A Japanese Forum, my tutor, JFBP and Pimsleur

I sort of miss working on Heisig, so I went surfing for reviews, to bask in my success a bit. This time I decided to do a google search, and I came across an amazing thread in a forum dedicated to learning Japanese. Last month I had no idea language learning forums existed, now I'm totally addicted. I can ask anything I want, and in a matter of hours a bunch of experts will give me my answer. This will revolutionize the way I study.

I started lessons with my tutor. Very difficult. It seems that I don't know enough of anything to converse with her. I can only get about 3 hrs per week too. This will be a challenge. But she is very dedicated, and I won't give up. Just like with Thai, there are too many new words to make a dent in them, so I'm just taking down a few and memorizing what I can. There has been some improvement, but I'm still struggling. And unlike Thai, grammar is a major problem. It made me finish JFBP quickly, but I'm still lacking a lot.

Finishing JFBP was a hard effort. Except for pronunciation, nothing is easy about this language. And about the time I finished it, according to the guys on the forum, I came to find out that it's not a very good book. It's poorly organized, doesn't go into enough detail on the stuff it covers, and doesn't cover very much. In addition, the vocabulary is more business oriented than general learning, so some of is isn't frequently used. Very disheartening. I learned about another book, which is supposed to be the best single text for the English speaking self learner. It's called Japanese for Everyone (JFE).

I'm pleased to say I finished Pimsleur 2. I'm working on Pimsleur 3, which is the last one. It's getting easier, and I can usually finish a lesson in 2 tries now. Without Pimsleur, my tutor work would be a total waste of time.

Finished RTK1

It's perhaps the hardest single intellectual effort I've made in my life, but I prevailed, and finished RTK1. I read dozens, maybe even hundreds, of reviews of this book. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, but there were surprisingly few reviewers who actually finished the book. I get the feeling it's pretty rare, and now I can count myself amongst their ranks. I'm very pleased with myself!

The last couple months of RTK1 have been really hard. Adding 20 cards per day isn't too bad, but reviewing all the other cards has been really time consuming. I estimated that, by the end, I was spending 3 hrs per day on Heisig alone. That's the reason I stopped everything else, except for Pimsleur. 

Now I need to go back to my old program, but add something to fill in the huge void left by RTK1. I'm going to add a tutor. I only have about 1000 words of vocabulary, and I haven't tried to talk to anyone since I left Boeing in March. But this was the way I finally made my "breakthrough" in Thai. I had a tutor, with the instructions not to correct me unless she couldn't understand me. Every time she used a word I didn't know, I'd write it down, and memorize it before the next lesson. I was taking 5 one hour lessons per week.

The theory behind this was sound IMO. No corrections would ensure that there would be as few interruptions as possible, and I could get comfortable in the language quickly. Research has shown learners, as long as they are learning, and getting lots of correct comprehensible input, will correct themselves just as effectively as being beat up by a strict teacher. So no-corrections is a no-lose situation. With Thai, this seemed to be true for me.

The other issue, vocabulary learning, didn't work as well. There are so many new words at first. I have no idea how to deal with so many, or if it's even possible to learn so many so fast. So I ended up taking down only some of them, learning a portion of those, and being several days late on the remainders.

But the Thai tutor experience was very successful overall. I went from being a total mess of a beginner to being a solid intermediate in conversation in our 2 months together. I think it worked better than any other beginner program would work, short of living in Thailand.

So my new program will be

1) Tutor

2) Pimsleur

3) Vocabulary

4) JFBP

Finished Pimsleur Volume 1

It was hard at times, but I finished with Pimsleur 1. Now I'm working on volume 2. The first Pimsleur lesson I did took 7 tries to advance. The next was 5, and it wasn't getting any better. So I did something the program recommended against - I made a word list, and drilled it when I wasn't doing lessons. That improved my performance to a maximum of 3 tries to pass a lesson.

This is perhaps my greatest weakness in learning languages. I learn words passively, meaning in context, without drilling, slower than anyone else I know. I'm a visual learner, meaning seeing the word written down helps a great deal, but it goes beyond that. Amongst a group of 50 Peace Corps volunteers in Tanzania, I was acquiring passive vocabulary slower than almost anyone else (3rd from the bottom). A week before the final test, I started using lists, and I finished 7th from the top. 

