Instead of NaNoWriMo

Another of my periodic attempts to reboot my interest in Japanese: everyone else seems to be doing NaNoWriMo so instead I'm going to try (again) to work my way through the 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese.  There are 30 lessons in it, and 30 days in the month.  I've done the first seven or so lessons several times but always got bogged down.

There are some good reasons not to keep banging my head against this book: it's rather dated, even in the early stages clearly tries to explain too much at once and gets into a muddle, and uses the old romanization.  But I still rather like it since it uses a large vocabulary and seems to cover most of the grammar.  I might have a go at the accompanying volume An Introduction To Written Japanese if I fancy something different (I tend to get about 5 or 6 lessons into this, then lose the thread).  I suppose I should fiddle with the Obenkyo kanji-flashcard app too when I have the time.

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.

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.

Japanese texts on The Internet Archive

A search for Japanese-language texts on The Internet Archive was productive: in particular I like the look of this and this, which are volumes 3 and 4 of a Japanese reading course by Arthur Rose-Innes from before the war.  If I ever get advanced enough to read pre-war texts, with their bigger range of as-yet-unsimplified kanji and different use of kana, I might start here.  There's lots of other stuff that looks like it might be interesting too... too many books, too little time.  A lot of the metadata is less good than it could be, but I don't knock anything cool that someone gives me for free.

Japanese is now a cool language to learn but within living memory the Western nations saw it as very obscure—from the preface to my vade-mecum, Teach Yourself Japanese (1958) by Dunn and Yanada, [...] yet outside of Japan and her former Empire, and those parts of North and South America where many Japanese have settled her language is known by only a few hundred people at the most. This can't literally be true—none of the pre-war Japanese tutorial stuff on the Internet Archive and Googe Books would have been published at all if the market were that small!—but it's certainly true that when the Pacific war started, Britain and the US had some trouble finding people with knowledge of the language, other than Japanese and Japanese-Americans.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.