Effective Timeboxing: The Power of Randomization

Learning Japanese has taught me about many other things on the side, and one of those things is timeboxing. Really all it means is giving yourself a certain time limit for a certain task. The idea behind it is that is gives you focus and a push to get into action by containing it in a certain timeframe. In other words…

• You know the beginning and end of the time spent on this task.
• You know it won’t take too long or end up going nowhere because you’ve limited yourself on how much time you can spend on it.

Quite literal…

This technique works in a few different directions. Your timer might end when you’re really at the height of whatever you’re doing (playing a game, reviews, etc.) Great, stop now because you’ll be that much more excited to keep at it next time. Other times your timer ends when you’ve really been getting nowhere with a task. Great, stop now because you’ve used enough time on it already. It’s also good for when you have trouble starting on a task because you don’t know where to even begin. No matter, just hit start on that timer and sink your mind into it. You could be surprised that just by taking that leap, you’ll end up making progress.

I usually follow the TV episode theory when setting the duration of a timebox. Most programs are aired anywhere from 30-60 minutes, actual showtime being 22-42 minutes roughly. You can really keep up some variety in your Japanese activities with timeboxing. Just think as the next box as changing the channel when the next program is up. You could go from doing a few Anki reps, then to a TV show, then to some kanji review, then to a video game. Seeing Japanese in different contexts is very useful, so timeboxing makes it even easier to go back and forth.

But what do you do when you can’t decide? This is often why I would end junking out on the computer doing nothing in particular, which made me feel like I wasted my time. There is solution here too.  You can leave it to chance. What better tool to randomize your choices than the almighty dice. Just about everyone is familiar with the D6–the cubical, 6-sided wonder common in board games. But there are actually many other dice such as D4s, D8s, D12s, and the D20s, which are all practically synonymous with traditional role playing games.

Rrrrrrrrrroooooollllllllllll the dice, rollllll it now!

So how can you use a dice roll to decide what to do next? Simply have a look at your favorite Japanese activities, figure out how many there are, and choose and appropriate dice. I happen to have a small collection (as well as fascination with) different types of dice, but I actually just use an Android app called D20 by Ambergleam to generate rolls. Despite the name it actually has a variety of dice options.

Here is an example with a D6 (regular six-sided dice) with some activities that I personally do.

1. Watch a drama or anime
2. Do SRS reps in Anki or level up in Reading The Kanji
3. Read a snippet from a website with the help of LWT
4. Play a video game
5. Read a manga
6. Allow myself some “About Japanese” time (ex: blogs, grammar guide) This one is especially important to limit, unless you’re reading this blog, then you can just go wild!

So looking at this this example f I rolled a 4, I’ll be playing video games for an hour or so!

Setting time limits really is a means of focus. By saying “I’ll limit myself to one hour for playing a video game in Japanese, what you’re really saying is “For one hour, I’ll only be playing video games in Japanese and not getting distracted by other things that I can look at later.” To use your time effectively it’s important to know/define exactly what you’re doing before hitting start on your timebox. Again, the computer can especially be a time sucking vampire if you just press go on your timer and don’t really know what you’re going on there for. Personally, learning Japanese has truly become a life goal for me, so I feel all the more fulfilled when I know I’ve made good use of my free time to progress towards this dream.

Media Recommendation of the Week: JapanFM

JapanFM is a streaming radio station from the French network Hotmix Radio. All you have to do is watch an ad once every couple of days, and non-stop Japanese music streaming from your browser is yours! They have a lot of variety from pop to rock, even songs you’ll recognize from your favorite dramas or animes. I’ve actually found a lot of new bands this way. Sometimes music can be less distracting than videos when you’re trying to multitask, and it often gets me pumped in the morning, Japanese-style! Happy listening!

 

What to do after neglecting your studies! Panda’s step back into Japanese

Quick little insert about why it’s good to learn a foreign language, apparently (if you’re a native English speaker and you’re flexible with causality.)

“The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer
heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer
heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer
heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer
heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats
and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

CONCLUSION:
Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.”

Had to share that nugget of wit before starting on topic!

Mikoto’s gently nudging me to get back into my studying by making me write this for our audience. . I started in Japanese a very long time ago and I go into  sprints and then quit for a short while. This is how I tend to be with ALL things, however. I don’t get a toe wet, I get my entire house wet and then some when jumping into new and exciting things. After so long, I get a little burnt out and quit. I do this with games, cleaning hardcore, excerising  and so on. If you’re like me and like to sprint, or am getting burnt out on Japanese learning, please follow along for some tips.

Say you’re completely stopped at your Japanese. You’re not even passively immersing!

1)Start slowly and try to put Japanese back into your life. Even if for the first month back into your studies, you do nothing but passively immerse (listening to things in the background without really shadowing or trying to understand it. Sometimes I call watching shows with subtitles passive. I know a lot of learners out there would have my head for suggesting such a thing but hey.. That’s still more japanese in your life than you had the day before.)

2) If you’re on the Kanji stage-

• Get caught back up to where you were when you quit. What I mean is, for example in Anki, it’ll tell you how many you have due. I’m not saying review all 500 you have, just review what’s due. Anki will take care of the other 400~ (depending on how long you quit and what number you’re on of course)
• Get caught up by doing 3 minute sections every day. You can do more, but you want to at least do kanji once a day. I’m saying go slow to prevent you from being burnt out. If you’re like me, and love sprinting through review, Sprint away. Just make sure you’re taking breaks, at least an hour, between sessions.

Run, Kanji, Run!あああああああああ

• Once you’ve gotten caught back up, THEN add more. Go however you did in the past, 0-15 cards a day.
• Be sure to do something fun with the kanji you know. We have kanji games on site, but there’s a ton of things you can do. I like to add pictures to my anki using google! It’s sometimes really fun to see what can visually represent kanji.

3) If you’re in the  Kana stage

• This really depends on how well you knew your kana before. If you were like me and quit after you got to __ it probably wouldn’t hurt to just act like you didn’t learn anything at all (which my retention was practically null, so that worked well for me). I started over with my hiragana and used a mix of Real Kana and Read the Kanji to review.　Plus a　little forced reading with Japanese Baby 1 and mikoto.
• I had to personally drill the kana into my head. The trick is to do it in short bursts. We’re not a long distance runner, we’re Japanese Sprinter Babies! Sprinting means we get to do fun stuff like watch Japanese movies, animes, Iron chef (which the original is a GREAT FUN way to learn some crazy Japanese dishes)
• As a fellow Japanese baby suggested, the trick is once you get a good grasp kana, put it into practice! Read children books, convert websites into kana, listen/read lyrics. You want this to be FUN!!!! This will keep you coming back for more.

4) Shadowing- We all know that I don’t really like shadowing. If you didn’t know that, you know now! I say this because I feel I sound utterly stupid. So, what I try to do to make light of the situation is to mimic the tones and gender of those speaking. It may just make my gibberish sound more feminine or masculine, but it’s fun. Also, if you want to make yourself feel better, record yourself shadowing your native language and listen to it. You’ll notice you stumble over a lot of it and some of it, your mind guesses and may be close. This is because our brain is hardwired in this language and can think faster than your mouth moves. For example:

• “Oh thank _______”
• Your brain will most likely put one of three words in there, God (if you have a habit of saying that), You, (if you’re polite), My stars! (If you’re just.. unique)

I do this all the time singing. Especially if I don’t know the words, our brain makes a conscious decision to try to ‘fix’ and finish the sentence. You may have a rhyming word, a word that could finish the sentence, or the correct word.You’re probably saying, ok Panda, who cares. My point is: Once you reach a certain point of Japanese, your brain will switch into Japanese and try to be 3 steps ahead of the speaker. So, keep with it young one!

