Sentence of the Day 6/30/09
Another sentence from クロノトリガー (Chrono Trigger). This one comes from a particularly dramatic (read awesome) moment in the story, though the sentence pretty much explains itself. I didn’t include definitions for very basic vocabulary; if you have trouble with those words you may find Rikaichan helpful.
「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
This is probably the most important piece of information that I can impart to you.
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.
クロノトリガー Review
Video games are one of my favorite ways to study Japanese, but being a poor unemployed musician (okay I’m really not a very good guitarist but “musician” sounds better than “bum”) I a) can’t afford to buy new games, and b) can’t afford to buy a computer/console/handheld that can run them anyway. Luckily, classic gaming is what all the cool kids are doing these days anyway. Console emulation is your best friend when it comes to playing classic Japanese games – consoles up to the PSX can be reliably emulated on even a crappy system like mine. I prefer SNES, mainly for performance reasons. Today I’m going to talk about one of my favorite games, in either Japanese or English, from a Japanese learning perspective, Chrono Trigger.
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.
How I Study
Learning Japanese is not incredibly difficult. After all, everyone in Japan has done it, right? Almost every person in the entire country knows the language, and they learned it before they even went to school. What that means is that learning Japanese takes no special intelligence or aptitude. What it does take is motivation, persistence, and time. If you have these three, along with an approach that works for you, I guarantee that you can learn any language you choose.
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:
- I wanted to be able to read books on Go that were unavailable in translation.
- 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.
- 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…
勉強中 