trip to the store or wherever will be worth it.

All the headphones I’ve mentioned do start to hurt eventually, but only after several hours of use. So, yeah, rich sound (to me, at least…I’m not an audio buff) and comfortable wearing. Anyway, what matters most is you and the shape of your head/ears; I think I must have weird ears, since most headphones simply don’t fit me. Or maybe headphones are a metaphor for life and how we need to take control if we want to be happy.

Whatever.

The floor is open to your comments and suggestions .

Understanding the News

This article is about how I learnt to understand the news.

I started by listening to the Yomiuri News Podcast and the Nihon Keizai Shinbun Podcast when ever I had a moment’s spare time. At first I understood close to nothing, maybe the odd word or two. However, the more I listened, the more I understood. As a result, I now have the confidence that I will understand it all first time.

What was particularly helpful was the reading TBS or Fuji News Network articles in the morning and then listening to news podcasts later in the day. Generally, they all report the same news so having that initial knowledge about a story helped astronomically in boosting my understanding.

What I also did was read articles/editorials/anything news-related and if there was a word/phrase I didn’t understand I would simply copy and paste into Mnemosyne/Surusu. This, to me, is the definition of sentence mining: harvesting any sentence that you would like to be able to say or want to understand.

This is really a simple process, but one that is essential to get the large amount of names of people/places/crimes/boats/buildings/etc. into your SRS and thus into your brain. I didn’t actually read many ‘newspapers’ as such — but I did read editorials and articles from online sources (much easier for SRS entry) and since these are practically the same as newspaper articles you will be able to understand real newspapers.

My typical day in the ‘news’ phase would be:

• Get up read listen to news online whilst having breakfast.
• Walk to uni whilst listening to news podcasts.
• If the lecture was boring, I would listen to news podcasts and try to write out what was said (or the headline) on the notes in front of me.
• Any free time during my day where I was alone, I read news articles online or listened to news podcasts.
• A lot of the time I would just walk around listening to news on my iPod and mimicking (albeit very quietly) the news reader.
• I tended to mix my focus on news with other Japanese studies such as books, magazines, Youtube videos — pretty much anything that was in Japanese.
  • The best thing about this was following a news story for weeks and seeing how it developed over time.

One thing I struggled with was understanding the headlines of news articles. Often they rely on Japanese people’s knowledge of kanji to decipher the meaning or simply are just words with no particles in between them.

As you learn more and more Japanese you will understand the incredible flexibility of Chinese characters and hence will become able to, as the Japanese do, to grasp the meaning simply from seeing the characters in the headline. To this end, knowledge of ALL 2000 odd characters is essential as they ALL appear in news no matter what internet forums/idiots may say about the lesser-used ones.

As Khatzumoto has recommended previously, using the FNN Video News would be a good place to start as the videos’ text is in the corresponding article on the main page. If you loop the video the same news articles repeat — thus giving you reinforcement of the content. I combined this with podcast listening.

In my opinion, the most important thing for the learner of Japanese is knowing all the general-use kanji. Everything stems from this. I can concretely say that if I had not done Heisig, I would have quit Japanese years ago. Anyone who has done the Heisig method will tell you it works perfectly and it is 100% worth doing.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of knowing ALL the kanji in general use; they are the foundation of Japanese and will provide a helicopter to the top of the mountain that is Japanese whilst everyone else falls by the wayside.

He’s right about the kanji, you know…

• [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 ).

Why is this girl so good at Japanese?

Because she spent 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a years studying Japanese. She has spent 40,000 hours listening to Japanese. Her name is Didi.

The people who went to college spent 5 class hours a week, plus perhaps 1-2 hours out of class per hour in class, for 52 weeks a year. That comes to 2000-4000 hours a year, being generous. This is an order of magnitude less than Didi.

Didi is just shy of four and a half years old.

Don’t ever talk to me about how kids are magical until you spend 40,000 hours listening to your target language.

Don’t ever talk to me about how you’ve spent 4 years studying Japanese when really you’ve only spent 3-6 months, counting by hours.

