Motivation is a fragile thing – it comes unpredictably, and if neglected it fades quickly.  This is true for not just music, but everything – language practice included.  How to “keep your Japanese plugged in” will differ depending on what your practice routine consists of, but for me it includes having Anki open at startup, keeping my books open on my desk, having podcasts and movies set up in advance, and having my electronic dictionary available in my top desk drawer.  Japanese posters and wall hangings help too.

Spend a little time brainstorming how you can keep your Japanese plugged in, and you’re sure to find yourself practicing longer and more often!

Speaking: this is the area where I feel strongest right now relative to my overall level, and where the skills I built in Japan seem to have decayed the least.  My active vocabulary isn’t huge, but I use it flexibly enough to be effective (it’s not the size that counts, right?).  My goal here is to find some contexts in which I can practice speaking here in Boston, such as a language exchange partner or one of the local Japanese Lunch Tables.  Priority is low, since I have no pressing need to use my spoken Japanese.

Writing: also strong, but I find my limited vocabulary quite a bit more limiting.  This might be because my writing, mostly on Lang-8 and in emails, has to cover a fairly broad range of topics, and I feel more compelled to write concisely and precisely.  It’s easier to talk around a missing word than it is to write around it.  Vocabulary building is the biggest issue here, as I don’t feel that my grammar is limiting right now.  Apart from continuing to write emails and journal entries I have no plans to specifically work on my writing skills, as I feel they will improve as my reading skills improve.

Listening: enormously weaker than when I left Japan.  I used to be able to understand almost 90% of what was going on in TV shows, but now I feel like it’s closer to 50-60%.  Working on my listening is going to be largely a matter of how soon I can get a new iPod now that mine is out of commission, so that I can increase my immersion.  Reading will build my vocabulary, but I need lots of practice separating out words at native speed.  Japanesepod101.com will be another good source of listening practice, mainly for modern, slangy or idiomatic phrases and vocabulary that I don’t have access to in reading material.  JLPT2 listening practice is low priority for the time being.

Reading: ugh.  My kanji recognition has really plummeted.  My reading probably feels worse than it is, since I’m suddenly so dependent on it for input, but for the same reason I need to improve it a lot.  Doing an RTK refresher is the first step, after which I want to start working on 2001.Kanji.Odyssey, Kanji in Context, and my JLPT2 study materials.  Once I’m done with RTK, vocabulary building is going to be the highest priority.  For extra fun and exposure, I have some mangas sitting around that I can read (名探偵コナン、ヒカルの碁、デスノート）, moving up to light novels (十二国記、short stories by 吉本ばなな and 星新一) as I feel ready.

I’d like to take the 日本語能力試験２級 (JLPT2) this December, not because I think it’s a good measure of Japanese ability (though it may be a decent measure of literacy) or because I need it for employment (though it couldn’t hurt!), but because I feel a strong need to have a concrete goal to work towards.  While in Japan I abandoned the idea of studying for the ２級 simply because I was making so much progress without it, and I felt maximizing my natural language exposure would give me the most benefit.  Right now, since I’m in a position where natural language exposure has to be specifically sought out through purchase, piracy, or personal interaction, I feel I need to be a little more focused in order to bring my language skills to where I want them.  It also seems like a good way to fill in some of the ‘holes’ left behind from my at times haphazard immersion experience.

I’ll re-evaluate the JLPT2 idea in September, as the deadline for registration gets closer, but for now it seems like a solid goal and a good way to make use of the resources at my disposal.

First of all, studying is when you are actively focusing on the language – making flashcards, learning grammar points, picking out new words, etc.  It takes a lot of concentration, and even the hardest of core among us will get diminishing returns after going at it for too long at a time.  Things like motivation, variety, and caffeine (and other interesting substances – don’t do drugs kids!) will extend your ability to study for long periods of time, but there is always a limit.

Exposure, on the other hand, doesn’t involve focusing on the language, but instead on what’s being communicated.  Hanging out with Japanese-speaking friends, watching TV with or without subtitles, playing video games, reading a book (if you’re at that level – staring dumbly at the page doesn’t count as exposure) – you know, all those things you started learning Japanese in order to do.  You may not feel like you’re learning anything, especially when you don’t understand everything you see/hear/read, but you’re wrong.  You’re immersing yourself in the language, and letting it ooze into your mind bit by bit.

