Still around

Given that I've only managed four posts in the last two years, this blog is for practical purposes abandoned at the moment.  Still: I might start plugging away at Japanese seriously some time.  Maybe.

Having abandoned any pretense at serious study some time ago, it's interesting to see what I still remember, on the odd occasions when I see some Japanese text.  Most of the basic verbs; a few nouns; quite a few kanji and most of the kana though I still get a lot of the katakana mixed up (always found them harder than hiragana for some reason).  Enough to remind me that I was really interested in all this stuff a while ago, and that I ought to get back into it.

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.

Motivation

There's actually not much point to my learning Japanese except that it interests me, and I'm increasingly finding myself making excuses not to bother studying it—that is, it isn't interesting me—so I might move on to some other language this year.  Before I do that I'd like to get to some definite level of competence in Japanese, but if I don't then I suppose I'll just abandon it for a year or two and maybe come back later.

I'd like to get somewhere with the language within the next few months (in the next five weeks it'll be nice to have something to distract me from the UK General Election campaign: burying myself in the books should stop me getting irritated with the Internet), but whether I do or don't, I'll probably try something else afterwards.  I've been half-heartedly mucking around with this for too long now.

Roy Andrew Miller's hatchet-jobs

I've mentioned before how it's sort of an ambition to work my way through Roy Andrew Miller's A Japanese Reader.  He died quite recently and his obituary quotes some of his reviews of hapless fellow-academics' work:

“The best that can be said of the authors’ treatment of ancient Chinese and Japanese texts is that it is brave and fearless. Armed with little more than a dictionary and a vivid imagination, they do not shrink from offering novel interpretations for texts that have already been studied at least a thousand years, with the consequent accumulation of a tremendous body of exegetical materials and secondary literature, all of which they are prepared to ignore, just as they are willing to overlook the existence of perfectly correct modern translations, that if consulted, would immediately show where they have gone wrong.”

 They (mostly) don't write them like that any more.  For more, go here.

Stuff

Have been doing very little on the Japanese front in the second half of this year, though have occasionally been playing the tapes of OUP's Take Off In Japanese (published in 2000), which I picked up from a charity shop for about £2.  Listening to audio always taxes my patience but it's a habit I need to get into, and it's actually a nicely-prepared course.

Have also tried going back to Obenkyo on my Android phone to see if any of the kanji I crammed about a year ago have stuck.  Some of them have...

Also still dabbling with O'Neill and Yanada's An Introduction to Written Japanese, which I periodically start studying again, always running into difficulty around chapters 5 or 6 (of 20).  I suppose Japanese is a language that isn't really suited to a single-volume graded reader—you just can't drill and repeat all the kanji enough in a single book—but I ought to stick at it, and I'm sort of planning to throw myself at it yet again in spare moments over Christmas and the New Year.

Interglossa

What appears to be the full text of the long-out-of-print Penguin book by Lancelot Hogben on his proposed auxiliary language Interglossa is here.  It's what you'd expect from the editor of Frederick Bodmer's The Loom Of Language, a book that I'll have to write about some time: full of optimism for a post-war internationalist future that will be organized and planned by nice British chaps.  Both Bodmer and Hogben felt that it was reasonable for different languages to have different words for things, but for modern languages to have declensions and conjugations was just ridiculous and someone should do something about it.

All languages are Welsh

according to Hieroglyfic (1768) by Rowland Jones.  An attempt to trace all languages back to a few original primitive sounds, years and years before Nicholas Marr did the same and annoyed Stalin.

Visualizing Japanese Grammar

A collection of short Flash tutorials covering most of Japanese grammar.  The audio on some of these seemed to be a bit out of sync with the video, but although they're quite old and creaky (nothing dates faster than once-cutting-edge educational technology) they look pretty good at covering the essentials.

Benny has a book coming out in March...

on language learning (obviously).  It looks very interesting.

Haven't quite got into the swing of doing Japanese-related stuff yet this year.  More to follow soon, hopefully.

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.