Don’t ever blame on something as nebulous and BS-ological as talent, what can much more easily be explained mathematics.

Put in your hours. And you will be rewarded. It’s that simple. It is a poisonous combination of ignorance, arrogance and innumeracy to expect to have even passable Japanese WITH AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS EFFORT than even a typical Japanese toddler has put in.

For the record, I have logged about 20,000 hours of listening since June 2004. And my vocab is easily far larger than Didi’s (sorry, Didi! you’re still my friend!). So chalk another one up for adult learners.

Adults can do it. You can do it. Japanese — any language. But you need to step up to the plate; you need to show up; you need to not have the temerity to think that 1000 classroom hours and some homework is an acceptable level of effort. Because it isn’t. Come back with 5 figures, and then we can talk, literally .

Steve Kaufmann does a much better job explaining it than I have. If, as he says (and I think he is absolutely right) most vocabulary is learned incidentally rather than deliberately, then it is crucial that we give the vocabulary lots of chances — lots of “incidents”, lots of hours of input — to hit us, and thereby be learned.

This is not fluff. This is not theory. This is cold, hard, listen to effen Japanese in 5-figure+ quantities if you want to get good at it. That’s all you have to do. But you do have to do it. As Jim Rohn suggests, success is easy; the things that you need to do to succeed are easy. But the reason so many fail is because: “The things that are easy to do are also easy not to do”.

Language is easy. There may or may not be difficult problems in life, but language is not one of them; get it out of your head that it is.

Now get listening!

The format is simple, OOTA Hikaru/太田光 does the dryly delivered silliness or “boke (呆け)”, 田中裕二/TANAKA Yuuji does the straight-man-slash-wisecracks-on-the-side or “tsukkomi (突っ込み). The quality of subject material, the timeliness of Tanaka’s tsukkomi, and how blase Oota can be while making ridiculous statements, make both BSMD as a group and this show, worth your attention.

Oota manages to weave politics into a lot of his discussions without ever sacrificing humor. Tanaka’s rebuttal timing is perfect, down to the millisecond. And the fact that Oota can go from saying something very profound to something completely stoopid in the same tone of voice is always fun; that’s quality boke.

Another thing I really enjoy about BDSM, I mean BSMD, is that Oota sometimes literally falls in love with certain words or phrases. And he’ll get excited and keep saying them over and over again even when it doesn’t make sense “それからドーした？！！？”. I laugh just thinking about it.

Funnily enough, I do the same thing a lot: a few weeks ago, my friend H-star had to listen to me say “豪華にね、ゴーカに” every few minutes for like 6 hours. I thought it was just something I did because Japanese was new to me — ‘guess not.

Oh yeah, Oota is also a voracious reader, going through over 100 books a year. So you input fiends take note — if you want to talk like the man, consider reading like the man, too.

And just when you thought he couldn’t get any cooler, according to the ‘Pedia, Oota was effectively banned for a time from Nippon Broadcasting System (NBS) in the early 1990s; the deal is that he was sitting in one night for Beat Takeshi, who had a severe cold and was off for the night, and as a joke he very gravely announced that Beat Takeshi had, in fact, died due to complications from the cold. If you know Oota, you can picture him doing something like that; reading about it, I thought it was hilarious. NBS, however, appear to have had a cow…

Anyway, even if you don’t understand all the talk on Bakushou Mondai Cowboy, I encourage you, exhort you, call upon you, to listen to it. The dialogue is really natural, and it’s a good chance to hear someone explain themselves on the fly, as Oota does. You’ll definitely pick up a thing or two, and you’ll start laughing soon enough.

BSMD also do tons of work on TV, so…yeah…keep an eye out.

Anyway, a lot of you who have very kindly come and visited this website are now sentence-picking and SRSing, and generally getting your read on, so for all intents and purposes, I’d say that the Japanese literacy problem, to the extent that we can call it that, is solved. Just keep adding sentences and doing your reps. Case closed.