5) After a ～month of getting your feet wet back into Japanese, try to get back into a routine that matches how much free time you have. If you can only devote 5 minutes a day, well damn, that’s 5 minutes more than a non learner is learning! I’d like to quote my Professor from my freshmen year (note, this applies to more then just engineering of course).

• You’re doing Engineering. Do you realize how hard that is? Do you realize you’re actually doing it! It may take you 2 years to finish this degree, it may take you 14. You may be fresh out of high school, you may be 80. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how long or how old. You’re doing it, and once you finish, no one can take it from you.

Another professor during my sophomore year

• (Panda), despite your disability, you can do this. It doesn’t matter the road you take, as long as you work hard and you’re honest with yourself. You are doing this, remember that.

My Advisor during my junior year

• I  have a lot of 40 year old’s who come in and say that the road is tough and long but no one can take it way from them. It’s pride that you knocked something out of the park. It may have taken you 50 swings to finally get it over that fence, but it’s now way beyond the boundaries.

Hopefully you have someone spouting off wonderful, delicious support to you! If not, you need new friends (jk!!!) You have to remember, every day is more than the day before. Build on it and succeed.

KEEPING on track

• ok, So, we’re back into Japanese Happy Land, yey. Let’s celebrate with fun games and knowledge! Ok! We can only party straight for 12 hours for so long!　Be sure to balance your life with Japanese fun. Don’t go too hardcore unless you’re living in Japan of course, haha (you can handle hardcore all the time!). Listen all the time, however, because passive learning takes no effort and can help sink sounds into your brain.
• For things that need active learning, (shadowing, kana/kanji reps) set reasonable time constraints. You work, go to school, have babies? Devote a % to nothing but Japanese. You can do this all at once for the day, or break it up into small portions through the day. Just be sure to say, for the next __minutes, I WILL do nothing but Japanese! You can timebox for the entire day, if you know the exact times you’re taking care of classes and work, or when the baby naps. Make Japanese be your b**** to your schedule, not the other way around. You decide! You Conquer! You learn Japanese! Find that balance that your schedule will allow, that you want, and without getting burnt out.
• Force Japanese to be in your life. Have your phone/browser/computer/whatever be in Japanese. Anything you can turn into Japanese, keep it in Japanese. This will force you to ALWAYS be touching Japanese in some form. Only have Japanese music on your mp3 player.
• Set real and concise goals. Don’t say I want to improve my immersion. Say I want to listen to a minimum of 1 hour a day of Japanese!
• Write a blog or connect to other learns. Share what you find that works for you and what works for others. Share the wealth of knowledge.
• Celebrate the little things! You just learned your kana? Treat yourself to a Japanese children book and Sushi. At least, that’s how I like to treat myself. Food goes a lot way for me. I’m like Pavlov’s Dog, books and food make my mouth water!
• Keep it fun!

 

LWT: Learning With Text Introduction

One of the programs that I’ve recently started to delve into is called LWT which is short for Learning with Text. LWT is a great open source project created by a really cool guy in 2010. He published his LWT in 2011 as a free, open source project open to the public domain.

So what exactly is Learning with Text do for you? Its basically a supplemental reading program, that helps you dissect what you’re reading, look words up in dictionaries, save meanings and notes on words or phrases in a language you’re trying to learn. As you learn words you have a color ranking system based on how familiar the word is to you, even add audio and a versatile ability to export cards to an srs, such as anki. All of this is done inside the program and can help eliminate constant screen flipping, copying and pasting, and otherwise wasting time with juggling things when you can simply keep it self contained.

The Home Page for F3M LWT

You have a few options in getting the program on your computer. For those who do not know about programming, then I recommend the web version hosted by Benny from Fluent in 3 Months. It really is the easiest to get set up with, and will be the specific version that I’m going to post pictures from. For those who do know programming, I recommend you check out the LWT picture up there, just click on it for the link, and you can find all sorts of information on how to get it setup for yourself on LWT’s main site. Plus there is some good information, links, and guides there as well (which I’ll be linking too at the end as well). There are a few more out there, and even a few acquaintances I know are thinking about hosting more Japanese friendly versions, however, Benny’s setup is already up and running and otherwise secure. It’s also absolutely free. Thanks Benny!

Screen Shot of Reading/Editing View

A lot of people do like to compare LWT to LingQ and in many ways they are similar. LingQ may have a fancier interface, however they charge you for it. I for one am all about the free and will not be reviewing LingQ.

The following are some YouTube videos that give you a nice picture of its overall features, including one from Benny himself.

If you’re unfamiliar with The Czech Experiment, I recommend you give it a good read. He’s also a language learner who covers lots of good information out there and shares his experiences of learning Czech.

So what are people saying about LWT?

Our buddy Daniel had lots to say as he’s been delving into the program intensely in the last month.

Pros

• The biggest pro is that you absolutely have to use this software. It’s so convenient, so essential, so awesome. Being able to use absolutely any text you want to learn makes the process more fun and more relevant to your interests.
• Everything is integrated into one window, the text, the dictionary, and the card creator. This completely takes away the annoyance of window switching. Super effective!!
• This is an extremely customizable tool, especially when it comes to which dictionaries you want to use (yes you can use more than one!)
• Once you go through the text, you can read it without the help of a dictionary or furigana since it’s all inline. This helps make reading a much more fluid experience, and a great confidence booster too.
• This self-contained text factor is especially useful on a device like a Kindle, or if you’re printing out your LWT texts.
• The real icing on the cake is that you can export all your findings to Anki, a tool already well known in the Japanese learning community.  The terms, translations, readings, and the sentence you found it in are all included, keeping everything in context.

Cons

• Setup can be daunting, even for the technically minded! I would highly recommend using a hosted server, such as this one (http://fi3m.com/lwt), since everything is already set up and working. It is a server based tool, so it only makes sense to use it that way rather than just running locally on your computer.
• There are some particular challenges for Japanese, a language that does not typically use spaces between words. There are various solutions, but personally I leave it at the default setting (remove spaces and treat each word as a character) and then use the feature where I can tell the site where the word begins and ends myself.

KanjiWarrior shared a few of his thoughts on Twitter with me as well.

I like LWT, but one of the drawbacks to me is lack of built-in dictionaries, and lack of support for Asian languages.Also the time associated with preparing a text before you can read it and having to input the definitions.I have a lot more to say about LWT but hard to confine it to 140 characters. I guess I’ll have to blog about it again soon.

Lan (Landorien) also shared some of his experiences with actually trying to set up LWT on his computer.

• installation looks intimidating but is pretty straightforward

• i installed it on my web host and got it working without trouble

• testing is somewhat coarse-grained compared to anki. i haven’t used it much, preferring to export terms to anki

• exporting is easy and creates a useful deck. you’ll probably have to rearrange the card layout to suit your preferences

• default styles make it hard to read especially for Japanese. i have a style sheet on my blog that replaces the text area font with a more readable font and changes the background to a tan colour which makes it a lot easier on the eyes for extended reading.

