Metafilter came up trumps today with this question and responses about reading material for the learner of Japanese. This led me to Liana's Extensive Reading Journal—there's a very good explanation, and justification, of extensive reading here. So many good blogs, so little time.
With Russian I never quite got to the point where my reading became a continuous upward swoop of improvement leading to full literacy. If I read with copious use of a dictionary I soon got bored, often forgetting the start of a hard sentence by the time I'd reached the end of it. If I read with no dictionary at all, I felt as though I was just filleting the text for easy words and establishing the structure of sentences with no regard to actual content (something did something to something yesterday with a something). Perhaps it's different with Japanese, where the semantic associations of the kanji will give you hints even if you've never seen the word before.
Also from that Metafilter question thread, lots of Japanese audio resources.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Dingler's Polytechnic Journal
I've made several false starts with German. Almost two decades ago, I tried to work my way through a textbook that was probably Breakthrough German. This attempt was doomed on multiple grounds. I was using a university language lab and I think I couldn't take the textbook out of it; language labs are semi-public places and I felt self-conscious about recording my poor attempts at a German accent; I needed to learn German in order to read some very tough mathematical papers written in Germany in the 1930s, and the cheery room-booking/bread-buying/train-catching dialogues weren't going to deliver that ability any time soon. What I actually needed, though I didn't then know such things existed, was a textbook specifically about scientific German, written with the sole intention of getting the student or technician up to speed with the grammar and basic vocabulary as quickly as possible. I have a few on my shelves now, and keep intending to have another go at raising my knowledge above the level of poor smattering that I have now. Listening comprehension is always difficult for me, and German has a reputation of being easier than many other languages to listen to with understanding (clear syllables and a firm rhythm), so I will get around to it soon.
Anyway, today I discovered Dingler's Polytechnic Journal, a German scientific journal published from 1820 to 1931 which has been very nicely digitized and made freely available. Here are links to the individual volumes up to 1877; for the later volumes you need to click on 'Faksimile' in the introductory paragraph and use a different interface. Even without much knowledge of German I find it fascinating to dip into it at random (Brunel's dad makes an appearance here, for example). The typography goes from solid Victorian Fraktur to beautiful modernism: there are adverts in the early-20th-century volumes that are astonishingly recent-looking: this from 1916. I read somewhere, probably in some mathematician's autobiography, that almost all of the typesetting of American mathematical journals was done in Germany right up until WWII, at which point the US had to learn the skill very quickly. The equations and graphs in the later years of the journal are beautiful.
If I learned modern German to a reasonable standard, 19th-century German wouldn't be too difficult. I'm a bit saddened that a knowledge of modern Japanese wouldn't immediately open the door to older forms of the language (written Japanese is quite close to spoken Japanese now, but a hundred years ago it really was a different language with a different grammar; also kanji have been simplified over the years, and the kana orthography had some sense imposed on it). But perhaps classical Japanese can be a future challenge.
Anyway, today I discovered Dingler's Polytechnic Journal, a German scientific journal published from 1820 to 1931 which has been very nicely digitized and made freely available. Here are links to the individual volumes up to 1877; for the later volumes you need to click on 'Faksimile' in the introductory paragraph and use a different interface. Even without much knowledge of German I find it fascinating to dip into it at random (Brunel's dad makes an appearance here, for example). The typography goes from solid Victorian Fraktur to beautiful modernism: there are adverts in the early-20th-century volumes that are astonishingly recent-looking: this from 1916. I read somewhere, probably in some mathematician's autobiography, that almost all of the typesetting of American mathematical journals was done in Germany right up until WWII, at which point the US had to learn the skill very quickly. The equations and graphs in the later years of the journal are beautiful.