So, there you are. You’ve been mining your sentences diligently, but you still have trouble even following a conversation let alone participating, right? Maybe you still can’t follow your favorite anime. Right. OK, I have a question for you. How much Japanese are you listening to? Whatever your answer is, I can guarantee you that it hasn’t been enough for long enough yet. Which is why I suggest you:

Listen to 10,000 hours of Japanese over the next 18 months. [Arithmeticians: (1) yes, there are more than 10,000 hours in 18 months: it's called an estimate; (2) sleeping hours count, but obviously you're going to want tons of waking hours, too -- in any case, go for 24 hours a day; (3) this figure allows for those occasions when you perhaps can't listen to Japanese, but even in these cases, turn that Japanese right back on ASAP].

Why 10,000? Am I obsessed with this number? Kind of. But, it is based on a rough calculation. I was fluent (perhaps not native-level, but definitely, absolutely fluent) at about 18 months. Over those 18 months, I listened to 18-24 hours per day of Japanese, which comes to 10,000 hours. Because my learning was input-focused, my listening ability was even stronger (much stronger) than my speaking ability; everyone needs to be able to understand more than they usually use — you don’t talk like a politician or a newscaster, but you need to understand how they speak. And in order to get to this state, you need to spend every waking moment listening to Japanese — and every sleeping moment, too (just be sure to not pick Lord of the Rings for your sleepytime listening, because Frodo Baggins is a little screaming wusspot of a Hobbit: “ガンダルフー！！！アアアアアァアアァァ！！！”).

EVERY. WAKING. MOMENT. Of course, you may have school to go to, maybe a job. You can make small exceptions. But your school doesn’t run 24 hours a day, does it? You do sleep at night, right? Leave the Japanese on all night. You have class, right? Listen to Japanese in class if you can get away with it (i.e. if it won’t damage your learning experience). If not, listen to Japanese while you do your homework. You take lunchbreaks, don’t you? Listen to Japanese. You walk or drive or otherwise commute places, don’t you? Listen to Japanese while doing it. You do have free time, right? Japanese owns your free time. You do sentences in an SRS, don’t you? Good — listen to Japanese while doing your SRS entries/reps. Do you lie around and stare into space? Listen to Japanese while doing it. Do you take walks? Runs? Go to the toilet? Take baths/showers? Eat? Hang out with (Japanese-speaking) friends? Take road trips? Take plane trips? Listen to music? Surf the Internet? Cook? Clean? Wash dishes? Go shopping? Do pilates (sp?)? Tae-bo? Kung-fu? Listen to Japanese during all those times.

Remember that silence thing? Silence has left the building. Every moment of your life needs to be soaked in the sweet water of Japanese listening. I had Japanese playing even when I went out into the mountains behind Momoko’s house to watch the sunset. And in the toilet (pants down, headphones on, bombs away…No? TMI?). And in the shower. And in bed. This is serious business, dude — I am not messing around and neither should you. We’re talking about learning a language here, not cleaning the sock lint from between your toes. So be prepared to show the heck up, day in, night in, day out.

Of course, this isn’t an excuse to not read. Of course not. You’re going to need to do both at the same time. The cool thing about audio is that it’s even more hands-free than text and video. You can sit, run, jump, kiss and listen all at the same time. You don’t always have to actively listen to the audio, not at all. In fact, I mostly “heard” rather than I listened. Just leave it on. Just hearing it, just having it surround you, is a great thing.

For maximum benefit, I recommend listening to things where you have some vague clue what’s going on. So, ripping audio from video you’ve seen before works really well. As does listening to music (you can go pick out the lyrics). But even if you don’t fully understand it, just keep playing it. You will get something out of it, you will. Trust me, you will get something out of it. Just do it. All Japanese, all the time.

I’m allergic to BS, so that type of thing is really hard for me to hear. And even harder to type out. Time for more myth-busting. You can watch and understand the news in Japanese. I’ve been doing it since 2005, and my intelligence is famously questionable.