• editing text while reading is annoying. you get taken to a separate edit view, where you have to scroll down to the spot you wanted to edit, and then when you go back to reading you have to find your spot again. an inline edit would be very helpful

• i had been using mecab to parse the text, setting LWT to remove spaces but not to make each character a separate word. this however required me to edit the text wherever mecab combined two words that should have been split, which especially with names happens fairly regularly. i’ve changed over to setting LWT to make each character a separate word and adding all terms as spanning however many characters are needed. the downside of this is you don’t get an accurate count of known words, but that’s minor

• overall despite some quirks LWT is easy to use and probably the fastest way i’ve found to go through a text, completely understand it, and collect all the words for your SRS

While I agree with some of the issues, pros, and cons, that my fellow users feel, I personally find that there is a lot of pros to the cons. Because I used the already set up site, I did not have to fuss with many settings, and getting started was pretty quick. I will admit though if you’re already well into the reading of Japanese (or any language of that matter), you will be doing a lot of prep work. That is perhaps its only absolutely largest downfall.

Various Settings you can change

In our next blog we’ll go over getting set up and how to use the program, then tips, tricks, and resources to use for LWT. So stick around to get your hands wet! Like/hate this program? Let us know in the comments below what you think about LWT!

 

Deck Styles

Since I first found out about SRS programs, I’ve found that styles can change a lot depending on how you learn, and for the content that you’re learning. What may be good for Bob might not be good for me and so on, however today, due to many requests, I’ll let you see all the various types and styles I’ve tried out that were beneficial, and ones I’m currently using.

I learn really well with visuals and sounds over words. They’re a lot slower to make, but I’m rewarded by a more enjoyable experience. So for starters I’ll show you my cards for Visuals.

Visual Card Layouts

I really only have two, here goes! The first style asks a question about the image (all in Japanese). Never ask a question that isn’t obvious to a middle schooler. You shouldn’t be asking something so difficult, or something obscure in the picture that isn’t pointed out. Arrows, outlining, and coloring should be indicators. Of course it goes without saying, that if your Japanese is more basic, you might need to get help, or simply stick to super easy questions.

As you can see the question about what’s in the picture is obvious. If you have different focal points, you can always use the different indicators like, over there (near question asker), over there (away from asker), or whatever. There is limitless possibilities.

If you noticed in the answer section I have lots of answers. I don’t have to answer those all, rather, if I answer with any of those, its correct. Yeah, that even means if I don’t wanna write the kanji out, I don’t, and I still win.

How I use the card is simple. When presented the question, I verbally say the answer, write it out, hit show answer. If I got it all right, then good, if I messed up any, I hit the 0 (I use anki) I’m strict like that simply because of the variety of correct answers. I could even say, pink and white kittens, or say fluffy well drawn cats, or a drawing of cats, ect, depending on the level of your Japanese. Don’t be afraid to mix it up.

The second style is just a tad bit different and usually is hand in hand with some close deletion. Basically the image is what gets inserted into the missing part of the sentence. So here, there usually is only a few right answers. Same as the other card too, you only want to use images that make sense. Confusing and uncertain cards will only create more issues for you in the end. Just think about a year from now, if you hadn’t seen the card since then, you don’t want to stretch your brain just training to remember which part of the image you’re suppose to be paying attention too.

Often you can use the same image a few times to create some variety. Often you can use the same picture of say a map, and just use the different parts (which saves a lot of time versus making a new map image for each area). Answering this card is like answering any other type of card for me. I simply verbally say and write out the answer.

Do not, and I mean do not use boring images. Use visually appealing images, raunchy images, you name it. Don’t choose some normal girl to describe, use a hottie! Or, use someone so ugly it makes you laugh. (i know cruel right? but hey, you’ll remember how to describe them a lot easier this way than choosing normal looking people).

So that’s the styles I use for my cards. I showed you two really nice looking cards, but a lot of mine have images like this…yeah, I don’t even spend that much time on it, just little doodles really and so long as its to the point and obvious, it works. Don’t worry about being an artist. But I like to do a lot of image searches in google in Japanese, and I always get pertinent images to what I’m trying to make a card for. I’ve had these styles for a while, and they’ve never let me down. It also helps get rid of English from the process of thought.

Both of these styles are not meant to be reversed.

Audio Card Layouts

Since showing an audio card doesn’t really work, I’ll use good old fashion font to show you. I have a few styles of audio cards that I actively use.

Basic Transcribing:

Front: *sound, lets say its a Japanese woman going ‘あ’*

Back: あ

This one is simple, hear something, transcribe it, and I usually repeat the audio. I have simple audio to complex, but generally never really long, since I write it out by hand. These sound cards can be reversed.

Open Ended Questions:

Front: 何時ですか？/ *sound file of question*

Back: *The current time*

These types of cards leave a lot of correct answers. Of course, answering in English is…/cough acceptable /cough, but really you should be answering in Japanese instead. Cards like these really help to solidify dates, days, hours, money, counters, description of events/items and so forth. I’ve personally taken out the text because I want to build my ability to hear and respond, since its a harder skill to develop.

The fun things about these is you can ask yourself, what’s your favorite movie, what movie did you see in the last week, describe a show you watched recently, What movie are you looking forward to seeing and why? and so forth. I try to make the cards set up to where I have to think on my feet about something new every time. I also do not grade these cards normally. I grade them on my ability to speak, sure, but I never hit failed button, and I usually never hit the perfect ability. I always answer it with 1 or 2.

I also look up stuff when I look at these cards. I do not feel that is cheating. These decks are held separate from my other ones because the nature usually messes up the whole ‘timing’ to answer things and well I like having statistics. Sure these cards are different and most wont be able to do them, however I feel that it is an awesome set up that really gets you use to answering questions directed to you. If you want to have friends, you have to be able to talk about the things going on around you and how you feel about them. That’s 101, so these cards can help do that, get you there, so you don’t freeze up when someone asks you how you like a show.

Of course, these cards are not meant to be reversed.

Music:

Front: lyrics

Back: *clip of music*

This is similar to style one, except that its to make your singing better. This style was easy to use, and I used it for a long time, but I kinda got tired of it as the clips were small, songs would get jumbled and ultimately I could sing songs around my yard and back easily. It can be reversed. I never used English, and I usually did practice with the song extensively before turning it into cards. Cards were more for review than for learning.

Text Style Layouts

Simple Clozed Deletion:

Front: べっど、きれいに直して。make the bed

Back: べっど、きれいに直「なお」して。

ーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー

Front: べっど、きれいに＃＃＃＃。make the bed

Back: べっど、きれいに直「なお」して。

ーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー

Front: べっど、＃＃＃に直して。make the bed

Back: べっど、きれいに直「なお」して。

ーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー

Front: ＃＃＃、きれいに直して。make the bed

Back: べっど、きれいに直「なお」して。

I use a plugin for anki that automatically makes a field on the back of the card that shows the furigana over the kanji. So I save a lot of time not having to worry about that. Since for me, I only make cards that has 1 new concept, I generally never use dictionary definitions since the sentences help me figure it out instead. As you can see for this one sentence I use 4 versions for the simple clozed deletion. I never cloze delete what isn’t obvious.

When reviewing the card I say the sentence, then write out the missing part, sometimes I even write the sentence out. Then I grade it like the normal anki way. I personally find this to be awesome for small sentences. Its my new choice for single sentence absorption. I don’t try to memorize anything, but rather use logic of my knowledge of words and grammar to create these cards. Sound can be used too, even images, you can combine to make a lot of variations of this.

