Obenkyo

Have been drilling kanji with the Obenkyo Android app and am very impressed; started with the easiest JLPT level 5 kanji and have made it up to working through level 2 at the moment.  This has only taken about 4 days of a couple of hours' work a day.  Levels 5 to 1 contain 79/166/367/367/1231 kanji and there's an Additional Kanji list of 130 (mainly recent additions to the Joyo list, I think).  In kanji-drilling mode, the app shows you an English definition, say "study, learning, science", and you have to choose the correct kanji 学 from the 6 shown.  Or you can do it the other way around and given a kanji, choose the definition from a list of 6.  The 'definitions' usually include something very close to a Heisig keyword, but as seen in the example above, are a bit longer and woolier and wordier.  This means there's often some overlap between definitions for different kanji, which is something that you just have to deal with.  On and Kun readings are also given.  There's even a draw-the-kanji challenge; the AI that judges whether or not you've done it properly is imperfect but frankly it's amazing that it works as well as it does.  For the 79 level 1 kanji I drilled the drawing of the kanji, but on the later levels I didn't bother; I just wanted to fix the kanji in visual memory.

There are a few imperfections: in particular there seems to be a fixed internal ordering to the kanji and the 6 kanji (1 correct, 5 incorrect) to choose from appear in that order, so you subconsciously learn that such-and-such a difficult definition is likely to be at the beginning of the kanji selection list, or at the end.  The weighted-random selection of kanji gives pretty good spaced repetition, but it might be useful to have the option for extra-hard kanji selection: select the defined kanji from among deliberately-chosen almost-but-not-quite-right ones.

I worked through about a quarter or a third of Heisig several times over the past three years and always got bored.  The knowledge has proved useful for drilling with Obenkyo, though I can't remember all of the Heisig names for radicals and have had to resort to making up my own.  Perhaps a revisit to Heisig will be necessary before I move onto the big final block of 1231 kanji and then the additional ones.

Readings will have to follow later!

Peking / Beijing

When I was young, I saw a TV news item that told me that Peking was now no longer called Peking, it was called Beijing.  (Perhaps the news item was in fact a bit more accurate than that and went into the gory details of Wade-Giles and pinyin, but if it was, it all went over my head).  It struck me as a puzzling thing to happen to a city, being renamed like that.  This must have been at the time of the 1979 pinyinization.  Peking still persists in the names of institutions that want to boast about their age, such as Peking University (and I think that on the Chinese version of the site, the last character in 'university' on the logo is the unsimplified version  學 as opposed to 学, for added old-fashionedness).

I keep wanting to train my ear to hear the sounds of Chinese properly: never mind the tones, many of the initials are very hard to distinguish.  Perhaps something to do next year.

Reading

Having (yet) another go at the O'Neill and Yanada Introduction To Written Japanese.  Previously I've always foundered round about lesson 4 or 5 (of 20, although no new kanji are introduced after 16: the last 4 lessons deal with pre-war kana/kanji usage and difficult handwriting). This ought to be do-able in reasonable time.  Have also dabbled with the Miller Japanese Reader and would like to have another serious go at this.

Benny at the half-way point

with a short video here.  Perhaps less confident in Japanese than he was after 6 weeks in some of his other Fluent In Three Months language challenges, but he has been ill, and he sounds confident about the second half of the challenge.

Speaking fluently has never been the aim of any of my language learning; for me a language is text, not sounds.  This is probably the wrong way to go about it but it's far too late for me to change now.  Certainly with Japanese it's the fascinating writing system that got me interested, and of the books on Japanese that I have that try to introduce the writing system simultaneously with basic grammar and vocabulary, many make the reasonable point that since kanji are what attracts so many to the language it's a shame to defer study of the writing system until there's been a lot of the spoken language covered.

Not much energy for language learning at the moment...

So am likely to be quiet on here for a little while unless I suddenly manage to pick up momentum with Japanese again.  Keep meaning to go back to Duolingo and tinker with German again, and if Duolingo delivers the long-promised Chinese course, I might have a go at that.  A recent article claims that they're hoping to add up to 50 languages within the next few months, via the magic of crowdsourcing.  This sounds ambitious, but we shall see.

Benny's Japanese Mission

Benny Lewis has announced that he's aiming to get to B2 level in Japanese (with emphasis on conversational skills rather than reading and writing) in the next three months.  Should be entertaining to read, and he does good videos.  Previously on his site: Scott and Vat try to spend a year speaking only Spanish/Portugese/Chinese/Korean; no English talking at all.  This is probably brilliant for fluency but would drive me insane.

