Still around

Still here, but not posting very much as haven't had the time or the energy to do much language-related stuff over the last month.  I hope that early in the New Year I'll gain enough momentum to post more regularly on Japanese-related topics.  And perhaps I'll redesign this rather ugly blog.

Wishing you all a happy and healthy Heisei 24!

Stuff

Have had just no time for Chinese recently, and little inclination to try to squeeze language study into the odd spare moments that I do have...

 Watched this film last night and was rather cheered by how much of the dialogue I could match up with the subtitles.  Even though I haven't done any Japanese in the last several weeks, the knowledge is still rattling around in my brain somewhere.

Teach Yourself Chinese by HR Williamson (EUP, 1947)

I've been glancing through this book; it uses unsimplified characters with Wade-Giles romanization, so it's hardly going to be anyone's first choice as a textbook these days, but like the other Teach Yourself books of its era it's a lovely little hardback ("Produced in Great Britain in complete conformity with the Authorised Economy Standards"—paper was still in short supply).  At 530pp I think it's the fattest EUP Teach Yourself book I've ever seen.

The author seems to have been this chap, who must have been very disappointed by the turn that China took towards the end of his life, but who would have been cheered and astonished to see the number of mainstream Protestant churches in England now with well-attended Chinese-language services.  The book consists of 40 dialogues: text in Wade-Giles and side-by-side translation verso, vocabulary and corresponding hanzi recto.  At the back are vertical Chinese-character texts of all the dialogues, grammar notes, a very large and clear list of characters with romanizations and translations, a list of radicals, and a list of the characters arranged by Wade-Giles.  It's a comprehensive book clearly aimed mainly at missionaries who are going to go Out East and live in a Chinese environment heavily mediated by lots of servants.  Sample dialogue: Master: "You did not make the bed properly yesterday.  I did not sleep very well."  Servant: "I am sorry sir.  There was too much to do yesterday, and I couldn't overtake the work."  Mao hadn't quite won by 1947, but even then it should have been clear that that old style of expat life in China was on its way out.  You can trace the shrinking of the British Empire by the last publication dates of language primers for colonial officials and their families (I've seen several books on Malay from the 50s whose purpose is to enable exaperated wives to yell instructions and rebukes at 'native' cooks and houseboys).

Listening to syllables

Am repeatedly listening to the first few lessons of Colloquial Chinese just to get used to the rhythm of the language and the sounds of the initials, finals and tones.  Interesting that I can sort-of get the tones (which I expected to be the hardest part) with fair accuracy, but am having problems distinguishing several of the initials from one another.  But it's early days, and I hope I'll improve.  Or maybe it's just that the audio is sounding very muddy and I need to get my tape heads cleaned!

Sino-Platonic Papers

(available here) describes itself in this way:

Sino-Platonic Papers is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. The purpose of the series is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished.

It's full of interesting stuff about East Asian languages.  In particular there seems to be rather a lot of skepticism about the benefits of hanzi and kanji; one might innocently expect Western experts in these languages to be enthusiastic fanboys/girls for the characters, either because it was the characters that they first found interesting about the languages or because they're proud of the memorization-mountain that they have climbed.  But readers of  Language Log will know that Victor Mair is not a starry-eyed fan of characters!

Anyway: interesting stuff (mostly in PDF form, though some HTML), and well worth a read.

Sound and vision

First thing to say about starting to read the textbook is that I've just discovered that I've been pronouncing Pinyin wrong for years. It might take a little while for the correct pronunciation of the unguessably awkward initials like q and x to 'stick'. The audio for this course is on cassettes, which I am handling with nostalgic awe. I remember the days when I used to buy albums on cassette...

Chinese project

Have slacked off on the Japanese and fancy trying something different.  Everyone else seems to be writing a novel this month, something that I have neither the talent nor the inclination for.  But I like the idea of a time-limited project, so I've decided to have a crack at Chinese, just for this month.  Textbook is the original 1995 edition of Colloquial Chinese by Kan Qian.  And away we go.

Benny's Klingon-language house tour

Here.  Well done that man.

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.

Klingon language mission

I don't have one, but Benny The Irish Polyglot does.  You'll see lots of blogs being added to the sidebar over the next few weeks, most but not all language-related.

Benny travels the world learning languages and translating; I don't try to follow his method of learning languages but I enjoy reading about how he gets on, and you probably will too.

Japanese reading resources

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.