I saw this page from How To Learn Any Language a while ago (it might be that someone put it in comments) but neglected to link to it despite how cool it is: a headshot jackpot mother lode of Japanese audio materials with transcripts. They range from children’s books to some more, what’s the word, anyway, there’s a lot of range. What’s exciting to me about this is that it has links to all those European fairy tales you and I grew up with (yay!). I’ve been listening to Snow White and The Emperor’s New Clothes this morning. Anyway, give it try. AFAIK, it’s all free! Freeee!

First of all, an admission of guilt.

I have misled you.

In some of my SRS item examples, I have shown some reeeeeeeearry long sentences.

Wait, hold on, Kung Fu Hustle is on, and its the final fight against the Axe Gang and the frog guy. BRB…

…I love when he kicks the guys and it makes a bell-ringing sound…

K, I’m back. Yeah, so it’s all my fault. Part of it has to do with the fact that Japanese has the structural power to handle the creation of very long sentences. Since it doesn’t require the repetition and restatement of pronouns (what one might call “subjects” in English), it can create multiple, clause-length modifiers for a single “subject”, without confusing the reader. Or something like that, I dunno — I read this in a book about Japanese (a Japanese one, of course).

So, like, at some level, I thought it would be good for me to put long sentences in the SRS. Also, I probably wanted to show off that I could handle it, you know, prove how leet I was — I don’t like doing this as much as it may seem, but this is a website about how you can get reeeeeeeearry good at Japanese, so some amount of “demonstration” is probably a necessity.

Anyway, I was wrong.

Shorter Items

SRS sentence items. Yes they should be sentences, but you must kiss. That’s right, make out more. Get the tongue in there and…NO! I mean KISS: Keep It Short and Sweet. Sentences, yes; books, no. Break up long sentences if you must, I find that commas, pronouns, and particles/prepositions generally represent a good breaking point. If there is no clean, natural breaking point, then perhaps just break by length. Either way, you may or may not want to use ellipsis marks (…, ・・・) to mark your break. You might also consider incuding the original, full-length sentence in the answer section, for reference.

Right now (June 2008), I have an absolute hard upper limit of 10 characters on my Chinese sentence items, with most items being 6-8 characters long. It’s a bit more fluid for Japanese, but a hard upper limit 30 characters (kanji-kana mix), with most items being 10-15 characters long, seems about right. Earlier in your journey, you might want to go for even shorter Japanese sentences, in the 5-10 character range.

Remember: a long sentence is nothing but a bunch of short sentences stuck together. And even if a sentence looks simple, sometimes you need to make it even simpler for yourself.

Here are some examples, mostly from Momoko (source sentence and resultant sentence only shown):

• Source Sentence: 「マハティールとアブドラの対立は激しさを増し、マハティールは５月１９日、自分が３０年かけて作ってきたＵＭＮＯを脱退し「アブドラが辞めないかぎり復党しない」と捨てぜりふを発した。」
• Resultant Sentence:「捨てぜりふを発した。」
• Quoted From: Tanaka News, 国父の深謀

• Source Sentence: 「中村によると、我々の現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」
• Resultant Sentence:「現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」
• Quoted From: スロー・イズ・ビューティフル―遅さとしての文化

• Source Sentence: 『「もう、今を犠牲にするのはやめよう」という彼らの感覚は、必ずしも「今さえ良ければそれでイイ」という投げ槍な刹那主義と同じではない筈だ』
• Resultant Sentence:「必ずしも・・・投げ槍な刹那主義と同じではない」
• Quoted From: スロー・イズ・ビューティフル―遅さとしての文化

• Source Sentence: 「 21世紀初期，先進機械人的發展步伐越來越快，其中日本更是機械人科技的領導者。」
• Resultant Sentence:「先進機械人的發展步伐・・・」
• Resultant Sentence:「發展步伐越來越快」
• Resultant Sentence:「其中日本更是・・・領導者。」
• Quoted From: 2077日本鎖國

• Source Sentence:「アンパンマンが島に下りて見ると、岩の割れ目の中から泣き声が聞こえて来ます」
• Resultant Sentence:「アンパンマンが島に下りて見る」
• Resultant Sentence:「泣き声が聞こえて来ます」
• Quoted From: アンパンマンとあおばひめ

Delete (or Edit)

Sucky sentence items. They’re different for everyone. But everyone has them. You’ll know them when you see them. You’ll feel it. The dread. I see you looking at that sentence item. Yeah, you struggled to find it. Yeah, you entered it. Yeah, it seems important to know. But you know what? You’ve gone your entire life up to now not knowing that sentence; if it really matters, it’ll come up again. Right now, all it’s doing is sucking up your time and energy. Remember, you want to get QUANTITY of repetitions here. An item that’s sucky is a weed — feeding off the nutrients intended for all the other sentences. Delete it. Edit it if you really feel like it. But if editing feels like a waste of time, and for me it often does, then deletion is definitely the way to go.