More miscellaneous stuff

There's a lifetime's worth of reading to be found on openlibrary.org (which provides a reasonable interface to the books scanned at archive.org ) so long as you're willing to put up with not very good metadata and some scanning that isn't as good as it could be.  I was pleased to find this book, published a century ago, which gives lovely illustrations of 'grassy' soosho script; after flicking through a few dozen pages you begin to see the way that this style of handwriting works, even though you recognize it'll be a hell of an uphill struggle to really come to terms with it.

Am up to chapter 4 (of 20) in O'Neill and Yanada's An Introduction To Written Japanese; this is the first chapter where I've had to take things slowly.  The first chapter uses hiragana, the kanji for numbers 1-10, and very simple words; the second and third chapters introduce 20 and 30 kanji respectively (and the second chapter perversely uses katakana where hiragana would normally be used - some later chapters of the book do this too, to give you more practice in katakana than you'd otherwise get).  Chapter 4 introduces 40 more kanji, and there are 40-50 new kanji each lesson up to lesson 16: the last 4 lessons introduce no new kanji but use some pre-simplification kanji and the older okurigana usage.  The book says it uses 680 kanji in total; it's one of the tradeoffs of having a short graded reader that a lot of new kanji and vocabulary is going to be introduced very rapidly, and it's at chapter 4 that one starts to sense a combinatorial explosion, with too much going on simultaneously to cope with easily.  Perhaps I should go back to Heisig for a while.

Flicking through RTK2 the other day, was pleased to 'learn' a Japanese word that millions of British people learned long ago in the 80s: 'roll-call' is 'tenko', or 点呼.  A well-remembered BBC TV series (Wikipedia) taught us the word.

Corpora

This 280KB text file at Leeds University gives the 15,000 commonest words from a corpus of Japanese text, for a vague value of 'words' (there are some odd symbols and punctuation quite high up the list).  Might be useful.  It'd be mildly interesting to do statistical crunches of the range of kanji used in the list.  Many more corpora for various languages here.

The art of memory

I've just reread Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein, his account of competing in memory tournaments.  He discusses the history of memory techniques, from their golden age in antiquity to their decline as literacy and printing removed most of the need for them, to their modest revival among enthusiasts and competitors today.  It's an informative read and also a good-natured one, in its polite American way: I fear that a British journalist spending time among the memorizers and mnemonic-system-builders would be very careful to do the usual Brit journalistic point-and-chortle from a safe distance, pulling rank on the friends that he made during his research in order to mock their geekiness for the amusement of the readership.  American journalists don't seem to do this as much, thank God.  (See also Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a tale of competitive Scrabble that's similarly sympathetic to the individuals involved).

When I was a kid I read in a computer magazine, probably Your Computer or Acorn User, an account of language-learning software that used the Gruneberg Linkword system, a basic method of punning on foreign words in order to learn their English translations.  I got into the habit of using this almost subconsciously when learning French and Latin vocabulary at school, and it must have helped.  ('Learn this vocabulary', the teacher always says.  But how?)

After a brief flurry of activity, my attempt to get through Teach Yourself Japanese, the 1958 edition, has ground to a halt again, round about chapter 6 or 7.  I'm never going to get through this with good-student diligence so it's time to try something else.  The problem seems to be that after the first few chapters, the mental load of learning both new vocabulary and new grammar is too much.  I enjoy flicking through the book and picking up grammar from it, but it's just too hard to learn the grammar and the vocabulary simultaneously chapter-by-chapter: there's too much going on.  So, why not have a go at learning the vocabulary all at once?  The glossary at the end of the book contains over 3000 items, which would be a bit much to bite off in one go, but the vocabulary at the end of An Introduction To Written Japanese, which is the book that I want to work through to get reasonable facility in the written language, has about half as many words.  That's kind of workable.  So: perhaps learn all the vocab in the book about writing, keep drilling it to memorize it, and start working through the book and learning the writing system.  I'll have to use TYJ for the grammar explanations, but having half the vocabulary down pat will be helpful and I can always start trying to learn all the words in its glossary if I'm feeling cocky.

It's odd that I haven't thought of doing this before.  Japanese writing, everyone knows, requires a lot of learning by rote.  There's no way around this; it's a bridge that you have to cross.  But rote learning of romanized vocabulary... funny that I'd never considered doing this.  It's the first non-Indo-European language that I've ever tried learning so it's hardly odd that I'm having trouble getting the words to stick, and the quite large number of imported English nouns doesn't take one very far.

