I’m not learning Japanese (yet), but I’m planning on doing it in the future… However, I’m learning German and, although your method is mainly designed for the Japanese learner, it’s in accordance with my own ideas on language learning and I’d like to improve my learning. Now to the point: I try to listen to German on the bus and I search for content on the web and to talk to native speakers on skype. I’m currently using the lingq method, which I think you already know (www.lingq.com) and I try to be immersed in the language. But can’t live in the language, as much as I try. How did you really do it before going to Japan? You had to talk to people in English, and how did you manage to only watch TV in Japanese?

Sorry for the big post…

>For over a year I have confused these two characters: “packed” and “cottage,” assuming that both used crock pot and forgetting the stories.

They actually don’t both use the lidded crock. If you look closely, you’ll see that “Packed” uses the Aerosol Can and “Cottage” uses the Lidded Crock. For further demonstration of this, please view the frame for the Kanji for “Good Luck” and you’ll see what I mean.

Hope this assists you in your confusion.

Dear Teacher:

I wanted to send you this as an attachment because I tend to hit plateaus where I level out and take more time to master characters. When I am faced with a dead-end and feel no progress, I have found two methods of clearing up the problems.

An example:

For over a year I have confused these two characters: “packed” and “cottage,” assuming that both used crock pot and forgetting the stories.

Two solutions to quicken and sharpen the mental image of Heisig’s stories:

(1) Use questions that reflect a logical grammatical connection between or among parts of the kanji so that the answers to the questions are the actual sub-kanji or key words.

(2) Use the word perfect to enlarge the kanji so details and connections are seen more clearly to discriminate between two characters that may look similar when the font size is very small.

“PACKED” 詰
(I tried but can’t copy and paste the 48 font)
“COTTAGE” 舎
(I tried but can’t copy and paste the 48 font)

I recently discovered I needed better glasses and so they help; however, these kanji have been copied and pasted into a Microsoft word document so that they can be enlarged and effectively contrasted, thus more clearly understood. Solution 2 addresses a physical problem of actually seeing the text.

Solution 1 addresses logical understanding of the story composed by Heisig or by the student (if Heisig’s story doesn’t work).

“Packed,” for me, requires two questions: “What is packed?” and “What is its container?” When I answer them and connect them logically by the questions in my native language (I have no experience as a native speaker and reader of the kanji), then I can more readily store the image and accept it. I use my native language as a bridge.

“Cottage,” for me, requires two questions: “What keeps the rain off me?” and “Where could food be stored?”

I know that the ideal level to reach is forming the questions and stories in Japanese, finally letting go of the native language. However, these basic tools are encouraging me to add new kanji and increasing my confidence in retaining what I have studied.

I really enjoyed the experience you shared from your university comedy group. Often mental cruelty is just thoughtless remarks, commenting on something the speaker can’t control.

OFF THE PLATEAU AND SEEING BEYOND THE CURRENT DEAD-END.

Those who talk about it end up spending so much time seeking out “free internet resources” and trying to tie them together, talking about learning Japanese with other learners, that they don’t actually DO the learning.

And that’s easy to do. Learning Japanese takes effort. Let’s face it: it’s much easier to spend your time chatting in English with other wannabe-learners than it is to buckle down and start learning sentences and kanji and vocabulary. After a while it becomes impossible to learn Japanese, because they’re not actually learning Japanese: they’re just talking about it.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you’re learning Japanese if you spend your 15 minutes a day reading a Japanese lesson on a website or doing a few exercises in a textbook. Maybe if you can do this every day for 20 years, you’ll have a chance. But that’s not good enough for me. I don’t have that kind of time left After finding this site last year I’ve pretty well stopped posting on the fora and am instead living in my own little bit of Japan, USA, actually DOING the learning instead of just talking about it. Thanks for the attitude, Khatz. You’ve made me change from a wannabe into a learner.

Thanks for your kind comments…You mention how Japanese language groups are especially toxic in terms of emotional atmosphere. You know, it strikes me that, between Japan’s immense cultural productivity (music, movies, literature), and the communication technology with have today, especially in the form of the Internet., the distance between Japan and the rest of the world, in many ways, really is just a click. In other words, it’s the same as the distance to anywhere else (sorry to sound like a Discovery Channel documentary OH WAIT they don’t make those any more, only furniture shows). But I digress. Anyway..it strikes me that we may well be living in the twilight of “Orientalism”, or whatever the collective name for all the stupid myths surrounding Japan and simlarly “Eastern” places is. One day, Japanese will just be considered normal to the point of vanillaness. And then the real “exotic” languages will be the ones where for whatever reason, the people have had a combination of low population and low cultural output in the form of recordable/transferable/reproducible media, and those will be the new “man, you’ll NEVER understand that” languages.

But then you mention that this attitude exists in language learning circles in general, so…I don’t know. I just hope that’s how things are one day.

And I still don’t get it…Excuse me for taking this to the lowest, most racist denominator, but how can you hold the twin ideas of “we are better than those people because our people invented the motor car and the atom bomb, beyach”, and “we are too stupid to learn those people’s language”? Doesn’t that equation break somewhere?…Am I making sense?

A lot of it is a lack of confidence in one’s skills. The - perhaps subconscious - urge to hold back (on an emotional level) these beginners. Maybe there is some satisfaction in that. I don’t know. I honestly wish more people had your confidence, khatzumoto. It is a liberating, and - dare I say - inspiring attitude.

That sounds like you had to hold your position in a pretty brutal argument. I liked your point about how inability to understand an Australian accent doesn’t make you any less a native speaker of English.

Arguments like that and stupid comments about how it’s “impossible” are the biggest reason why I quit visiting fora like that; it’s just too painful to hear that; when you’re climbing the mountain, you don’t want to be hearing that it can’t be done.

You’re a strong guy, Alex. Keep on keeping on.

(PS - My forum handle is “Ezrach” there.)