There is another reason why Japanese vocabulary is so hard for me. I need to learn using their simplified script, kana. The romanized script, romaji, has bee strictly forbidden to learners these days because it hard-wires in romanized text rather than Japanese, and obstructs the learning process. So I've been using only kana for my word lists. This is really hard. I've just barely learned the script, and I'm having to use it to learn a lot of new vocabulary. This all but wipes out the advantage of being able to see the written word.

So I got desperate, did some research, and decided to use a mnemonic method that I tried out while learning Swahili and Thai. The linkword method has been around a while (I'm not suggesting anyone buy the product in the link; it just details out the method really well). I thought I sort of invented that method, so was surprised that lots of other people use it, along with many other techniques. I've used a lot of other simple mnemonic techniques like this for vocabulary, but this one works the best for me.

At first, using the method was really slow. But after some practice, I think its about as fast as having the word in roman script. This is great news, since I learn about 80% of my vocabulary this way. It was about 30% with Thai, and 10% with Swahili. Using linkword to this degree is really new to me.

Back on track after Vacation

After quitting my job, I took a trip to Belize, and then to Thailand. I just started a job, with a group I used to be in, in Texas. I kept doing my Heisig flashcards and Pimsleur lessons which I had in my mp3 player during my vacation. 

Now that I'm somewhat stable again, this is my program:

1) Heisig - 20 characters per day.

2) Pimsleur - 1 lesson per day. It usually takes 3 days to master one well enough to move on.

3) Vocabulary - I've copied all my vocabulary neatly into one notebook. I review the notebook daily, but it's getting too long to get through in one sitting, so I do a part of it.

4) JFBP - 1 chapter per week. This is hard, especially since it's all kana. And it's the first of 3 books. Man, Japanese has a lot of grammar.

I'm averaging over 20 hrs per week. I really underestimated this language. I still have my hopes of finishing my studies by the end of the year, but I'll see how it goes.

I quit my Job, and started Heisig

Well, I reached a breaking point at work, and decided to quit. Now it seems like all the motivation for learning Japanese has been removed (no more Japanese coworkers), but I'm going to continue. There are 2 reasons for this.

One, I've spent over 200 hours on Japanese so far, and I hate to see that go to waste. I reached a comfortable in Thai after about 300 hours, and 2 trips to Thailand. Japanese might take a little longer, but that 200 hour down payment is a great start.

Two, I think I've solved the kanji puzzle. I've found a great method surfing Amazon the other day. Remembering the Kanji I by James Heisig (RTK1) is a book that teaches the meanings and how to draw all the Joyo (basic 2000 or so) kanji. It doesn't teach the readings at this point - that's done in book 2. But his philosophy of "divide and conquer" seems to be just what I need, after proving to myself trying to do everything at once is impossible. Here is a free pdf of the first 113 pages that describes the method.

It's harder than I thought...

I had a lot of fun in that class. There were about 20 students, but only 2 serious enough to do homework (me and a Chinese girl). The class alone wasn't nearly enough, so I started studying more by myself even before class ended. 

I started  Pimsleur, which is an absolutely excellent language learning program on CDs. It focuses on pronunciation and conversation only, which will give me a solid base in the language. It took me about 1 month to learn the kana on my own, which I'm pretty proud of. I got a book for studying kanji, but it seems impossible. Even the Japanese guys at work told me they didn't know how I could learn the kanji. I've been using repetition.

I bought the kana version of my classes text book: Japanese for Busy People (JFBP). It's hard. It seems much harder than my thai book. But I'm having a hard time getting motivated, since I can't see how I'll ever figure out kanji. Maybe I'll quit.

It started at Boeing

(Note - much of this language log was written after the fact)

I've been working on the same row as a group from Mitsubishi for about 4 months. I'm tired of studying Thai, so why not learn this language that I can use right now? I think if I work hard, I can learn it in 1 year. I enrolled in a 6 week, 16 hour free Japanese class at Boeing.