If I learned modern German to a reasonable standard, 19th-century German wouldn't be too difficult. I'm a bit saddened that a knowledge of modern Japanese wouldn't immediately open the door to older forms of the language (written Japanese is quite close to spoken Japanese now, but a hundred years ago it really was a different language with a different grammar; also kanji have been simplified over the years, and the kana orthography had some sense imposed on it). But perhaps classical Japanese can be a future challenge.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Manga Kamishibai: The Art Of Japanese Paper Theater (Eric P Nash)
I learned about Kamishibai from the Miller Japanese reader (whose English notes I've extensively flicked through, though I haven't attempted the Japanese yet). I acquired this big art book at the weekend; lovely illustrations from what I am told is the great age of the art, the 20s to the 50s. The WWII ones are particularly interesting. I know next to nothing about Japanese visual arts—never got interested in manga or anime when I was younger, though I watch a bit of anime now—and it's good to cure my ignorance a little bit. A kamishibai performance. Another one. It's halfway between a Punch and Judy show and a PowerPoint presentation.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Language learning and gender
That quote from Miller in the last post, where he referred to the student of Japanese as 'he', got me wondering what the gender disparity is among students of Japanese. Many more women than men study foreign languages at degree level in the UK—I think this table (PDF) says that about 18,000 women got a foreign language undergrad degree and only about 8,000 men. [Edit: these are undergraduate awards of all types for 2008/9.] But what of Japanese specifically? A big black mark to both HESA and UCAS for having such awful Excel-dominated websites, and a special award to UCAS for making you download an executable in order to get a dataset (no thank you), and for having a rubbishy enquiry engine that only works in IE. So the short answer is I still don't know. Japanese has a geeky fanboyish reputation, so will that mean more men than you'd otherwise expect? I'll report if I manage to find out. (I was looking for undergraduate figures as I thought that would be the most useful proxy for 'serious' learners and was under the misapprehension that UCAS and HESA would have useful web interfaces; I've looked at the JLPT site but can't see any breakdown of results by gender there.)
Targets
Well, my original idea of going for the N1 or N2 level of JLPT by December has been shelved as a bit silly. I'd still like to do one of the higher levels some day; July or December next year might be a more sensible target. But I don't want to do any level of the JLPT which I'd have to struggle for; I want to achieve a level comfortably, without having to swot up on specifically test-related activities. The test is a measure of achievement but isn't the achievement itself—I want to achieve reading and listening fluency (to a lesser extent writing and speaking fluency) and I don't want to have to teach myself to the test in order to pass.
I've been listening to quite a bit of Japanese radio over the last month or two, with virtually no comprehension but a bit of recognition of particles and verbs and numbers (telephone numbers being particularly easy to pick out, as announcers always read them in a certain rhythm, just as English-language announcers do). I've never achieved decent listening comprehension of any language other than English, and I think getting good at listening will definitely be the biggest challenge. Soonish, perhaps when I've more or less finished Teach Yourself Japanese, I'll start listening to easy-Japanese podcasts.
Rough plan for the next few weeks: try to finish Teach Yourself Japanese (I'm about a third of the way through; the rest of it will take tens of hours of effort but exactly how long will depend on how much backtracking and revision I do. I want to really nail the grammar of the spoken language and get a useful starter vocabulary, but I won't be trying to remember every single word I come across). Then start on Reading Japanese. The first few chapters are all about the kana, which I've done before and which I've forgotten before; hopefully it won't take too long this time around and it will all finally stick. There are lots and lots of reading drills and I'll try not to skip anything.
After then... we'll see. I often flick through the awe-inspiring later reading passages in the Miller Japanese reader and tell myself that if I ever get that far, I'll definitely be able to call myself a reader of the language. Miller claims as much in his introduction: ... when the student has successfully read the greater portion of the selections in this volume he may turn to other modern Japanese texts in the full expectation that he will be able to read them, and he should not be disappointed. I like such solid promises as it shows the author has given some thought about what he's trying to deliver, whether he achieves it or not. So maybe I'll have a go at Miller, finally; alternatively I might have a go at working quickly through Bowring and Laurie, which I've been dipping into occasionally and whose style I rather like. The advantage of having thrown the provisional schedule out of the window is that I've got the liberty to do what I want, rather than looking worriedly at the calendar and feeling resentful about not having progressed much with kanji yet.
Hmm, kanji. While doing Reading Japanese I intend to have another go at Heisig, and keep it up as a side project. The pure Heisig approach of learning all the kanji in one go before learning anything else turned out not to suit me; for all the liberty it affords the student I found it duller than actually doing the exercises in a textbook—probably this just shows that I'm undisciplined.
I've been listening to quite a bit of Japanese radio over the last month or two, with virtually no comprehension but a bit of recognition of particles and verbs and numbers (telephone numbers being particularly easy to pick out, as announcers always read them in a certain rhythm, just as English-language announcers do). I've never achieved decent listening comprehension of any language other than English, and I think getting good at listening will definitely be the biggest challenge. Soonish, perhaps when I've more or less finished Teach Yourself Japanese, I'll start listening to easy-Japanese podcasts.