MCDs:

There are already so many examples all over the web now that I don’t think Khatz will mind (if you do let me know plz and I will remove it). I’ve not gotten into the Massive part of it yet, since I still do 1-2 sentences, but I have found as I’m learning more and more that sometimes its harder to get a word to make sense in the context of one sentence, and here is where the Massive comes in handy.I’m going to show you what I do with a fake example, yeah I’m naughty like that, but I don’t know your level of Japanese, so easy it is, 猫！Wiki is a great place to get a lot of words, and reading practice, but you can use any source from anywhere! News articles are also really great as they tend to describe the subject/word multiple times.

Front: 青い眼は白＃＃＃＃＃とシャム系のネコ（ポイントのあるネコ）に多く、白＃＃＃＃の場合は高い割合で聴覚障害を持っている。白＃＃＃の場合はオッドアイと言われる、左右の眼の色が違う場合も多い。この場合、青い眼の側の耳に聴覚障害を抱えることがある。

Back: 猫　「ねこ」

Many concepts can be covered here, and really I’ve not tweaked the process much since I still use mostly smaller sets of clozed deletion. These cards however get you exposed a lot to reading. And really the more you read the more you’ll get comfortable with reading and the faster you’ll get and so forth and so ON TILL THE WORLD EXPLODES.

So anyhow, there is a style I urge you all to look at if you do like the idea of reading as a form of study. I personally don’t use this method, but I was told by the one who does them that he’s recieved a lot of benifit from them. He called it Literal Translation Looped Reading.

I also deleted my old standard sentence deck, as it became a bore to me, content was too simple, and so forth. You might like it so here goes.

Standard Sentence:

Front: これは何？

Back:　これは何「なに」　What is this?

RTK Deck:

Front: 一

Back:　one[link to RevTK story]

hehe I know right? So simple, so to the point. I didn’t find any other way any easier than anything else so this is the one I used. I also kept my stories on the RevTK site and if I forgot my story, i could simply click on the keyword and it would bring up the page where its story was on. Made it fast and convenient.

So really that’s all that I use and I hope this post was of some use to you guys. I personally use anki/anki mobile, and I’m not afraid of getting rid of cards, and decks, and what not. I’ll post another if I ever figure out that new style I’ve been experimenting with, but I see no point in wasting your time with the rejects, lol. Also, as a side note, I do use color changes and stuff in anki to see things quicker in the longer cards.

Comments, question, you know where to put em!

 

A Month of Music – How I Learned Songs

Can’t believe its already December. My how time flies by. For those who don’t know, I was doing a little mini project for myself about using music to learn Japanese . While I sucked generally at keeping my progress tracked on the site, I did a lot of work with it through the month. Thanksgiving made things a little rough, but in the same time it helped out, so here I’m going to share what I learned.

Fumbling Beginnings!

In the beginning I did something I think that was beneficial, but not really realistic for long term application and for those who don’t have a lot of investment time. I basically took a song that I liked (Gackt’s Love Letter), that I knew I could sing the range for and looked up the lyrics for it on the goo site. I ended up going to a different site because sometimes Goo doesn’t love me and wouldn’t load up properly. But the new site had a colum for romanji, natural script with kanji, and then a rough translation. To get rid of the nonesene I copied and pasted the real lyrics into my Ooo text file. I also bolded it, if that matters to anyone. So anyhow, now set with the words and the song, I listened first.

I knew a good portion of the kanji from my RTK and then some took me a moment to realize I knew them. After listening a few times to get the sounds for the kanji, I painstakingly (not really, I love writing!) wrote out the first line and put the kana on top. I then wrote out the line again and again, and sung the song as I wrote (no longer doing the furigana past the first line) until I had about 4 or 5 of the 1st line total. Yeah. Time consuming. But I’ll tell you what, its been a whole month since I did that first line like that and I can still read it like no bodies business and write it out easily.

I would then make two cards, one with the lyrics on the front, no furigana, and sing it from memory, then hitting the space bar would show the reading and the clip of audio from the song. (I used audacity to get my audio clips). Then another card would have the audio and I’d have to produce the writing for it, and then hitting the answer button check against the sentence. I put no English on it whatsoever. I did look up the words and stuff in the dictionary to get a better feel, but I’m about total blindness on some things. The less my English can touch my Japanese the better.

I spent a lot of time with the song and half way through it wasn’t fun anymore. On the plus side, I can sing this bad boy almost like Gackt himself. Hey, bring out the カラオケ！But, its not very practical when wanting to learn faster (or with a cute chibi ビビちゃん hanging off your ankles!). After all this I realized I didn’t want to be a mega master of just a few songs, but rather have many songs under my belt, sacrificing the writing aspect to speed things up.

Children’s Songs

You may or may not like children’s songs. They’re easy, often not super meaningful, and sometimes nauseatingly cute and fluffy. If you’re lucky enough to have an audience like I do, them maybe its not so bad though! Plus, you learn countless of songs that a lot of people in Japan know. It covers a variety of simple vocabulary in their natural sentences/phrases. You open up a new can of enjoyment when you get your random 10 year old and 6 year old 2nd cousins to enjoy it and want you to sing it over and over again too! Or have relatives staring at you as your sing them to your kid.

Once I started on this track it was on. Not only because the little wins kept me motivated but because Vivian absolutly loves Japanese children’s songs! I used a lot of material from an awesome Youtuber named Cotohachan. A vast majority of the songs have the kana on the bottom as the song plays. This was actually very nice, being able to focus on the words if you needed, or enjoying the fun video instead while you sang along. Most songs were relatively short and catchy. Sadly though, not really any kanji, but this was still a vast enjoyment over the process I did with the first song.

Really all I did was watch them over and over, sing along with them over and over, then sing them on my own over and over. No writing involved.

I haven’t SRSed any of the children’s songs, and the one reason is I’m doing it naturally. All day long when changing diapers and feeding Vivi I sing to her. She loves this! Man, she sways and waves at me and sometimes even pretends to sing along. In the changing table department its really helped out, she doesn’t fight me nearly as much to get away. Also at night when I’m rocking her some, I sing to her the ones she loves the most. When she gets on her little giraffe horse thing, I sing the one about horses (since really its just a horse that has the coloring of a giraffe lol). When she sees and plays with the cat, I sing the one about the cat. So forth and so on, so really, I’m getting a natural setting of SRS. I’ve sung these songs so much my honey do started to sing along with me and he doesn’t even want to learn Japanese!

Did My Japanese Improve?

Yes and no. haha, sure, I know a lot of words now that I didn’t know, learned how to say them in a fun catchy way, and I remember them easily from the music, however I didn’t really get much reading practice as I had originally hoped for doing this (save for kana). I was really hoping to see and use a lot more kanji (Since I’ve been studying them for almost 2 years now!). This monthly experiment helped me find the next method that I’ve begun to test, but can’t really prove since I just started on it! So hopefully I can combine what I learned with the kid’s songs and what I learned with the writing/singing thing I did at first to create a good method for learning more complex lyrics/songs.

 

Till next time! じゃまた！

 

 

 

AJATT+

Okay so curiosity killed this cat! Not haha, anyhow, I kept seeing a few posts from AJATT’s twitter feed that talked about a new card format. After a twitter to him asking what MCD stood for (and no its not McDonalds) and not getting a reply made my curiosity buttons get pushed more.

If you’ve not heard of AJATT then you probably haven’t heard of it’s projects either. There are quite a few now, and I myself have three now. Two were a Christmas gift (qrg and mfsp) and then now I just subscribed to AJATT+.

