Progressive acquisition of foreign characters

I love YesJapan!

This website, designed to teach you “Japanese from Zero”, has a lot going for it. It has a simple, clean design, five courses of increasing complexity, and a free 7-day trial period (after which the monthly subscription fee is $14.95). But beyond the mechanics, I really like the pedagogy. One of the things I find most challenging about learning written Japanese is the kana (and kanji). If a book is written purely in Japanese script, I find it tiring and tedious to slog through; I’m just not fast enough at decoding the symbols (yet). But if it’s all in romaji (“our” characters), then it’s easy to be lazy and not learn how to read actual Japanese. Given my upcoming trip to Japan, I’m guessing that being able to read signs will come in particularly handy.

YesJapan to the rescue! They use a “progressive” solution to this problem in which they teach you a handful of new kana at a time, and from then on, the new ones are replaced in all subsequent lessons. For example, by lesson two you’ll encounter words like “あre” (“are”, “over there”) because you’ve already learned the hiragana for “a” (あ). You end up being able to read the kana without exerting much incremental effort at all, since there are only a few new foreign things to remember at each time. Brilliant!

Another great thing about the site is the copious use of pronunciation links. There’s nothing like being able to play (and re-play) native speakers’ versions of what you’re trying to say, so that you can emulate your way to perfection.

There are quizzes to test your retention, vocabulary lists for writing practice (using only the kana you’ve learned to date, of course), and interactive games like Kana Attack to let you “fire” at incoming kana by correctly guessing their romaji — flash cards on steroids!

Course 1 has this motivational phrase at the top of the page:


Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru

Piled up specks of dust become a mountain

So here I am, piling up specks of Japanese dust to build a my own little mountain. Yesterday, after four hours of teaching and five hours of work on my thesis, it was great fun to indulge in a couple of hours working through the first two lessons in Course 1.

Japanese emoticons

Emoticons, by their nature, always seemed language-independent to me. Sure, you might debate whether :) or :-) is a better representation, but a smile is a smile, no matter what language the surrounding text might be, right?

Guess not!

Thanks to Ravenous Rob, today I learned that Japanese emailers and webmasters and bloggers have their own Japanese-style emoticons. They are differentiated from the “Western style” emoticons (as Wikipedia’s entry on emoticons calls them) by their orientation. Where we Westerners are used to rotating our heads 90 degrees to the left to puzzle out :) or :P or even >:-O, Japanese people look their emoticons straight on: (^_^) or (0_<) or (~.~). See, you even get cheek lines! The effect is very anime-esque, with the enlarged eyes and round head. While I had actually encountered ;_; before (to indicate "crying in pain because your joke was so bad"), I had not picked up on its Asian overtones. Or undertones. In fact, it still looks like semicolon-underscore-semicolon to me, but perhaps with some practice (>_<) I can learn (O_O) to see the faces, not the trees (@_@). One last fun tidbit from the Wikipedia entry:

The creator of the original ASCII emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44), was considered lost for a long time. It was however recovered twenty years later by Jeff Baird, from old backup tapes.[6]

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman (Fahlman at Cmu-20c)

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

Yes, this Scott Fahlman, who even devotes a page to the story of the smiley.

Flash cards!

Today I found this great application for the Mac called iFlash. It allows you to create your own (virtual) flash card decks. Flash cards hearken back to elementary school days… why would anyone want to use such a boring old metaphor for testing their memory? Aha! Because of the following iFlash features:

  • Cards can have more than two sides (I know my topology friends will love that). This is useful, for example, when studying Japanese; you can have kanji, kana, romaji, and English versions of the same word/phrase on different sides of the same card.
  • You can attach pictures to any side of any card via drag-and-drop.
  • You can record sound clips (or attach existing sound files) to any side of any card. This is ideal for a foreign language flash card deck. (You could even attach the sound of the word/phrase to a blank side of the card, to strictly drill listening comprehension.)
  • iFlash will shuffle the cards (if desired) and then drill you on them. You indicate whether or not you “got it” for each card, and it records this (as “memorized”) so that you can visually see your progress. It can also use this information to bias future card choices towards ones that you don’t yet have memorized. There are three different scoring methods you can choose between.


At right you can see a screenshot (click to enlarge) I took of the flash card file I started, using the vocabulary that’s been covered so far in the sixteen lessons I’ve had from japanesepod101.com. You can see that I’ve entered all of the hiragana “sides” and am in the process of filling in the English sides. (Actually, one of the English entries is wrong in this screenshot; anyone catch it?)

This would have come in very handy when I was memorizing mineral chemical compositions in Mineralogy three years ago!

Conversational Japanese

I recently discovered the podcasts put out by Japanesepod101. They offer a roughly 10-minute lesson each day, and you can access a year’s worth of archives via the iTunes music store. And it’s all free! I’ve taken to listening to a lesson each morning while doing my stretching exercises. It passes the time and I learn a little tidbit of Japanese each day.

I’m starting with their Beginner archives. I’ve studied Japanese off and on, but it’s been a while, so this is a great refresher. A lot of the basic material they’ve covered so far has, in fact, been familiar (mostly greetings). However, here are a couple of new things I learned (or re-learned). I’m posting hiragana versions of some of the words because a) I can (the Mac rocks!) and b) it helps me practice recognizing hiragana (boy, am I rusty).

  • Another way to respond to “[o] genki desu ka?” is “zekouchou desu” (ぜこうちょう です) = “I’m on top of the world!”
  • Another way to respond to “hajimemashite” is “kochirakoso” (こちらこそ) = “Same here.”
  • The pronouns: watashi (I), anata (you), kare/kanojo (he/she), watashitachi (we), anatatachi (you plural), karera/kanojora (they)
  • Some useful adjectives: isogashii (いそがしい) = busy, samui (さむい) = cold, omoshiroi (おもしろい) = fun/interesting, tanoshii (たのしい) = fun

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