Ever hear the expression “a mind like a sieve”?  If you haven’t, it’s describing the feeling you get when you walk out of math class and can already feel the stuff you just learned leaking out.  Well, exposure is like that, but in reverse – you’re immersing your mind in a tub of language, and letting it freely leak in.  Volume is key here, and I’m not talking about turning it up really loud.

The benefits that you get from exposure, especially when you’re not understanding everything, can be hard to quantify.  One big benefit is that it lets your mind prioritize things, deciding which words or phrases come up more often in natural language, and building “hooks” in your memory for you to access them more easily later.  Days later you may study a new word and find that it “sticks” immediately, all because it came up like 25 times in that episode of Sailor Moon (don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you were watching it).  Another intangible benefit is building up your ability to pick out words and feel the rhythm of speech, which is difficult, if not impossible, to build while studying.  You may even pick up new vocabulary just from context, which is like learning a new word for free!

The best exposure is comprehensible, natural input – native speech or reading that you understand 90+% of – but depending on your level, this can be anywhere from difficult to impossible to come by.  Let me warn you that exposure to material you don’t totally understand yet, especially if it’s fun and/or interesting, is way way way better for your language abilities than spending hours and hours looking for stuff closer to your level.  Put simply, worry less, do more.  Volume is everything.

You might remember the first time you saw a Japanese newspaper (unless you thought it was Chinese, but that’s okay, go ahead and remember that instead, it doesn’t change my point).  It looked like a seething mass of arcane scribblings, right?  Kanji (the Japanese word for the characters used in both Japanese and Chinese) present the greatest barrier to Japanese literacy, and as such is the aspect of the language that learners tend to have the most difficulty with.  Apart from a few of the simplest ones, most kanji are near incomprehensible to the untrained eye, and many are similar enough to occasionally confuse even native Japanese.  In fact, the business of kanji training is biggest in Japan itself – even educated adults spend time on kanji books, video games, and TV shows much in the same way that English speakers might work on building their vocabulary.

RTK is one man’s attempt to turn those arcane scribblings into beautiful snowflakes that lend beauty and richness, rather than frustration, to the language.

The man is James Heisig, and the system is simple:

1. Start with the simplest characters and build up to more complex ones.
2. Assign a simple English keyword to each character to act as a memory anchor.
3. Determine the building blocks (“primitives” in Heisig’s terminology) comprising each character, and give each one a vivid image.
4. For each character, create an image or story linking the keyword to all of the primitives involved in the kanji and their positions.
5. When reviewing, reconstruct the character starting with the keyword, which reminds you of the story, which tells you the primitives and where to put them.

Those of you familiar with mnemonic devices may find nothing special about this system, unless you try to do all this by yourself.  Step 1, the ordering of the characters, is a monumental undertaking in itself.  Assigning the keywords so that no two characters are too similar is a logistical nightmare, and splitting up the primitives intelligently has its own special pitfalls.  In essence, Heisig has done for you everything that doesn’t contribute to your memory of the characters and their mnemonics – he has built the skeleton for you to gnaw the sweet, juicy kanji meat off of.  Vegetarians may prefer to think of some sort of tree/fruit metaphor instead.

Note that this book will not teach you everything about the characters you are learning.  You will learn two things for each character: how to write it, and one English keyword that gives a meaning for it.  You won’t even get the full meaning of each character, since many kanji have multiple possible English meanings.  This means that you should not expect to complete this book and be able to read anything immediately.  In fact, you might even say that after completing the book you haven’t really learned any Japanese yet.

That doesn’t mean that you haven’t learned anything though.  This is about the mechanics of how memory works.  When a learner attempts to learn kanji “cold”, there is nothing for them to connect to in his mind (like cold meat from the refrigerator – limp, lifeless, forgettable, and they all taste the same.  Vegetarians may be out of luck here).  You have an image, and maybe a word or two, but nothing to anchor them to.  As a result they tend to slip away quite easily, an experience that I’m sure many beginners can relate to.  The RTK system helps you to create an anchor point for each kanji, which you will later link to readings, compounds, and vocabulary.  You might say that it primes your mind to receive the language.