Here’s a little rantathon: When I first went on the web I tried to find some reviews about this product. AJATT sums it up really well, however that doesn’t really tell you the feel of things, or if its really hit it off. I also noticed, no one online that I’ve found really goes on about it either, except one forum that bashes it for costing money.

My feeling is this, people only bash things for three reasons: 1)hate it (really, they just don’t dig it), 2)Jealous (I wish I could make money farting around!), or 3)They just don’t know anything and are assuming what it is (so and so hates it so I will too).

So, since I don’t follow hate bashing of those who’ve not tried, I decided to finally shed some light on the AJATT+ situation. For starters, I have nothing against a person doing work and getting paid for it. If you spent a good portion of your free time helping out others, after a while it will get old and you’ll want something in return. That’s natural. Even my honey do gets paid food or the like for fixing someone’s a/c on the down low. I think people are starting to feel anything online should be free, but if you think about it in real life, if you came to him in person and asked advice, you’d be paying more money than what he’s asking for. All in all, don’t complain because you don’t want to pay. Complain only if you pay and it sucks balls (but he’ll refund it anyways, so what’s the risk?). Okay I’ll step off meh soap box.

So I paid, only the one month (about $10). I’ll mostly likely sap this resource for a month then wait a long time and do it again (unless maybe I get addicted?).

First Impressions

Getting through the start up was really easy. I was glad when it didn’t make me go to my inbox and click on this link and do that and do this. I hate long registrations and that just turns me off, but this was fairy simple and fast. The registration page opens into another page that basically says, go here for guidelines or introduce yourself on the forum page. It gives links to both. So being the rebel I am, I passed the whole guidelines section (because that’s for goody two shoes and squares yo!) and went to the forums. I posted a little snit saying I’m here.

I spent a few minutes just doing a lightening by look at the forums. In fact, my curiosity about what MCDs  might be made me overlook a lot of stuff at first, but I did see a lot of fun threads and the community is currently right over 250. Not a lot, but definably not a small amount either. Khatz even had a thread for bombarding him with questions, living up to his word.

The main AJATT+ site looks a lot like AJATT’s free blog newest layout. You see the newest article up top larger, and the older ones in smaller boxes down below. I must say that I was kinda shocked at the number of articles already made considering it hasn’t been around for that long. A lot of them had audio and what not. I didn’t go into them further due to my MCD obsession.

I did notice that on the left side was a few sections, recent posts, recent comments, and tweets. I love that. In the forums you can also follow threads and get notifications, send people messages, you know, the normal stuff. So after finding what I thought was the first post on MCD’s it was actually a second post, but you know Khatz, he’s good about linking previous articles that apply, so off I went on a reading frenzy that lasted about 20 minutes before I realized I had to go feed my daughter.

Over all, good layout, easy to find anything. I like simple and straight to the point without the added craziness of fluff that’s unnecessary. Maybe the only thing I could see proving useful is a category list. [edit addition- not sure if I didn't see this before but now there is a category list. Either Khatz read this and thought, hey yeah, makes sense, or I'm a complete idiot for not seeing it to begin with! haha but its there now!]

Forums

Forums pretty much are the same everywhere, but maybe you’re curious as to what a paying forum might give you that’s different. I’m sure there are lots of forums out there that do swapping of materials, advice, links, techniques, and somewhat moderation, however with the +forums you get all that plus better moderation (weed out trolls/haters mad fast), be able to bug Khatz for attention (some people want to talk to the lion’s mouth, so to speak), and specifics on the AJATT method from Khatz and other users that for some reason people don’t get through the websites. Really its a forum to specifically get those who’re like minded about the method used in AJATT. Like minded is the key here. In AJATT+ you’re not going to get people who like to bash the AJATT method/Heisig, but still talk about sentence mining.

It being a smaller community probably is annoying to some, but I don’t see threads being inactive. After popping around I can see that people are generally good about responding to people, or reading posts that just have info on it. I don’t enjoy forums that are inactive, but I also don’t enjoy forums that are so big and active that so much gets re-posted and re-posted and then lost in the onslaught of activity. I see that as the benefit of smaller active communities. A comparable forum that’s pretty similar would be Koohi’s forum (lots of good info too), however the trolls there are many, and I don’t really care for the arguments and constant hating. Oh well .

Articles

Currently there are 5 pages of articles each with varying amounts on them, and I’m to lazy to count. I know its enough information though to last me at least a week or more of reading (I can plow through some material!). I can see audio too, yay! There is also full Japanese articles, as promised, and English ones too. On a side note, there is a lot of Japanese integration into the website itself. Not everything shows as English and I think that’s awesome. Back on track. There are lots of articles about his newest techniques that he doesn’t talk about on the main site. When Doug played WOW he always gave people a version old macro. It makes me think of that. You’re getting an older version of his studying habits on the main AJATT, and AJATT+ has the newest version. Of course, the newer version doesn’t seem to be as well studied and tested (yet), but that is where the fun is at, I think. Of course, all this info, at least in passing browsing could be found else where, its conveniently wrapped up here.

To clarify, his newest version doesn’t change the traditional steps really at all (unless you want to try out the lazy kanji cards which could technically be applied in the RTK step), its the same. However, with the onslaught of his MCD articles talking about replacing the 10k sentences, this to me is a step to take once you’ve sorta mastered that. It to me is a more advanced monolingual study method to retain and maintain your language as well as add a few vocabulary.

I do like the real e mail series, as its just as a real Japanese person is doing. I guess what I mean to say is its not fake dialogue, they’re emails that he’s actually reading and writing. I also like that he actively replies to comments made on posts. I noticed in the regular AJATT site he was starting to get really bad about leaving people hanging (not ever responding), but here it seems with monetary motivation, he answers often.

I of course cannot divulge the information on the site, that’s cheating, sorry. I can say though that its a nice bundle of information that is at least worth the one paid subscription to read them alone (plus you could save them and read them later outside the browser of course).

Where it Might Go

Really there are only three things that could happen. One – it dies out. Two – it stays the same. Three – it gets really large! I don’t see this forum getting crazy large, but the articles could really get to racking a great deal in size. I like to follow the works of intellectuals who I feel are similar minded, so to me, as long as he’s actively posting, I don’t see it as a waste of money. I could eat $10 bucks of food and not be the richer for it . I can see a lot of the forum side does have other language sections, which is neat if you plan on using the method for another language. You’ll have others in the same method that’ve tried out other things and what not.

I would ultimately like to see more actual interaction of Japanese. Though there is a thread for Japanese only, It’d be nice if there were maybe a chatting service that fluent native/native-like speakers could speak to those not quite as good as a form of practice. Like one big chat room or maybe even more one on one. A lot of people out there get really shy about on the spot interaction or even feel to shy to go out and make a friend through skype. I think AJATT+ would really set itself apart from its basic site if it did something like that.

Anyhow, I hope that let you know more about the feel of AJATT+. If you have any questions specifically about content, just as me and I’ll let you know if its covered or what not. I don’t want you to waste money if you really feel it isn’t something that will benefit you. I still think it primarily speaks to learners in the intermediate and beginner stage, with a few dabs of advanced here and there. I think it also speaks to those who do need guidance and some motivation to keep at it. In the world of self learning or autodidacticisim, people tend to think asking for help/advice is pretty lame, but I think that it has its place. It’s not as though you learn physics on your own, you usually follow someone’s discoveries and formulas until you’re able to do enough of it to explore new things on your own.