Rough plan for the next few weeks: try to finish Teach Yourself Japanese (I'm about a third of the way through; the rest of it will take tens of hours of effort but exactly how long will depend on how much backtracking and revision I do. I want to really nail the grammar of the spoken language and get a useful starter vocabulary, but I won't be trying to remember every single word I come across). Then start on Reading Japanese. The first few chapters are all about the kana, which I've done before and which I've forgotten before; hopefully it won't take too long this time around and it will all finally stick. There are lots and lots of reading drills and I'll try not to skip anything.
After then... we'll see. I often flick through the awe-inspiring later reading passages in the Miller Japanese reader and tell myself that if I ever get that far, I'll definitely be able to call myself a reader of the language. Miller claims as much in his introduction: ... when the student has successfully read the greater portion of the selections in this volume he may turn to other modern Japanese texts in the full expectation that he will be able to read them, and he should not be disappointed. I like such solid promises as it shows the author has given some thought about what he's trying to deliver, whether he achieves it or not. So maybe I'll have a go at Miller, finally; alternatively I might have a go at working quickly through Bowring and Laurie, which I've been dipping into occasionally and whose style I rather like. The advantage of having thrown the provisional schedule out of the window is that I've got the liberty to do what I want, rather than looking worriedly at the calendar and feeling resentful about not having progressed much with kanji yet.
Hmm, kanji. While doing Reading Japanese I intend to have another go at Heisig, and keep it up as a side project. The pure Heisig approach of learning all the kanji in one go before learning anything else turned out not to suit me; for all the liberty it affords the student I found it duller than actually doing the exercises in a textbook—probably this just shows that I'm undisciplined.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
On doing the exercises
I'm up to Lesson 9 of Teach Yourself Japanese now, and have just started the exercises—15 Japanese-to-English translation sentences and then 15 English-to-Japanese. I'm happier with the Japanese-to-English ones; when I make a mess of an English-to-Japanese translation I'm conscious that I might be reinforcing incorrect notions of Japanese syntax and grammar in my mind by writing duff sentences. I'm definitely with those scholars of language learning who approve of a silent period at the start, where the learner watches and listens and reads rather than actually producing any of the foreign language.
Stuff is starting to come together, a bit. When I look at romanized Japanese text I can now break a sentence down into rough consituent blocks: 'wa' marks the end of the topic, 'ga' the end of the subject (not the same thing!), 'o' the end of the direct object. Verb always always always at the end, except that there might be an odd particle after it to finish off the sentence. The verb at the end will probably be at a specific politeness level. Watch out for the adjectives: they don't decline as nouns do in IE languages, they conjugate like verbs—arguably adjectives actually are verbs in Japanese, at least the i-adjectives as opposed to the na-adjectives. So, I've got some notion of what Japanese grammar is like, though there's still some way to go yet.
How much longer with Teach Yourself Japanese? I'm backtracking and revising assiduously, reading and re-reading the Japanese sentences from the exercises to try to drill those bits of the grammar that aren't sticking. (The absence of a relative pronoun in particular keeps tripping me up). At an average of one lesson per day I can finish it this month. I'd like to finish faster as I'm hungry to try the Jorden and Chaplin Reading Japanese. We shall see.
Stuff is starting to come together, a bit. When I look at romanized Japanese text I can now break a sentence down into rough consituent blocks: 'wa' marks the end of the topic, 'ga' the end of the subject (not the same thing!), 'o' the end of the direct object. Verb always always always at the end, except that there might be an odd particle after it to finish off the sentence. The verb at the end will probably be at a specific politeness level. Watch out for the adjectives: they don't decline as nouns do in IE languages, they conjugate like verbs—arguably adjectives actually are verbs in Japanese, at least the i-adjectives as opposed to the na-adjectives. So, I've got some notion of what Japanese grammar is like, though there's still some way to go yet.
How much longer with Teach Yourself Japanese? I'm backtracking and revising assiduously, reading and re-reading the Japanese sentences from the exercises to try to drill those bits of the grammar that aren't sticking. (The absence of a relative pronoun in particular keeps tripping me up). At an average of one lesson per day I can finish it this month. I'd like to finish faster as I'm hungry to try the Jorden and Chaplin Reading Japanese. We shall see.
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