Men In Black

I had seen James Heisig, creator of the famous kanji-memorization technique, referred to a few times on the web with 'Fr' before his name, and a bit of digging confirms that he is indeed a Catholic priest, ordained in 1969 if this document is anything to go by, and a member of the Divine Word Missionaries (hence the SVD that sometimes appears after his name).  Given that the Heisig technique is one of the most-discussed learning methods for the Japanese language, it's odd that I've gone a few years mucking around with the language before discovering this rather basic biographical fact about the man.

On my to-read list at the moment is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, the story of the encounter between the author (a missionary) and the Pirahã, an Amazonian people with a language and worldview that have been argued about a hell of a lot over the years.  (See the tilde over the 'a' at the end there?  I went to the effort of finding out the Unicode point for a combining tilde, just to get the tribe's name right.  Don't say I never give you anything.)

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.

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.

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.