Don’t believe the hype. There’s nothing especially complex about the news. How could a type of program that uses a fixed set of phrases, and (due to the nature of news) repeats itself for weeks at a time…be difficult? How can a form of television invented to inform a non-expert audience be difficult? If anything, news is very much a lowest common denominator of television.

As with most so-called “difficult” things, there is no magic to watching the news. You just have to get used to it. And the way you do that is by watching a lot of it. I mean a LOT. A. LOT. There was a time when I watched and listened to the news exclusively on a close to 24-hour basis (yes, when sleeping as well). I would even watch a news broadcast, record the audio from it, and replay it for days at a time. Watching, watching, watching. Listening. Listening. Listening.

The news source I used for that was the Fuji News Network (FNN). Then and now, they offer a 30-minute news digest that updates once a day. The news streams in clips of about 90 seconds. Each clip has an accompanying text section on the FNN site, often this text is an exact transcript of the words spoken by the newscaster. Even when it isn’t, it’s very close.

I would loop the FNN webcast all day. It only updates once a day, so that means a lot of repetition for you. But not in a boring way — each time the news repeats, you will catch something you may have missed the last time. Pretty soon, you’ll start to pick up the set phrases (“逮捕されたのは・・・”、”警察は事故の原因を調べています”) and the keywords (“北朝鮮”, “拉致問題”) and such.

Eventually, you’ll understand the entire broadcast. It will take a while (weeks and months), but you’ll learn a lot and you’ll feel yourself learning a lot along the way. In the end, news will cease to be a challenge for you. After that, you can either continue being a news junkie, or become a jaded news refusenik like me .

Either way, the vocabulary you learned from watching news will remain with you through your SRS. And since TV news and newspapers are related, I imagine your TV news proficiency will help you read the papers as well.

Finally, you’ll learn about more formal words and styles of Japanese speech, for example, that people when speaking formally, use filler words like “まあ” rather than “さあ”, and “ですね” rather than just “ね”, and tend to end their sentences in “・・・と、いう風に思います”. All these things that born native speakers take for granted, you the self-made native speaker can learn just like they did — through intense observation, followed by imitation.

FNN was the main news source I used; while I was using it, Yomiuri News Podcasts came into being. They offer news in both audio and video formats; which may save you having to record audio from the Fuji News Network site (although, I would still recommend doing that; it’s more fun to listen to something you’ve watched, as well as being easier to understand when you’re still learning a lot). Also, being podcasts, updates can be “hands-free” in a sense.

One of my favorite ways to simulate having Japanese friends is (was?…wait, is…is today my day to be indecisive?) podcasts. And one of the best podcasts out there is 「道産子女子高生のしゃべり場！まりもえお！」（ど・さん・こ・じょ・し・こう・せい・の・喋り・ば・まりもえお, which somewhat loosely translates to: Marimoe! Three Hokkaido High School Girls’ Hang-Out Joint!).

By the way, this isn’t another instance of me trying to force gentlemen to talk like ladies . Marimoe aren’t your stereotypical high school girls who’ve forgone the services of their brains; they aren’t airheads and they don’t really talk in a ditzy or explicitly feminine way; most of their speech is neither womanly nor manly but gender neutral, so do feel free to imitate and listen to them without fear.

Perhaps the coolest thing about Marimoe podcasts is that they have the quality of being both very natural (as if you just happened to be listening to three native speakers having a normal conversation), and very professional in that they actually do/did the podcasts on a regular basis; they pick something of a topic in advance and there are no dumb pauses — none of the narcissism and repetition of poorly done podcasts: “うん・･･･････････････・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・ええと・・・”…I mean, after a while, that just gets too much.

Whether or not you are the level in your Japanese where you understand them, there’s still value in having them playing in the background. And the cool thing about spoken word over music is that it’s not as distracting — sometimes you want to concentrate on something else while still to remaining “in Japan”; Rip Slyme are too groovy to let you focus anything else; but with something like Marimoe, you can.

Anyway, definitely give it a try.