From my own personal experience, I can tell you that the greatest strength of RTK is that it changes kanji from intimidating to friendly.  Before RTK I used to dread reading kanji-heavy texts, since without knowing the readings or meanings it was just gibberish, forcing me to look up almost every word.  After completing RTK though, or even starting from about halfway through the book, I began to find that kanjified texts were actually easier to read than kana-only texts, since I was able to link most of the kanji to English keywords hinting at their meanings.  New vocabulary became easier to learn and remember since I was able to link it to the kanji already in my memory.

Perhaps most importantly, I stopped confusing similar looking kanji with each other.  This is something even Japanese natives struggle with sometimes, but having each character broken down and learned as primitives makes the problem almost trivial.  When have you ever been able to start with an advantage over native speakers?

The greatest weakness of RTK is the investment of time and committment it requires.  It takes a great deal of faith to spend roughly 2-4 months (for the average learner, though it can be done much faster if you have enough time on your hands) without actually learning any concrete, practical language.  This makes it a bit much for casual students to handle.  For anyone serious about attaining Japanese fluency, and especially literacy, though, I can assure you that the time invested in RTK will pay for itself over and over again.

If you’re still not sold, why not try out the system for yourself?  Mr. Heisig has made the first 1/3 of the book available for free.  Many public and university libraries also carry the book.  Once you’re ready to buy, the 5th edition (the most recent edition) is in print and available from Amazon.com.  Note that this post describes RTK books 1 and 3; book 2 attempts to treat the kanji readings systematically, but it doesn’t work nearly as well.

「ここは、『時の最果て』……。　時間の迷い子が、行き着く所だ。」

最果て　さいはて

最（もっと）もあと。最後（さいご）。
This is pretty dramatic phrasing – 果て is a word you hear a lot in poetry and music.  From the verb 果てる.  If you followed the definition, you have probably guessed that this is the phrase that made me choose this sentence!

迷い子　まよいご

親（おや）にはぐれたり、道（みち）に迷（まよ）ったりした子。まいご。
A synonym for the more common 迷子（まいご）, but one which is easy to read once you realize it’s just a compound of 迷（まよ）う　and 子（こ）

行き着く　いきつく

目的地（もくてきち）に着（つ）く。到着（とうちゃく）する。
Another compound, this time of 行（い）く and 着（つ）く.

Spaced repetition completely changed my world.  When I was lost on the streets of Tokyo, Spaced Repetition rescued me.  It gave me food when I was hungry, water when I was thirsty, and medicine when I was sick.  It helped me discover what could potentially be a new treatment for colon cancer.  It has saved hundreds, if not thousands of trees without a single protest march.  It has let me meet countless cute girls both in and out of bars.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit.  I have an exact count of how many girls it helped me meet.

What Is It?

Put simply, Spaced Repetition is a system for putting information into long-term memory as efficiently as possible.  It involves learning something, and then reviewing it, and then reviewing it again later, and then reviewing it again even later.

The trick is in the increasingly long intervals between the reviews, which reflects how information is stored and reinforced in your memory.  Ideally, the intervals should be calibrated so that you review an item just before you would have forgotten it, thus achieving maximum time efficiency with your reviews.

Simple right?  Simple but extremely powerful, and set up correctly you can be confident of never forgetting things that you learn this way.

Neato, But How Can I Apply It To Japanese?

If you’re like me, in the process of learning Japanese you have probably created flashcards at some point.  Maybe even a lot of flashcards, bags and boxes full.  If you’re tech savvy/environmentally conscious/living in a small apartment, you might be using a computerized flashcard program instead.  You also probably review those flashcards by taking a deck and reviewing it from top to bottom, discarding cards you get correct and reinserting those you miss back into the deck to be reviewed again.  After you’re done, you put the cards away and probably never look at them again (or at least not once you pass the exam, amirite?).  Flashcards are a great way to learn material, but reviewing them in the traditional way makes it impossible to use them to go back and cover old material – there are simply too many cards to manage.