 

Interactive Immersion

Today a thought crossed my mind about the effectiveness of immersion and why some people absolutely love and live by it and others say its a waste of time and effort. What made some people’s immersion more effective that others?  It dawned on me that the major difference was often obscure (not emphasized), not talked about, or maybe not even realized by the people who found it very effective. So here I am to share some of my thoughts on why Immersion really is the way to go, but not just any old can off the shelves will do, but rather Interactive Immersion.

What is it?

I made this word up, but if it exsists for something else, well I don’t care. I am redefining it here for myself. Interactive Immersion is simply immersing yourself in things that require you to interact with it in order to use it/listen to it/read it/ect.

What is the difference between it and Plain Old Brand Immersion?

If you’ve ever bought milk, you’ll notice there are several types. Whole, skim, 2%, 1%, lactose free, Fat Free, ect. Interactive Immersion is merely a version of Immersion. Nothing really different except that its not on the back burner, its up in your face, demanding your action and input.

What items or activities are considered Interactive Immersion?

There are many types of things: video games, os in your target language, language partners (not allowing you to use native language at all), websites that need you to fill out things, search engines, chat rooms/ims/txts/emails/letters in your target language, and so much more.

What isn’t considered II?

See how I got lazy and wrote II? haha, anyhow, what isn’t considered is: Television, movies, music, books, some websites, any situations where you’re listening or watching but not doing anything else, not participating. Even reading and listening at the same time doesn’t count.

What makes the huge difference?

So now that you got an idea about what material I’m talking about, now I’ll let you in on why it makes such a huge difference. Action. Yup, that’s all there is to it. Action. Sure, you should immerse yourself, and read, man read all you can stand and then some, movies and music. All these things are wonderful. But the kicker is, until you’re on the line, having to use it, show it, answer it, make yourself vulnerable to effing things up, you’ll miss out on the wonderful joys of pushing through to actual language usage.

A lot of people who follow AJATT often forget about the action step of immersion. They ask fellow AJATTers about what sources they use for immersion and how to get it around them, but a lot of them forget things like, switching os and web pages like youtube and facebook into Japanese. They’re afraid, they think they’ll mess something up forever, or make fools of themselves to themselves. Guess what, we will. And we will. We will maybe a million times. Guess what also, we do this in English all the time too and we’re a native of how ever many years old!

It is a scary step for some, but for as long as you’re putting it off, you’ll never push through that barrier. And its really not that hard of a barrier. The amount of pleasure you’ll get from it is so intense, it will fuel you to go even further and further. It will also help you switch into monolingual stuff in no time. I’ve asked around, and it seems to be the pattern. Those who engage in more interactive immersion, (like talking in their target language, even if its just about weather), get further and farther and more comfortable in the langugage, than those who sit back and just let the immersion stand around them.

Liz Learners recently blogged about going into a Japanese Bookstore in NYC. She talked specifically about how happy she was with immersion. She talked about how great being surrounded was. But not only that, Liz spoke about how she was forced to interact in Japanese only with other people.

3. Lots of people I could look ridiculous in front of.
Nothing like a bit of social pressure to motivate you to do your best.  Not to say that I don’t regularly look ridiculous to strangers on a daily basis, but I felt extra pressure to really know what I was doing and understand what I was reading- or figure it out, lest I end up looking for ハリー・ポッター in the 日本者　section (Harry Potter in the Japanese authors section).  There was, admittedly, some “I can do this and I’ll prove it to you!” feeling in me too

Nothing puts you on the spot more than someone asking you a question. You have to answer. It creates panic and disorder if you don’t know what to do, even if you know what they’re saying, a newbie of any language will explain how they feel blank at that point. So how do you get over that? Do it more! Don’t shy away, even if your first couple attempts are just horrible gibberish and giggles. You are and will be better with every step you take interacting with your Japanese.

So there you have it folks. Since this now only recently dawned on myself, I’ll be changing even more of what I do to Interactive Immersion. Of course, I’ll keep a lot of immersion playing around me in the background, watching shows because its fun (and fun is best), and jamming to music because this is just as important. But of course, you already know why its important, so I’ll not go into that haha. If you’d like anything clarified, let me know, post that comment!

 

Book Review: The Ultimate Japanese Phrasebook

The Ultimate Japanese Phrasebook:

1800 Sentences for Everyday Use

by Kit Pancoast Nagamura and Kyoko Tsuchiya

Japanese Narrated by Reiko Matsunaga and Tatsuhiro Nishinosono

English Narrated by Katie Adler and Jeff Gedert

I don’t normally read or write book reviews myself. Mostly because I get sad I can’t go buy it and use it, and also that I’m all about the free. However once in a while I run along a book that I just can’t not tell you about it. This would be that book. Every time I go into a book store I look at the language area and laugh at all the “learn in 10 minutes a day” pamphlets and $400 “kits” that promise fluency like no other. Horrible dictionaries and kanji workbooks that are more boring and shackling as a prison sentence.

Yet, amidst all the horribleness there was a shining jewel of fun. I saw it a few months ago and passed it off after flipping only through the first chapter, as most of it was just a tad to basic for me. But when I went today, I noticed the rest of the book, and then proceeded to kick myself for not looking past the first chapter last time. I snickered and giggled on the way home, testing out such gems like “I want you/あなたがほしい。。。” on my lovely Doug.

So straight to the info in beautiful bullet formats:

• CD with native audio for all sentences, English followed by its Japanese counter part (mix of females and males)
• Sentence: English – Japanese (kanji and furigana) – roman characters
• Chapters easily divided and quick look up
• No long paragraphs to waste your time, straight to the good stuff, sentence after sentence with a few tip sections
• Covers a variety of situations from greetings to travel to eating to shopping to talking about feelings to pillow talk
• Gender neutral responses (a handful have both male and female counterparts)
• Compact size
• Large font, so even the furigana is easily read

Honestly I don’t see any cons with this at all, except maybe that pesky roman system there detracting you from reading the real deal. It’s not even overly proper either, but yet it’s not improper, you could really use these sentences on a daily basis. It’s actually the first book I’ve seen like this-just a collection of super useful daily phrases for all sorts of situations. No wasting time on crappy boring sentences but rather things like “he’s got balls of steel”.

No.

I’m not kidding.

He’s got balls of steel!      “彼は、肝っ玉がすわっている。”

There are so many useful expressions and then there are those that are just plain hilarious and useful, things you’d find yourself saying all the time, things you gossip about and laugh over. Fun things like: “I want you”; “she’s a hottie”; “he’s got a cute butt”; “she has great boobs”; “he’s a total suck up”. Honestly if you’re starting out in your quest for sentences, then I recommend you get this book. If you’re not studying the sentence mining method, that’s okay too. These are good for anyone to learn.

For those who are sentence mining, simply copy the audio you want, paste that sucker in the srs and bam! there ya go! Don’t even try to understand the grammar or anything, just have fun with them.

Another thing I should point out is that the sentences are not grammatical written expressions, rather they’re phrases. They are conversation/speaking (colloquial) form, not written form. So you wont be writing a book with these sentences unless your characters are saying these phrases.

Anyways, here in the old South Carolina it was $25 brand new from Barnes and Noble which isn’t too bad considering the wealth of knowledge that you get for it. The book is really durable feeling too, and that’s a plus with me when your sneaky little daughter likes to destroy, I mean “read” all books within her grasp.

If you don’t know the value of learning through sentences, then I recommend you listen to Jerry Dai on youtube as he talks about how it applies to Chinese (and it applies to any language). Or more on Sentence Mining from AJATT. Or Antimoon’s take on sentences through the Input Method.