• Marimoe
• Yomiuri Shimbun News Podcasts and Video Podcasts
• Podcast NAVI, Japanese Podcast Directory
• What is a Podcast?

“…I can certainly see how an emphasis on reading sentences leads to a large vocabulary and an intuitive sense of grammar and usage. However, what about listening and speaking? To what extent have you found that reading skills transfer over to these areas? On the site you talk about surrounding yourself with Japanese TV, movies, and music, but unlike reading material, real-world sources of audio and video are more difficult to capture in an SRS. I can imagine how intermediate students might be able to learn something from TV & movies, but as a beginner, things like TV Japan just go over my head without helping me to learn very much. Do you recommend the use of simple (yet admittedly contrived) audio resources like Pimsleur, JapanesePod101, or something else?”

Perhaps there’s nothing intrisically wrong with your typical language-learning tape, but:
1) I never used them
2) The people I have met who have used them, have trouble with real Japanese as it is spoken by actual Japanese people…
…because, as you said, they ARE contrived. So contrived as to be almost useless. Have you heard the kinds of tapes people in Japan and other countries use to learn English? Let me give you an example:

“How do you do? My name is Smith”
“Pleased to meet you. My name is Tanaka.”

The same Japanese people who listen to this kind of thing are the same ones who can’t successfully order fast food at a Wendy’s in America, or follow an episode of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”. These are the people who blame English for being “hard”, blame people for “talking too fast”, and/or buy into some quack-science nihonjinron theory that “the Japanese ear cannot process those frequencies”, because, well, it certainly couldn’t be the case that their learning methods were deficient to begin with, since they spent so much time and money on them, right? Hmm…

You see, the stuff on those English tapes, it’s not that it’s not English, it’s just that it’s the dead corpse of English injected with linguistic formaldehyde(?)…that was a spectacular failure of a medical metaphor…Anyway, it’s not alive. It’s like a wax sculpture of the actual living person that is English. I mean, who in their right mind goes around saying: “how do you do”? The English tapes would have you believe that that’s normal. And to top it off, those tapes tend to be about as entertaining as watching nails grow. Fake and boring — not a great recipe for learning.

“unlike reading material, real-world sources of audio and video are more difficult”

Aha! There’s a contradiction. Most people go around wailing about the perceived difficulty of written language. Now it’s spoken language that’s the problem. It can’t be both. Which is it? Well, in truth it’s neither one. I will admit that listening to real Japanese and reading/writing real Japanese require attention, effort and some time. Which is exactly why you can’t afford to put them off. You HAVE to start with them as soon as possible because they are “difficult” (which really only means “different” — you just need to get used to them). So start with real Japanese audio-visual sources right now. Of course, you won’t understand most of what’s said, but I guarantee you will understand at least one word. That’s how you start. With one word. For the longest time, you’ll only be able to pick up individual words. But from words you’ll grow until you pick up whole phrases, then sentences and then, eventually, the entire show. It takes months, but it is a finite process. And it’s not just words — the rhythms and cadences of real Japanese are important for you to hear, too. There are sounds that Japanese people naturally shorten, lengthen or combine. There are places in the sentence where you pause or don’t pause. The visuals — the facial expressions, the shape of the face/mouth, the bridges (“さあ”, “ええ”）. The hand gestures, the body movements. All of these are part of Japanese, too — a part that is a heck of a lot more easily, more enjoyably and more effectively (in terms of memorization) learned by direct observation than by having some textbook just list them for you.

Of course, it’s rough when you start, but it gets easier. In the beginning stages, take words you hear on TV and get short sentence examples of those words, then build on that. Nouns of course are a big part of any language — always learn a noun together with a verb that acts on it. Adverbs with verbs. Adjectives with nouns. Pay attention to what particle (wo, ni, de, etc,) is used with it. Start taking small, single steps every day while literally keeping your eyes and ears on the prize (reading, speaking and understanding REAL Japanese), and you will get there. It’s not a matter of “whether”, but of “when”. And the more time you spend on it on a day-to-day basis, the sooner “when” will come. The more you are exposed to real Japanese, the more comfortable you will become with it. It will become your default daily reality because you’ll have made it so.