Enter Sebastian Leitner.  This guy, when he wasn’t fighting the Nazi takeover of Austria or languishing in a Soviet prison cell, thought a lot about spaced repetition and flashcards.  He developed a system of boxes to put the flashcards in depending on how well he knew them.

Box 1 contains new or frequently forgotten cards, and later boxes contain progressively better-learned cards.  Box 1 is reviewed daily, Box 2 every 3 days, Box 3 every 5 days, etc.  When a card is reviewed successfully, it is “promoted” to the next box; on failure, it is demoted all the way back to Box 1.  The end result is a very substantial increase in memory retention, as well as a substantial reduction in number of flashcards, number of boxes, and number of mice living in nests made from old neglected boxes.

Sounds Awesome, Where Do I Sign Up?

Well, you could make your own set of Leitner boxes and start sorting your flashcards into them.  Or, you could take advantage of all the cool technological advances we as a society have enjoyed since the fall of Nazi Germany and have a computer program do it all for you!

I personally use Anki for all of my flashcard and spaced repetition needs.  Anki is free, current and actively maintained by a very talented developer, and through plugins has great features specific for Japanese learning.  There are also a growing number of pre-made Anki decks available on the internet for various Japanese learning resources.  Anki even allows you to synchronize your personal decks and review schedules to a centralized server, allowing you to catch up on your reviews from anywhere you can access the internet.

If for whatever reason Anki doesn’t float your boat, Mnemosyne is another good option I have used in the past.

There are many other options available, but one that I would urge caution on is SuperMemo.  SuperMemo predates most spaced repetition programs out there, and has a very broad feature set for studying many different kinds of material.  In my experience, however, it is difficult to learn to use, frequently buggy, and system resource heavy, not to mention the fact that it is commercial software.  What you gain in learning efficiency you may easily lose in simple usage efficiency.  As other (free) programs are quickly catching up (or may have already caught up) to SuperMemo’s algorithms and features, I see no reason to go through the long process of making it work and learning to use it properly.

English Title:  Chrono Trigger

Japanese Title: クロノトリガー

System: SNES a.k.a. スーパーファミコン

Genre: RPG

Gameplay Difficulty:  Relatively Easy.

Language Difficulty:  Intermediate.

Script:  Available

Ask any SNES fan what the very best games for the console were, and Chrono Trigger is likely to come out in the top 10, if not higher.  With excellent graphics for its time, a complex and engaging story, well-developed characters, and an solid battle system with some innovative features, it is difficult to find flaws in this game.  The SNES was a great system for RPGs, and yet Chrono Trigger stood out as one of the best.  In any case you can find detailed reviews of its gameplay all over the internet, but what about as a Japanese study tool?

First of all, it helps that it’s a fantastically fun game.  If you’ve never played it before, you’re going to want to keep playing, and that alone will supercharge your study.  Additionally, it really isn’t that hard.  There are relatively few battles in the game you’re likely to have too much trouble with, and most of the puzzles are pretty simplistic (though many of them are quite fun despite that).  Thus, most of the difficulty in the game will be just from the language, which is ideal.

Being an RPG, it of course has a lot of dialogue, which is great because dialogue is natural, everyday Japanese.  The problem in video games sometimes is what to do when you don’t understand what the dialogue is saying.  In Chrono Trigger’s case, there is very little text that will fly by without any confirmation – in other words, if there are words you need to look up, you can make that NPC wait around in mid-sentence while you go find your dictionary by just not pushing “A”.  Additionally, to make lookups even easier, there are scripts available for the game (I linked one above) which let you copy and paste any cutscene dialogue straight into the online dictionary of your choice.

While there are some complex topics that get discussed in Chrono Trigger, like time travel and paradoxes, the game seems to be aimed at a younger crowd, so they talk about this stuff in a very simple, down-to-earth way.  Sometimes they even have fun little cutscenes with mischievous imps running around illustrating just what they mean by “time paradox”.  There are patches of more difficult language, such as one scene where Chrono is on trial, but they are relatively uncommon.  Characters with accents do come up, but they not too thick and are generally penetrable with little difficulty.