Still aiming to have some definite results by the end of August, by which I think I mean I ought to be able to have a go at most Japanese text with the help of a dictionary or fancy dictionary-Javascript-bookmarklet-plugin-thingy and get most of the sense.  As for listening comprehension: that's never been my forte with languages and we'll have to see how it goes.

Vague plan...

Try to work through approximately the first half of the 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese with reasonable diligence and not get bogged down round chapters 8 or 9 as I usually do.  Keep notes and try to remember vocabulary and grammar nuggets; also try to keep translating in head from TYJ's transliteration to Hepburn and vice versa.  When I'm confident enough, start alternating study of later chapters of TYJ with chapters of the O'Neill and Yanada An Introduction to Written Japanese.  Keep drilling the kana so they don't slip away from me as they usually do.  Learn the kanji as O'Neill and Yanada introduce them, but use Heisig for review and to peek ahead and learn meanings (though not readings) of kanji in advance.  Once I've finished both books, err, do something else.  Might throw Jorden and Chaplin's Reading Japanese into the mix too.  Then maybe the Miller A Japanese Reader?

I do need to throw myself at Japanese a bit, if only because I'm finding reading the news these days pretty depressing and want to steer myself away from it.  Reading a newspaper once a day or listening to the radio news ought to be enough to keep me informed without wallowing in awfulness.  Burying myself in language textbooks from the 50s and 60s is one way out of it.

I'd like to have seen some sort of solid achievement by, say, the end of August.

Stuff

Not much happening on the Japanese front at the moment: keep dipping into textbooks but haven't been willing to throw myself enthusiastically at the language for a while.  Still listening from time to time to Japanese radio and can pick out odd bits and pieces.  Drilled kana (I always end up forgetting them) for a week or so, and found the Obenkyo Android app really useful for this; started working through the lowest JLPT level of kanji on it too, but lost interest after a time.  More soon.

An Introduction To Written Japanese by PG O'Neill and S Yanada

A charity-shop bargain at £2.49.  O'Neill and Yanada were both at the School of Oriental and African Studies: O'Neill was responsible for the still-famous A Reader of Handwritten Japanese (reproductions of letters sent to him over the years, of varying linguistic difficulty and readability, with translations and in some cases Hepburn romanizations), and Yanada was the co-author of the kunrei-siki romanized 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese that I've got 10 chapters, out of 30, into on a few occasions.

The current volume was first published in 1963 and I have the fifth printing from 1990.  It's a nice little paperback the same dimensions as the little hardback Teach Yourself Japanese, and actually it's a companion volume to that: it contains 20 lessons that are supposed to be used in conjunction with the romanized text.  The kana are dealt with at the very start, then each lesson introduces you to some characters with specified readings, then there are some example sentences (vertical handwriting, which is doubly unusual for a beginners' text), a kunrei-siki romanization, and grammatical notes.  English translations are at the back.  There's not much grammar explanation so Teach Yourself Japanese, or an acceptable substitute, really is necessary.

Looks as though this is now out of print, presumably since almost everyone now uses Hepburn.  I'm fond of the old Teach Yourself Japanese in spite of my many failures to get through it and its antiquated romanization: I might well have a go at it again in conjunction with this book, which is quite an ambitious volume (it gets as far as introducing the old kana usage, which I suppose was less of an historical curio 50 years ago than it is today).  On completing it, the beginner should be able to "... meet with success in most encounters with the written language".  Which is nice if true.  I like books that tell you they're going to get you to a useful level in finite time; it's what you're probably looking for, after all.

In other news: an augmented-reality app for Japanese youngsters to let them get something out of newspapers that they can't read.  Must be frustrating to be a young person barred by a complicated writing system from reading above one's level.

Eulingu

I idly clicked on the little-noticed 'Next Blog' link at the top of this blog (reminds me of the days of webrings; remember those?) and it took me here.  Eulingu is an conlang of the eclectic auxlang variety, a melange of lots of European languages.  As such it's pretty easy to read if you have a smattering of a few languages.  There's a short account of its background here.

All the modern Euro-conlangs (Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua etc) look pretty much the same to me, though if my Romance and Germanic languages were better no doubt I'd have a better eye for how they differ in what they've borrowed and what they've jettisoned.