 

What is a Language and How to Find Sentences

Languages are what?

I know our friendly online dictionary pulls out the ol’ complication by saying that language is “a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols”. Really, simply, languages is just how we communicate. While languages seem daunting and complex, rules and points and expressions, cultural blah blahs mixed with crazy squiggly lines and weird noises, I cannot seem to think of them as hard. I guess when it comes down to it, how we all feel about languages varies since we all experience life differently. I personally don’t see them as hard for the brain to comprehend (ie, we already speak a funny noise with squiggly line and lots of “grammatical rules”) but rather simply time consuming.

I don’t care what people tell you or me about age or natural ability of children, I still don’t hear my 5 year old niece talking perfect English, and its all she does, and has around her (that’s 43800 hours roughly man of pure immersion). She still mixes words and ideas and noises and cannot write hardly anything at all, nor read extensively. Harry Potter would Own Her.

People find a lot that’s blocking them from grasping a second language is preconceived ideas that they’re not good enough to, or its too hard for the brain. But do try to remember that its only exposure that matters, getting it around you. Hey and guess what, you’re smarter, can employ more critical thinking, and have more say over your life than a 5 year old, so I think you’ll have an easier time. The problem is, people don’t want to spend the time. You’ll gain more in 43800 hours (or 5 years) than my niece could even dream of doing if you started today, because you’re not learning how to learn to potty, and feed yourself amongst other things.

How to Find Sentences

or vocabulary

So what is communicating? What do we communicate? Did you ever step back and think, what do I actually talk about the most? So I did an experiment just a couple of weeks ago and recorded what types of subjects I talked to people about throughout the week. It was pretty funny how much we talked about the same things over again. Let me show you.

1. How is everyone, what I did today, where I went and what I bought. Basic really
2. weather: man don’t underestimate the amount of small chit chat you really use. Things like, the weather is nice, man its hot, wow look at that rain coming in.
3. Hobbies: music, singing, karaoke, and all sorts of music instruments, and of course, Japanese learning
4. Expressing emotions: this movie lacks umpf, ect, stuff like that
5. psychology, finances, computer technical, hvac, serious type subjects.

So as you can see, most of what I communicated was daily doings and weather. Funnest stuff I talked about was hobbies, and while I did a bit of emotional talking, or my feelings on subjects, movies, and whatever, only a few of my conversations were serious hitters like finances and psychology. Once you’re armed with your information on what you talk about daily, lets see how to use that.

If you’re following the sentence mining method, or even just looking for some vocabulary that you know you’re going to use, then using the above information is like peanut butter and jelly.

Warning, outdated information here preserved for post’s history : [[I always recommending those who want useful lists of vocabulary that's popular and shows up a lot to of course go to the the Smart.fm website and start their Core 2k programs, as it will teach you 2k of the most used vocabulary (and now they even have a core 6k, which is 4k More words that're pretty darn popular). If you're not familiar with Smart.fm, I'd recommend you take a look. Words, sentences, native audio, two game styles, and two drill styles, lots of fun.]]

Currently smart.fm is now Iknow.jp. They still have a vocabulary set up of 6K words most commonly found in Japanese. They have updated their iknow system to have the following features: study application, messaging system, and calendar; Dictation and Shadowing application; app for both iphone/ipod and android users; community; ability to still create your own lists; progression/stats page. Sadly now despite lots of angry protesting, Iknow.jp is now a service you must pay for. Not only that, its in Yen. Paypal does do automatic currency changing though, so fear not.

If you didn’t pick up something like AJATT’s “My First Sentence Pack” or pick up one of those books out there with the like, oh useful phrases in Japan, then you’re left at this point of trying to figure out where to start. The one thing I didn’t put in my list that I really never thought about was simply conveying basic needs. I probably do that more than I realize because I use a lot of body language with it versus much spoken English on the issue. I don’t say, Hand me that, Doug, I just point and nod at it, and we totally get each other. But maybe you don’t have that, or don’t do it, and need to convey that too. Like, Hey, I gotta PEE!

So now you know what you want to say in English, Great, now what?

Alright, lets take an example from each topic and I’ll show ya!

Conveying Basic Needs: “I need to get something to eat” Okay, so lets think, what’s the most important word in the sentence. Need or eat. Eat I think is better simply because it can be worked with more perhaps, hmm, maybe even changing it to, food. Either way, there is 3 vocabulary words to work with. Now we hop to a site that gives sentences. I’ll list a bunch of them below. I found a really good one too, so “When are we eating, I’m hungry!” shows up on the site as “いつ ご飯 食べる(たべる) の ？ お腹 空い(あい) た よ 。”

Bam, first section done. You can repeat this process for stuff like that easy mode.

Okay onto the list, here is an example from each one.

1) “I went to the store today” typed in store found a sentence of “I went to the store nearby” which will work since that store was nearby, and then bam “私(わたし) は 、 すぐ 近く(ちかく) の 店(みせ) に 行っ(いっ) た 。”

2) typed in weather “The weather here is so different from where I was” found one like “I can’t get over how different the weather is here” almost the same, bam “気候(きこう) が あまりに 違う(ちがう) んで 、 びっくり し て い ます”

3) Singing is a big hobby, I just plugged in Sing and got so many sentences that its nuts, I’ll find more sentences about my hobby than I imagined from some of these sites, “歌う(うたう) こと は 好き(すき) です か 。” or “音楽(おんがく) は 聞く(きく) の が 好き(すき) です か 、 それとも 歌う(うたう) の が 好き(すき) です か 。”

4) a little rough, but one feeling I feel a lot is happiness, since happiness is fun, lets choose one from there, ooh, already a good one, I often try to cheer up people so “don’t worry be happy” is a common thing, “くよくよ し ない で 、 楽しく(たのしく) 行こ(いこ) う ！” or “心配(しんぱい) し ない で 、 楽しく(たのしく) いこ う ！” works in that place

5) evil serious subjects often have tons of vocabulary, a popular one, depression, financial that is “the stock market is down”. So I typed in depression, and then stock market, found this sentence in both actually “株式(かぶしき) 市場(しじょう) は ひどい 状況(じょうきょう) に ある 。”"The stock market is severely depressed”

So as you can see, simply going to these sites and plugging in an English word of a sentence that I want to convey, I found more and more sentences than I would ever need. There are so many sentences to find this way. Of course, I’m assuming that if you’re monolingual, you can do the same by going to google and just typing in the word you want, and finding sentences straight from Japanese sources themselves, but if you’re intimidated and still multilingual, then this method is a great way to up your vocabulary and use that vocabulary daily.

So now to the listing of sites that’re out there that do this.

Tatoeba: Collecting example sentences, various languages, ability to export to anki, and the supplier of sentences to tangorin.

RhinoSpike: Foreign Language Audio on Demand – it has sentences and audio, and you can put in sentences for natives to record. Not as easy to find sentences like Tatoeba, but surely useful in this sentence mining.

Read The Kanji: Learn how to read Japanese Kanji – This site is all about plugging those known kanji in and finding sentences, collecting sentences, and all sorts of goodies. It’ll help you once you’re out of Heisig, and maybe give you a little more focus if it seems like the thing for you.

Denshi Jisho: It has a sentence section where you can plug in words and find sentences, pretty straight forward as well as a dictionary attached.