Finally, kanji usage is at a pretty standard level.  Most common/常用 kanji are in use, but words using rare or unusual kanji are often written in kana instead.

I highly recommend Chrono Trigger if you’re into RPGs, and even if you’re not it’s worth giving it a try.

Aha!  An approach that works!  This is where most people focus their attention.  Why?  Because that’s what classes give you – an approach.  A very carefully thought-out, academic, “grammar and vocabulary” approach.  When you have trouble learning the language, the class must not be very good, right?  So you should find a different class, right?

Maybe.  If your goal is to get on your feet and communicating at a very basic level quickly, then finding a good class may be the right approach for you.  I would like to go on record, along with a growing number of learners worldwide, saying that if your goal is the kind of deep, fundamental understanding of Japanese that leads to fluency, a class is probably not the best approach.

So what’s missing from classes?

Motivation

Why do you want to learn Japanese?  For me it was threefold:

1. I wanted to be able to read books on Go that were unavailable in translation.
2. I wanted to be able to watch anime as the directors intended it to be seen, in the original language and with the original voice actors.
3. I wanted to be able to understand what the hell was going on in those wacky Japanese comedy shows.

Of course, it’s going to be different for everyone, but having a very clear idea of why you’re learning the language is the first step to motivating yourself.  Next, ask yourself how you can incorporate those things into your language study.  For example, get a book on Go, and start reading it.

“WHAT??  Those books are way too hard!  I can’t even read a single sentence!”  <==  This is you crying and moaning

Well, why not?  Chances are the main roadblock is not knowing the vocabulary.

Get a dictionary.

Seriously.

More specifically, if possible, get an electronic dictionary that allows you to draw in characters you don’t know.  They are widely available in Japan, and also from all sorts of online retailers.  I use a Sharp Papyrus PW-AT750, and there was a long period where I couldn’t go without it.  Battery outages were grounds for much despair and helpless gibbering.

“But it takes too long to look up every single word I don’t know!”

This is why reading books works so well.  When you’re learning from a textbook, the example passages are all on scattered and unrelated topics, so each one uses a whole new set of vocabulary.  When you’re reading a book focused on a narrow topic, the same vocabulary gets used over and over again, and you will quickly find that you’ve gone from 8 unknown words per sentence to a mere 2-3, and then less and less.  Furthermore, if you’re reading about a topic you know well, you’ll be able to infer the meaning of the sentence fairly easily from the context.  In my case, once I knew 伸び、アジ、当たり、けいま, etc (all Japanese words with special meanings in Go, and which I already understood in English Go terminology), between the text and the diagrams I was quickly able to figure out what was going on in each passage.

Now, I’m not saying you should start with the advanced material immediately.  If an equivalent book at that level would be difficult to understand in English, it will of course be exponentially harder to understand in Japanese.  How about starting with a beginner’s level book, something aimed at say, a Japanese middle-schooler?  Books at that level won’t be teaching you anything new about the subject matter, but they are great sources of basic, easy, and most importantly natural Japanese.

Try it.  Read about what you want to read about, what excites you, and you will find that your understanding, vocabulary retention, and stamina will increase in proportion with your motivation.

I’ve wandered off-topic quite a bit, and the rest of “How I Study” will have to come in a later post.  IN SUMMARY!  The best way to learn Japanese better, faster (harder, stronger) is to get excited about it, and the best way to do that is to study using something you’re already excited about.

Another great source of motivation is AJATT, a fantastic blog written by a very gifted (though he’ll never admit it) language learner.  Much of my success and inspiration I owe to Khatzumoto, and I highly recommend reading through some of his early blogs to see if his method clicks for you.  Actually, it’s going to be quite difficult to blog about my own study methods since they are, at this point, so heavily based on his recommendations…

I hope to make this a recurring post, giving a sentence from my study regimen and a detailed breakdown of it.

