Ploughing on with the 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese exercises

Now up to Lesson 7, which I think is as far as I got last time I tried to work my way through the book.  Am assiduously doing all of the exercises, which involves a lot of writing in romaji, and I do wonder whether it's worth the effort given that I want to start on the written language as soon as I finish this.  But I'll stick with it for the moment.

I had occasion the other day to look up stuff connected with IUPAC chemical nomenclature, and at the moment the English to Japanese exercises feel very much like the old A-level Chemistry task where one was given the structure of an organic compound and had to give the correct name for it.  First identify the backbone of the molecule, then identify all the odd methyl and alcohol and suchlike groups stuck to the backbone, then construct a name that slots all of the radicals correctly onto it.  Certainly in the early stages, the Teach Yourself Japanese exercises feel like this: identify everything that will have to go into your answer, then glue it together in what you think is the correct order.

Japanese streets

From time to time, whenever I'm waiting for a computer to finish doing something else, I'll spend an idle few minutes wandering around a random area of Japan on Google Street View, mainly in order to look at the signs by roadsides and on shops.  It's a painless way of getting exposure to written material in a useful context; it's also an interesting lesson in how much of Japan looks very different from one's preconceptions of what Japan ought to look like.  Like many people in the West, I have vague images of City Japan and Country Japan.  City Japan is a Blade Runner-ish set of skyscrapers gleaming with neon and glass, and Country Japan is well-tended formal gardens with temples dotted around.  But drop the little orange Google Street View man almost anywhere in Japan and you'll see something else: low-rise buildings, a lot of rather shabby concrete, surprisingly narrow streets.  The abundance of overhead wires (far more than you'd ever see in Britain) makes me think of small-town America, or at least one of my possibly-false clichés of small-town America, no doubt influenced by Wichita Lineman.  It all looks quite prosperous, but ugly—much of Japan looks no better than the post-war areas of relatively decent housing anywhere in Britain, on a more cramped scale.  When I started reading Alex Kerr's books about the failures of modern Japan I thought his opinions on modern Japanese city architecture were surprisingly harsh; but Street View rather supports them.  On the other hand it's really striking to see vending machines out in the open, on every street, in working order.  Anywhere I've ever lived, such exposed machines would be vandalised and stripped of their beer/coffee/Pocari Sweat loads the first night they were installed.

Another go at Teach Yourself Japanese by Dunn and Yanada

Am having another try at working my way at least partly through this one: currently up to Lesson 4.  I've launched myself at this book several times in the past, and have done the first few lessons about half-a-dozen times, but I always tend to get stranded somewhere around lessons 6–8.  I'm finding the exercises easier each time I try to work through the book, but perhaps by now I'm just remembering all the answers rather than working them out from first principles.  Doing the exercises is a chore but I find it less dull than doing Heisig; I ought to enjoy the Heisig method but I clearly don't, so I'm putting that on the back-burner for a while.  If I do manage to work my way through all or most of Dunn and Yanada I might have a go at Reading Japanese by Jorden and Chaplin.

Picked up what appears to be a Japanese cookery book for young people in a second-hand shop today.  I know damn-all about cookery (even less than I currently know about Japanese).

Letters From Iwo Jima

Just watched it.  Good stuff.  (I'm trying to remember the last Clint Eastwood-directed film that I saw... could it actually have been In The Line Of Fire, 20 years ago?  Time flies.)

Could I comprehend much?  Not really; caught a few simple verbs, nouns, particles and numbers.  I seem to be getting into the habit of forgetting to listen very carefully to the dialogue and looking at the scenery to see which kanji I recognise; eg, the 兵 on the armband of the Kempeitai which I sort-of-recognised but couldn't quite place.

Heisig seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit this week; I'm getting less neurotic about trying to do some Japanese every day since it's now pretty clear that I won't have got my act together enough by December to attempt one of the highish levels of the JLPT, so that will have to wait until next July, or maybe later, so the JLPT-in-five-months strapline at the top of the blog might get sheepishly removed or amusingly subverted soon.  I do want to sit JLPT at some stage but I don't want it to become an end in itself; I don't want to be spending most of my learning time specifically targetting the sorts of vocabulary and grammatical issues that turn up in JLPT.  I want a good reading ability in Japanese and good listening comprehension, but I'm primarily judging myself against my ability with authentic Japanese material rather than exam materials.

A Japanese Reader: Graded Lessons in the Modern Language by Roy Andrew Miller

At some stage in the near future I will actually start discussing my continuing learning experience, but I can't resist mentioning one more book.  This one was first published in 1962.  In its 75 lessons, it takes you from the kana syllabaries to advanced continuous prose, and it's pretty comprehensive—it even covers the now-abolished old kana usages.  The Japanese texts are in vertical script and start at the back of the book; the corresponding reading notes are presented 'normally' from the start of the book.  Flicking backwards from the easy texts to the hardest ones shows what a mountain to climb the written Japanese language is.  It's a beautifully-produced book, as many of the the Tuttle ones are, and I want to work through it, eventually.  It requires some knowledge of the spoken language, of course.