Think of deletion as pruning or weeding — cleaning out a minority of overly burdensome items so that the majority can flourish. With sentence items, utilitarianism really works: the greatest good for the greatest number.

Length is not the only reason to delete a sentence item. Sentence items you just don’t quite “get”, or that you’re afraid might be wrong or awkward, also make good candidates for deletion.

This is Supposed to be Fun

Remember, sentences is not S&M. If it hurts, then it’s bad. No means no. Doing sentences should be like…popping bubblewrap. Requiring conscious effort, while being relatively easy and SUPER satisfying. Not to mention begging for repetition in an almost addictive way (addiction’s not the problem — it’s the object of addiction that matters). Doing sentences should make you feel like doing other sentences. If it doesn’t, then be aware that the fault probably lies neither with you nor with the language in question, but in individual items causing you dread. Get rid of them like you did your ’80s clothes.

It seems to me that a lot of people may be concerned that adding pictures to SRS sentence items (just as they were concerned with adding stories to SRS kanji items) would make things too “easy”.

Well folks, if in doubt, give your SRS items to someone who’s never had any exposure to kanji and see how they hold up. Play your Chinese/Japanese audio-picture question to an untrained person and see if they can produce the text (assuming you don’t give away the text in the picture… ). I think you’ll find that they’ll be quite unable to write “dementia” just from being clued in about sicknesses and dodginess, or write down “港股暴跌逾千點” stroke-for-perfect-stroke just from seeing a picture of a number and an arrow.

Adding pictures for sentences, and stories for individual kanji items, I think, is completely non-detrimental. Remember, just because it’s not painful, that doesn’t mean you’re not learning (or perhaps more accurately, “acquiring”).

I’m reminded of my own recent experiences with Cantonese. I’ve watched the movie The Incredibles, in Cantonese, dozens of times. The most recent time (yesterday…2-3 times) one of the things I picked up was “即刻/immediately/right now”, as in “過嚟呢度，即刻/Come here this INSTANT”, in the scene where Mr. Incredible gets yelled at by his boss, and his boss is being really condescending and pointing down at the ground (”here”), telling Mr. Incredible to get away from the door. The next day (today), I was watching a different Cantonese show that I’ve also seen a lot of (a news magazine program called “事必關己”/Infolink), and for the first time, I understood what the presenter had been saying at the beginning of the show, each time he does the voiceover intro. He says: “即刻,事必關己/(translation: Coming up on Infolink/Next — Infolink/And now, it’s Infolink)”. Before it was just a sound to me; now it is a word.

What I’m trying to say here is a lot knowledge can be transferable (duh). Stuff learned in “easier” contexts — more obvious contexts — transfers itself to contexts with less “supporting information”: less obvious contexts. In a sense that’s why the sentences method and much of learning itself works — those simple i+1 sentences you learn will enable you to read entire books that are new to you; they will even enable you to infer both the reading and meaning of completely new words, and even the meaning of kanjiless words. This is analogous to how many people start their reading with manga before moving on to straight text — I don’t think anyone could reasonably contend that: “you’ll never learn to read Japanese if you look at manga, because the pictures will be too strong for your feeble Terran mind”. So don’t worry. Enjoy that it seems easier. Frankly, I think this relative effortlessness is a step in the right direction. The relative ease with which you learned language as a child (very little *conscious* effort, but tons of *actual* effort in terms of amount of exposure) should be within your reach as an adult; I think this puts it there. Let go of your addiction to struggling (lol…too melodramatic?), and focus on acquiring rather than learning.

Let me reiterate: you do not need to be told or be aware of what is happening for it to be happening. You don’t need to measure and “feel” yourself growing taller: just focus on eating healthy food. People seem to forget that they are not computers; you do not need to be explicitly told rules like a compiler; humans don’t need XML — we know bold type and list elements and surnames when we see them. When we look at something, we know where shapes begin and end: we don’t need to count pixels and color levels.

It could be said that your brain is a computer, but it is one of a thoroughly different sort from the current artificial kind. It is the most powerful fuzzy inference engine out there. It figures stuff out, it matches patterns, without a word of explanation. In fact, quite often when people try to explain something, those explanations are totally incompatible with the brain’s internal data representation formats and so they just end up creating confusion. Generally, all your brain needs to do to get it is to observe the data — any data. No one needs to tell you a rule; you’ll put it all together on your own, often unconsciously. To acquire a language then, all you need do is show yourself the data. Your brain will do the rest. Trust it.

Anyway, screw theorizing — I certainly don’t know enough about this stuff to theorize. Just do it. Results pwn everything.

And remember, dude, I am still talking about writing kanji by ear, which Noam Chomsky is said to have called: “phreaking hardcore l33t haX0rN355″.

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.

A while back, I wrote an article on how to teach yourself to understand Japanese (TV) news to basically 100% comprehension. Essentially a “how I did it and how you can, too”. A young, virile, extremely good-looking man named James followed that advice. This is his story, in his own words.

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/Khatzumemo. 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 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 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 (http://www.fnn-news.com/) 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…