I don’t actively oppose audio-learning tapes like I oppose classes, but it seems to me that they give you a false sense of security and achievement. In reality, Japanese is never going to be spoken as slowly, clearly and precisely as it is on those tapes. People (especially women) are going to talk FAST. Men are going to mumble. Things are going to be shortened — “azzaimass” is as common and natural as “arigatou gozaimasu”. Better that you face reality on a daily basis from the beginning than be lulled into safety only to have it pounce on you suddenly. The fact that people who listen to language tapes of Japanese/French/whatever are STILL floored when they go to the country only underscores the fact that those tapes can’t have been such great preparation in the first place.

“I can imagine how intermediate students might be able to learn something from TV & movies, but as a beginner, things like TV Japan just go over my head without helping me to learn very much.”

Right. That is true. But I would still recommend that you watch as much TV as possible. Having said that, understanding only bits and pieces can be unsatisfying after a while. That’s why I also recommend JAPANESE-DUBBED VERSIONS of movies and TV shows you already know and like. In my case, that meant lots of things like “Star Trek”, “CSI”, “Monk”, “The O.C.” and “Independence Day”. You know the premise; you understand the relationships; you know the plots and you may even have all the dialogue memorized. So it becomes a matter of seeing and hearing the stories you love recounted in Japanese. Since you know what’s happening, you can focus on the Japanese. I’ve found it to be fun, effective and satisfying. Even crappy B-movies turn to gold in Japanese because the predicability of the plot and dialogue frees you from figuring out “what the heck is going on here?”, allowing you to focus on “oh THAT’s how to say ‘arm photon torpedoes’ in Japanese”. You never know when you might need to have a photon torpedo armed .

In terms of learning languages, cause and effect behave strangely . If you want to get good at listening to real Japanese then the way do it is by listening to real Japanese. In other words, being able to function in real Japanese settings is both the effect and cause of exposure to real Japanese settings.

Language tapes make you feel like you are really learning something; they give you a sense of progress and achievement…But again, sometimes, I’m afraid this is a false sense. For one thing, you will almost never hear or have the same conversations as are on those tapes. Even if you ask a question that you learned from the tape verbatim, will you get the same response? Almost certainly not. But those tapes don’t prepare you for the asymmetry of reality — there are a myriad of ways to say the same thing; other people are going to use words and expressions in a quantity and variety greater than you personally ever will. Your ability to understand can’t just be on a par with your ability to produce, you have to understand much more than you will ever produce. Going back to the Japanese people who’ve learned English but have trouble at fast-food restaurants: “Here or to go?” and “Shall I supersize that” were the questions that stumped them.

What was the problem? You could fill reams of paper with the answer to that question. They didn’t know about the “verbing” of nouns, compound words, slang…whatever.

What is the solution? Put more fast-food sections on the English tapes? No. That’s simply patching a problem without actually solving it — treating a symptom without curing the disease.

You can’t just increase the amount of vocabulary either, at least in part because the obvious basic features of a language (standard grammar structures, noun vocabulary) alone will not allow you to function smoothly in that language. Not even close. As much as the more obvious features of a language are necessary, equally necessary is a deep or deeper understanding of the underlying logic of a language. I don’t know what this understanding should be called, some people call it an instinct or an intuition, but that almost sounds too intangible because whether or not someone understands this underlying logic very tangibly makes or breaks them in a language. Not understanding this underlying logic is the cause of translations that are grammatically and syntatically correct but that just don’t “work”. They just don’t “sit” right. They’re awkward, stilted. They’re not “wrong”, yet they are completely wrong. For proof, watch any Japanese TV commercial with English in it: “For your number one”, “Inspire the next”…Hurrrnnh?