SpaceALC: This site is one of my favorites, as it pulls from website pages. I find myself best using Japanese in the search query, but it works both ways.

Japanese – English Parallel Corpus: I don’t have experience with this site personally, but its the same setup of parallel sentences.

Tangorin: Over 1,000,000 entries and 150,000 example sentences. A feature you can do on this one is save vocab words/sentences as well as export them to anki, which is a major helper for us lazies

While you can pull tons of sentences from things like Tae Kim’s Guide or your handy dandy text book, these sites focus on specific word to sentence look ups. Any more sites you know of, link them below! Any questions, Let me know! And if you made it this far, them my off the wall rambling today didn’t bother you

 

Method Review: 7 – TextFugu

I’m happy to report a new innovative item that has more recently come into this world. The great Koichi-san has hence given birth to TextFugu. For a follower of his zany (wonky was it?) cultural Japanese blog, Tofugu, this seemed like something I should check out. I decided to give the site a bit of time to come out of its introductory phase for a few reasons before reviewing. The first was to see if it launched well, and the second was to see how often the site was upgraded.

I’m happy to report that it launched (which is why I’m writing this ) as well as I’ve seen significant updates made to the site since it was launched. Because sometimes websites describe their products best I’ll let Koichi tell it like it is.

TextFugu was carefully designed with the self-teacher in mind, which means you can learn Japanese on your own more quickly and effectively than ever imagined.

It also comes with the following points of excitement:

A Learning Style That Works: Textbooks are usually boring. TextFugu is the online Japanese textbook that teaches you Japanese in a way that’s fun, integrates your own interests, and doesn’t waste your time. 52% of TextFugu members think this is our #1 feature!

Revolutionary Way To Study Kanji, Simplicity As A Feature

Integration With The Best: By integrating with the absolute hands-down best Japanese learning applications and websites, you’ll learn Japanese that much faster.

Regular Content Updates, Save Time, Don’t Waste It, Inspiration In Your Inbox,

I would like to talk about two more features separately, as I believe their quite awesome. The first is called the Bounties. This is a feature that basically allows you to earn money while helping the product become better. Simply put:

“people can submit suggestions, feedback, etc., and if I take action on the feedback, the person can either receive the bounty themselves (usually between $.50 – $1.00 each) or send it off to a charity. So far, 80% of people donate the bounties to charity, which makes me happy. The other 20% are slowly getting paid back the cost of TextFugu, which is also pretty nice.” (Koichi)

The Bounties system is great for a number of reasons (like getting paid to pay attention to detail). The best reason is simply that it improves the Textfugu, and I’m always about improvement. Payments are out on the first half of the month, and generally you’ll receive an email response to your claim. There is more information on Textfugu under “Rewards”.

The other feature is probably my favorite, as it is the only time I’ve ever seen it. 110% money back guarantee. Now if that doesn’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside about trying something out, I don’t know what will! To some, you might cringe at the criteria to get that extra 10% back, but to me, getting paid for negative feedback is awesome anyways. Basically during your first week if you feel Textfugu sucks monkey, you can ask for your 100% money back, and receive it within a few weeks. If you wanna go that extra 10% to get that 10% simply email them a 100-200 worded letter explaining why it sucks! This helps Textfugu improve even more. Koichi was also happy to report that no one has currently asked for money back, because apparently they’ll all very happy with their purchase.

Now there is a lot about this site that I saw as obvious, hey help improve my product, but there was a sneaker one I didn’t learn about until I emailed Koichi himself. Now, though he was unaware, I was testing his email response time (and if he would really read a more lengthy post) to a few questions that I had myself about his website. One of those questions happened to be about questions themselves. So far I had only found the ability to email questions. There are no forums, no numbers, no instant talk to someone to get help kind of things in Textfugu at the moment, and I was a little worried that having a question would lead to not getting answers in a timely manner (i mean, we don’t got all year do we? ). I received an email response (lengthy and well written to boot) concerning my inquiry within 7 hours. I thought that was exceedingly fast considering how busy Koichi must be as the only writer of Textfugu at the moment who also has a life!

It may seem like a bit of length to you, but to me it was fast. I didn’t even receive this fast an email to online courses from my community college who gets paid to answer my emails! Koichi did an awesome job of addressing all my concerns as well as throwing in a bit more information that I’ll report here in a bit. Needless to say his answer to my questions concerning “why just email” was this straight from the lion’s mouth:

Right now you can e-mail in specific questions, and they go directly to me. At the moment, I like it this way, because I can get an idea of where people are stumbling / having trouble. This is instant feedback on the product, and I’ve made 100′s of small changes based on feedback people send in. I love it, it’s a great way to know what’s working and what needs to be fixed, so I can keep chipping things away to make a simpler, better product. Nobody’s perfect, but I’m hoping that over time I can get darn close. Crowdsourcing is usually pretty accurate

I just love it!

As for the community of TextFugu, Koichi wouldn’t divulge how many subscribers to TextFugu there were except to say that they keep him super busy all day long. That said I’ve already found several mentions of TextFugu in forums and on sites like AJATT, so if it isn’t that large, I can definitely see it growing. Regardless however many there are Koichi is determined to make a perfect online textbook, so fret not, as this does not affect updates.

TextFugu is broken down into different Seasons (each should take on average a month to complete). Each season covers a variety of information broken into lessons that ends with a review. There is also a section for kanji and cheat sheets. (Koichi likes making these things, so new ones are made often).  When finished it should take roughly 6-12 months to get through the entire program. As for the moment, there is only seasons for beginners.

There are currently 3-4 updates a week, which includes 2-3  new lessons, as well as content added to existing lessons. Koichi wouldn’t divulge anymore information on updates, but promises they’ll be yummy .

Now I know you’re probably thinking by now, okay okay, what’s the price! Well I saved that for last of course, since like minded, I hate to pay for things! There are three different payment methods available right now. Monthly($20), 3 month($50), and Forever($120)! Basically with the first two, as long as you keep paying, you’ll be able to view the content for members, and forever of course being a one time payment that will make you a member forever. Though I know the forever may seem like a lot, if you’re a bit slower to learn its the best deal, and you don’t have to worry about paying out more. Where as maybe you’re not really sure and you don’t want to invest more than the cost to eat at Hardee’s. (remember the 110% money back guarantee)

By the way, there are some discounts available, but check that out on your own, mostly applied to educational institutions or teachers I think. You can always email Koichi for specifics if the FAQ isn’t good enough for ya.

So now that I’ve gone on an on about this or that, let me get down to the gritty in convenient, easy to read bulletins. Textfugu has:

PROS:

*lots of free articles for us to enjoy

*110% money back!

*multiple ways to pay

*will go from beginner to advanced

*addresses Kanji in a fun way

*fun to follow/read, accurate, easy layout

*constant updates/changes/additions

*earn money for ideas/suggestions/corrections

CONS:

*money

*does not address speaking often

*no community type features yet

*must wait for additions to come out if you’re beyond beginner

All in all, there is no way to report how people are learning through the whole program since it has yet to be fully released. Of those in the beginner stage however there is nothing but good reviews so far.  There have been no reports of scamming involved, nor any disgruntled purchases.

I myself plan to purchase a one month subscription just to see more once more intermediate Seasons are released and I’ll post more information at that time. Happy hunting and if you yourself are apart of the TextFugu community, please don’t hesitate to add your Cents in the comments below!

Sidenotes:

TextFugu and Tofugu are both on Twitter, Koichi is on edufire, smart.fm, lang8, with rss feeds available.