Today’s sentence comes from クロノトリガー (Chrono Trigger), pretty early on in the game as I’m just starting to play through it again in Japanese.  This particular quote comes from a soldier in Truce Village just after traveling to 600 AD for the first time, when Chrono is still trying to figure out where he is.  Notice that while there is one special term used primarily in fantasy novels and video games （魔王）, most of the terms and grammar are normal, everyday words.

Vocabulary definitions are in Japanese, and where possible come from チャレンジ小学国語辞典, which I highly recommend as a dictionary with very simply-worded J-J definitions.  Widely available in Japan, but you can order it from amazon.co.jp if you’re not over there.  Has furigana over every character!

Anyway, without further ado, today’s sentence:

「わが国は、いま平和をとりもどすため魔王軍と日夜戦っているのだ。」

我が　わが

わたしの。自分（じぶん）の。わたしたちの。
我が implies a level of pride in your ownership.

平和　へいわ

戦争（せんとう）などがなくて、世（よ）の中（なか）がよく治（おさ）まっていること。

取り戻す　とりもどす

もとの状態（じょうたい）に回復（かいふく）する。
A compound of 取（と）る　and 戻（もど）す.

魔王　まおう

悪魔（あくま）の王（おう）。
Wasn’t in my elementary school dictionary, so this definition was from the much more advanced 大辞林.  Luckily there was a simple definition available – essentially it means “lord of evil magic”.

軍　ぐん

兵士（へいし）の集（あつ）まり。

日夜　にちや

昼（ひる）も夜（よる）も。いつも。
I originally selected this sentence to nail down this kanji reading.

戦う　たたかう

武器（ぶき）を持（も）って争（あらそ）う。戦争（せんそう）をする。

I included all of the relevant definitions for your convenience, and as a kind of exercise for myself to make sure I really know each word, but for my own review flashcard I only include the following:

Front:

わが国は、いま平和をとりもどすため魔王軍と日夜戦っているのだ。

Back:

日夜　にちや　昼（ひる）も夜（よる）も。いつも。

わが 国[くに]は、いま 平和[へいわ]をとりもどすため 魔王[まおう] 軍[ぐん]と 日夜[にちや] 戦[たたか]っているのだ。

In other words, I have all the readings, and then the definition of the only word I’m likely to have trouble with.  I get the most mileage out of my flashcards when I include only one new fact per card, so I try to select sentences with that in mind.

Who Am I?

Me on top of Japan

My name is shaydwyrm, a name which has a long and illustrious history dating back to the day in elementary school when I thought I had come up with an awesome Battle.net screen name and then mangled the spelling because someone had already taken it.  As you might expect from that, chief among my hobbies is video gaming, followed by (in no particular order) Go, Ultimate, Guitar, Anime, and of course Japanese language.

I am a recent MIT graduate, where I did my humanities concentration in Japanese language.  This involved taking two years of language classes, which took me three years to finish on account of not being able to wake up in time for half of them.  Still, repeating a year of classes really made sure I had nailed down the fundamentals, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.

It wasn’t until after I graduated though that my Japanese really took off.  Through a university program I found a one year internship at Merck‘s Tsukuba Research Institute (now closing, sadly ), and spent the summer in intense study-mode preparing to ship off to the island.  Sadly, despite the college classes and my extra study, on arrival I found my Japanese to be pretty woeful.  I needn’t have worried overly much though – communication was rough at times, but by the end of the year I could talk my way through pretty much any situation, and on select topics of personal interest (Go, Food, Sake) I could sound pretty fluent.

Last August I returned to the US and plunged headfirst into the failing economy.  Due to a number of different factors I was unable to find work for a while, so I did what any self-respecting out-of-work video game junkie would do – I reopened my World of Warcraft account.

Fast forward almost a year hovering around zero productivity, and I’ve finally gotten back on the wagon.  Suddenly swimming in free time and slightly twitchy from missing my daily raiding fix, I’ve started reopening all my dusty Japanese resources and flexing my atrophied language skills.

This blog, should I prove able to continue updating it, will follow my attempts to polish my skills at reading and understanding Japanese in all contexts.  I am happy to accept any questions or comments on any post, and if I can’t help you out I will do my best to direct you to someone who can!