The Wikipedia entry for Miller points out that he's an Altaicist, which I understand is a minority position among Japanese scholars.  It can be disconcerting to read about academic disagreements about a language that you're learning&mdash.  Particularly when I'm on rocky grammatical ground, I don't like being reminded that linguistics isn't a hard science.

Undercover University by Frank Bell

Not a textbook of Japanese, though there are bits and pieces of Japanese-language material in it.  It's a first-hand account of imprisonment in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp; Frank Bell was captured in the Far East (as we would say) in 1942 after a very short spell of active service with the Royal Artillery and spent over three years in various camps, where he and fellow officers tried to keep their minds busy by teaching one another things—often languages.  The book, produced by his widow after his death, contains a lot of reproductions of pages from notebooks from the camps, usually filled to the margin (paper was a luxury) with declensions of verbs and vocabulary lists.

The Pacific war doesn't loom as large in popular imagination as the European theatre of war does; perhaps any chance of comprehension was finally lost when the old Empire disappeared.  The Dunkirk evacuations and the Blitz still speak to us, but it's difficult for most of us now to imagine what a huge effect the fall of Singapore had on morale.  The geography is more difficult, too: trying to follow the American island-hopping campaign is very difficult unless you've got excellent knowledge of Pacific geography or you've got a map to hand.  This topic is probably one I'll keep going back to.  Anyway, I recommend the book if you can find it.

Watching video with little comprehension

From time to time I watch Japanese-language video on YouTube.  At this stage I have very little comprehension of what's going on, but some people swear blind that at some level it's causing linguistic connections to be made in my brain, and that eventually it will pay off.  I find it very difficult to concentrate on the audio when watching foreign-language video... what really catches my attention is the speed with which the (foreign-language) captions appear and disappear.  This applies even when I'm watching content in a language that I can read to a sort-of-adequate level, such as Russian—when a caption flashes up for a few seconds and then disappears, I'm not going to be able to read all of it.  This really shows the difference between being able to read moderately well and full fluency.  Similarly, the constantly-repeating banner ad text on Russian-language newspaper sites defeats me until I've had the chance to look at each frame of an ad a few times.

I hope, within the next month, to master most of the kanji.  I've sort-of done the first few hundred of them several times and then run out of steam; the desire to really complete the general-use kanji (including the new ones that were added last year) is a good motivator.  Embarrassingly, I have 'learned' the hiragana and katakana a few times but have forgotten about half of each of them in between each learning session.  That's something else I need to get down pat this month.

Anyway, back to the Asahi Shimbun channel.

Crossing the language barrier

I don't have a television, so perhaps I'm just way behind the times, but the interviews in this piece strike me as very odd.  Roland Buerk asks Japanese people questions in English and they answer in Japanese, with English dubbing.  Is this the way that all multilingual telly interviews are done these days?  Are we supposed to pretend that the nice chap from the BBC has a New Testament gift of tongues?  British people have always been under the impression their English will be understood by everyone abroad if they shout it loudly enough at them, and this isn't going to dissuade anyone from this view.

IMJ92: An Introduction to Modern Japanese by Bowring and Laurie (CUP, 1992)

Another book that I picked up cheap in the second-hand shop... this book is a bit unusual among Japanese textbooks in that it teaches both the spoken language and the written language, at the same time.  It looks good, and rigorous on the grammar side of things; perhaps I'll give it a go in a few months' time.  My inclination is to pick up initial knowledge of the spoken language via romanization, but since I have a good memory for the shape of words on the page I'm concerned that I might become so attached to romanized text I have difficulty in switching to kana and kanji.  Ability to read authentic Japanese script is the target and I don't want to clog up my memory with Latin letters if I can help it.

TYJ58: Teach Yourself Japanese by CJ Dunn and S Yanada (English Universities Press, 1958)

This was the first Japanese textbook that I ever owned, and I have a copy (not the same copy) in front of me now.  Over the last few months I've made a few attempts at completing it, with my current personal best being 7 chapters done out of 30.  There's a review of it here.  It's in that lovely small-hardback format that the EUP used to use.  It covers pretty much the whole of the spoken language, using the kunrei-siki romanization; it moves at quite a pace and there are lots of exercises.  For most of my adult life I've had a great aversion to Doing The Exercises in a textbook, and each time I have a go at this book I find that my heart sinks at another set of dozens of the damned things at the end of every lesson.  (Translate into Japanese: As an individual he is all right, but he is no good as a Prime Minister.  I'm going with a friend who has become blind, so I may be a little late.  I no longer take any pleasure in working in the garden because there are a lot of caterpillars.  And so on.  None of this 'Hello Mr Tanaka, I am Mr Smith from the British Government' rubbish; and the grammar is rigorous, which is how I like it).