There are linguists who devote their careers analyzing and explaining this underlying logic. And that’s a good thing. Meanwhile, textbook writers try (and almost always fail) to codify this logic, which leaves a student confused; or they ignore and sidestep it, leaving a student ignorant and defenseless: after months or years of fake, whitewashed textbook-style Japanese, some students never recover from the shock of “real” Japanese and give up, mystified and mystifying this “impossible Eastern language”, because, you know those East Asians, so “inscrutable” (*eyes roll into back of head*).

I believe that the individual wanting to become a native-like speaker is best off training her brain’s instinct to simply DO it. To get it right and “keep it real” from the beginning. Leave the analysis for the academic discussion because it’s too long-winded and clumsily-worded to be useful anyway — you need to know real Japanese and you need to know it soon. You need to be flexible, fast on the uptake and quick on your feet. The way to do that is to expose yourself to authentic, by-and-for native-speakers Japanese on a constant basis — to observe, understand and imitate real Japanese. Face reality from the beginning.

And that’s not all. Don’t even get me started on different regional accents. Where’s the tape for those? Just think of how many accents you as an English speaker can deal with, even though you may only speak with one. Japanese has dialects, too. You don’t need to use them, but you can’t pretend they don’t exist.

Just because you feel like you’re learning, that doesn’t mean that you really are. Just because you feel like you’re drowning, that doesn’t mean that you won’t swim and live. Feeling that you know Japanese because you can follow fake tapes of it is like feeling like you know an animal because you’ve seen it stuffed in a museum or tamed at a circus. It just doesn’t work that way. You need to see the critter “alive” and in “the wild”. Build yourself a “hidden observation post” ( i.e. acquire and surround yourself with real Japanese materials whether or not you are in Japan) if you need to. Or, if you’re in Japan, turn on the TV and radio; go down to the video store. Whatever it takes. You can take this “language as animal” analogy further. Who are the Western world’s greatest experts on gorillas and chimpanzees respectively? Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall. Both these people literally surrounded themselves with the subject of their study. They didn’t go to the circus, the museum or the zoo. They went to forests in Cameroon and Rwanda to see the real thing. It’s not that they were smarter than their colleagues — they just had better methods. The same goes for language, except that language has the benefit that you don’t have travel to it in order to “feel the realness”. The very nature of language allows you experience it across space and time. In other words, you can bring the language to you; you can turn wherever you are into a little Japan without any fundamental loss of authenticity.

I know I’ve said some harsh things here, and it’s not meant as an attack on any particular audio publisher. They are all trying their best to help people. And there are, in fact, realistic audio tapes out there (I used some for Chinese once), but I definitely get the impression that these are few and far between, the exception rather than the rule — the same company will produce one or two good (realistic) tapes, but then put out a lot of cookie-cutter stuff, too. When learning a language HAVING FUN is crucial. If something gets boring, take a break. If something is always boring, throw it out. Life is short, so do things that are fun and productive.

A baby is born into the world. She doesn’t know ANY language or ANY customs. Three years later, she’s not only talking, she has to be told to shut up. “Well, babies are magical”, people say. Bollocks. Babies are stupid and ignorant. But with that ignorance comes an ignorance of embarassement, of fear, of limitations. 24/7/365 for 2-3 years, they are exposed to their native language(s) and as toddlers “suddenly” become quite fluent in it/them; no one ever tells them that it’s “hard” or that “it can’t be done”.Nothing is ever expected of babies but success. There is no magic to it; it’s not a “miracle”. If you take a seed, plant it, water it and give it light, don’t act surprised when one day things suddenly start shooting up out of the soil. If we really look at the conditions under which babies are working we see that their success is virtually inevitable. When we as adults work with the daily devotion and unshakeable conviction of a baby combined with our extensive knowledge, life experience and abstract reasoning abilities, we also inevitably succeed; we work our own “miracles”. You and I have to believe that we adults have a lot more going for us cerebrally than babies. What, then, stands in our way? Only ourselves.

Spoken and written language are not hard: if given the chance, they come naturally to all of us. Just think of all the idiots you’ve met in your life …most could speak and write just fine.