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.