Keep Your Guitar Plugged In
I was trolling some sites dealing with getting better at guitar today, looking for tips on how to develop my practice routine, when I ran across this interesting tip. In a nutshell, the recommendation is to leave your guitar equipment set up in your practice space, lowering the “activation energy” to getting started as much as possible. If you keep your equipment packed up and put away, the mere effort of unpacking and setting up may be enough to crush your motivation to practice. After all, it’s not every day that you have a powerful drive to practice – more commonly, you simply remember that you’re “supposed” to practice, and it’s only after playing for a little while that you get back into the groove. The faster and more easily you can do that, the more likely you are to have a productive session each day.
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!
Study Plan
Having come back to studying Japanese for a good two weeks now, I feel like I’m in a decent position to look at my strengths and weaknesses and figure out a plan of study.
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.
Studying is Hard Work
…but exposure isn’t, and you need a very healthy amount of both to get good at a language.
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.
Remembering the Kanji
The number of textbooks that have made a big difference in my study of Japanese is pretty small – the bulk of my learning has come from natural language materials. There are a couple, though, that I have read from back to front, side to side, and backwards, and send Christmas presents to the authors of. Remembering the Kanji, RTK for short, is one of those textbooks.
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:
- Start with the simplest characters and build up to more complex ones.
- Assign a simple English keyword to each character to act as a memory anchor.
- Determine the building blocks (“primitives” in Heisig’s terminology) comprising each character, and give each one a vivid image.
- For each character, create an image or story linking the keyword to all of the primitives involved in the kanji and their positions.
- 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.
I intend to devote a separate post to describing it in detail, but for now, Reviewing the Kanji is an excellent resource for those already on the RTK path of glory. It’s a website that allows you to share your kanji stories with other RTKers, and look at other users’ stories when you get stuck. It also allows you to review the characters from keyword to kanji with its online, SRS-enabled flashcard system. I pretty much consider it a necessary companion to the book.