If I had started this Japanese-learning project properly a few months ago, as I had intended to, I would have spent quite a long time on romanized textbooks right at the start; but if I'm targeting the December JLPT—now five months away—I can't really afford to use romanized text as a crutch.  I can use it to pick up vocabulary, but I can't count myself as properly knowing the vocabulary until I know how to write it.

I do like the old EUP language textbooks; they're of their era—very few theoretical worries about the best way to introduce someone to a language; start with simple stuff and drill and drill and drill the reader at every opportunity.  Well-behaved post-war language students, I am led to suppose, did do all the exercises and presumably it did them a power of good, but I'm from a more slack generation.

Have been looking again at the first 200–300 kanji in Heisig; this is stuff that I've looked at before and I'm in the annoying position of almost but not quite knowing it properly.  I can't quite dash onwards immediately but I've nearly got them mastered.  This almost-thereness goes against the spirit of Heisig, which is to spend more time than you might think necessary on each of the kanji and really learn each one of them so that you'll never forget them.  Again this might show slackness on my part, or perhaps my mind has just been addled by reading about Spaced Repitition Systems, which don't expect you to learn things completely right from the start.

Beginning Japanese

Over the next few months I intend to take most of my instruction from dead-tree books; here's one that that I have that's very useful and is available free on the web, entirely legitimately: Reading Japanese by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin.  According to the copyright page it was released into the public domain at the end of 1990.  The book teaches the reading and writing of the two sets of kana and a few hundred kanji.  The kanji diagrams are pleasingly clear, and show printed forms, clear handwritten forms and scrawled versions.  The stroke order diagrams indicate not only stroke order but which end of the stroke you begin with, which is very useful if like me you get confused over those strokes that rise from left to right.  The advice at the start of every book on the Japanese writing system is that strokes are writen left to right and top to bottom, but these strokes are clearly one (which one?) and not the other.  For many months, until the Jorden book corrected me, I was writing the water radical in its left-hand position, as exemplified in 洗, with its bottom stroke top-to-bottom rather than bottom-to-top, which is how it should be written.

There's a lot of drill and practice of kanji in this book (which assumes some familiarity with the spoken language).  My vague plan for the next few months is to do Heisig quickly (just the first book, getting all 2000 kanji into my head), then go quickly through a few romanized spoken-Japanese textbooks and then have a go at Reading Japanese.  I don't think I'll do all of the drills though.

Another useful resource: this book has a useful partial view available on Google, including some very nice tables of radicals showing stroke order and stroke direction.

Summer Wars

Didn't get around to studying any of Heisig today, but I did finally get around to seeing Summer Wars.  I'm doubtful of claims of how good watching foreign media is for your foreign language study in your very early days of study... watching it in Japanese with English subtitles, I could just about pick out a few particles and simple adjectives and verbs from the soundtrack, but that's about it.  A good film though.  A knowledge of Koi-Koi, which I don't have, would have been useful to me when watching it.

Welcome

Welcome to Abundance Declared, which is about my attempts to learn Japanese.  I've been messing around with the language for about a year now, having fun but not getting very far, and now I want to get serious.  With this in mind I'm thinking of going for one of the higher levels of the JLPT either in December or next July.  Ideally I'd like to go for the top level, N1, in December.  This is ridiculously ambitious and probably doomed to failure, but I feel that unless I set myself a very high target I'll just mess around and my attention will wander onto something else of interest, as it usually does.  So: fluent reading ability and full listening comprehension in five months.  Nothing implausible about that, eh?

I'll be starting by refreshing my knowledge of the kanji.  All 2000 of them, using the Heisig book.  This book, Remembering The Kanji 1, rather divides people.  Many absolutely swear by it; Heisig himself claims it's the only method of learning all the kanji that actually works.  Many others, such as Chris in a series of blog posts here (where he's actually discussing application of Heisig to Mandarin rather than to Japanese), are more skeptical.  Over the past year of low-intensity mucking-around with Japanese I've covered the first few hundred kanji in Heisig several times but have always got bogged down about a third of the way through the book.  There are 2042 kanji given in the Heisig book, and these include all 1945 general-use kanji that the Japanese learn at school—actually in the last year they've added some more to the general-use list, but many of them are in Heisig already.  Learning to recognise and to write all of them, getting that task out of the way right away, is appealing.

Heisig teaches you the meaning of each kanji in the sense that it gives you an English word to associate with each kanji.  This first book doesn't teach you how to pronounce any of the kanji: the Japanese readings (of which there are usually more than one for each kanji) are dealt with in the sequel.

We shall see how this goes.