An approach based on sound practice

By profession I create learning material - in fact one of the key reasons for having this blog is to put in to practice one of my firmly held beliefs (born out of reading the literature, rather than simply because I believe it). A few approaches that I would always bear in mind when creating material:

• it is important not to create cognitive overload by trying to learn too many things simultaneously
• breaking things in to chunks helps us manage our learning
• spaced repetition is the key to long term memory creation
• taking in information can be assisted by using prior knowledge as a building block

Of course, brute application of the type Tony at English Alien has been showing will work, but as a learning designer I'm aware that certain approaches can make the whole process easier.

I have some practical experience of this as it relates to the study of Japanese. What was most striking about my last trip to Japan was home much more intelligible everything was.

In the period since I'd lived in Japan I had actually been studying Japanese - something I hadn't done a great deal at the time as I hadn't really intended to remain connected to the country forever. Subsequently, getting on trains, walking the streets or looking at things to buy, the strange squiggles, markings and etchings that had silently passed me by the first time suddenly began talking to me. With a hundred or so kanji under my belt everything seemed to make a little more sense. I had a hook upon which to hang a few words and with that I was able to unlock vastly more than I knew, simply because the few that I knew gave me a lever on the possible pronunciation.

That said, it recently occurred to me that if I was to get through the remaining 三級漢字 for the test I would need to find a different approach: trying to learn the strokes, the meaning, on on-yomi and kun-yomi, plus some of the main words a kanji appears in fails to meet a few of the key criteria I mention above.

SO I set myself the goal of, in twenty five days, learning all the meanings at least (too little, too late) as a peg upon which to build.

Today I stumbled on Heisig and his "Remembering the Kanji" approach, thanks to Carlie, who looks to be about to try out his system. It wasn't the first time I'd seen his name - a challenge was laid down by Tae Kim a while back, which I thought nothing of.

Kim's criticism is that the kanji in and of themselves don't mean anything in Heisig. Heisig simply introduces the 1,945 jouyou kanji by meaning and strokes. Japanese readings don't even get a look-in until volume 2 of his book!

I can see why Kim's sceptical - it is possible to 'learn' all the kanji you need in everyday life in Japan without learning a single word of Japanese - but I can also see, from a professional stand point, very compelling reasons why Heisig's approach makes a lot of sense. Heisig argues that one reason that Chinese and Korean students find learning Japanese easier is that they are familiar with the meanings for kanji, even if they don't know the language itself. His approach levels that playing field, or so he claims.

I think the system is worth closer scrutiny for several reasons:

• the whole book is broken up in to manageable(-ish) "chunks" of between 10 and 130 kanji
• they are ordered so that what you have learnt will help to make sense of what is to come
• the system relies on spaced repetition
• you are only focusing on learning two things for each kanji - strokes and meaning

All of these things are practical, tested approaches that have a sound basis in learning theories that have been tested. The pay off comes as you add vocabulary later on - looking at new words in kanji you should be able to recognise the characters that make it up, and perhaps get a handle on the meaning of the word in precisely the same way an understanding of Latin and ancient Greek roots helps to decipher new words in English, or indeed in other European languages.

There are problems with it of course:

• learning all 1,945 jouyou kanji is all well and good, but at my level I am unlikely to need them, or encounter them to ensure learning continues
• maintaining spaced repetition going forward would require testing yourself at 60 a day, everyday, just to make sure you view every one once a month
• motivation is likely to be tricky as it would probably be unclear at times exactly where the benefit was - without an equally intensive vocabulary campaign to follow or run concurrently you may never need many of the kanji for years to come, if at all...

On balance, I don't think the system is going to be appropriate for me right now, but should I get that 三級 and we go back to Japan, I think this could be really useful.

If you're interested, you can download a sample of the first 250 or so kanji covered, and at the Reviewing the Kanji website you can track your progress and see useful stats about your progress (if you visit my other blog, Learning Rocks, you'll see why the application of IT to learning at there site, and their attempt to leverage the online community of learners, is so exciting to me).

Chasing a better goal

Writing is key to language improvement

This post by Steve 'The Linguist' Kaufmann is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

word accumulation is a more helpful goal [for new learners, than spoken fluency ]

This, to me, makes a lot of sense. In fact, word accumulation is my biggest barrier to being able to speak well as I very quickly find myself wanting to talk about a subject which my Japanese brain can't express. I can bugger about with the grammar and get my gist over, but without the labels to hand it is worthless.

But another point he makes:

if we have too much output before sufficient input, we risk ingraining wrong patterns in our brain

also rings true for me. I have become accustomed to speaking in casual Japanese at home to the extent that I struggle to remember the polite conjugations - hence the benefit I have had in using the fairly basic Berlitz book. I hear this too in other people - typically those who are better auditory learners than books types, who have picked up their language on working holidays or down the izakaya - one guy who entered my Japanese class a few years ago really struggled with the material we were covering simply because he didn't know the polite form very well, despite being far more capable of sitting and chewing the fat with folk in Japanese.

Moreover, Steve advocates writing as the way to improve:

Learners can write using their newly saved words and submit this for correction. Even a few lines will do

This is of course what he's going to do - he's plugging his product LingQ, but to me it makes sense: one of the most successful students I had, in terms of the pace of her improvement, was a girl who each week wrote just a few lines of diary and we corrected it and chatted over it (I use the word chat loosely, mind you). But the benefit was clear - she quickly moved through from very simple declarative statements to expressing opinions and talking about her weekends, past and future. Slowly, and on a limited range of topics, but moving far quicker than our actual book based study, or other students who only used that route.

So perhaps my goal should be to try and write more and use that as the basis of my language exchange each week.

Needing a new approach to learning languages

The problem that faces the self-driven learner is the usual lack of other people in the study process. Carlie at GoddessCarlie recently wrote a good piece on her approach and learning style, but one interesting feature was that in summarising the skills side of things she neglected to mention speaking - a function of what happens when you don't have too many opportunities for practice.

Learning a language has four areas that need to be addressed equally if it is to be successful:

• reading (visual input)
• writing (visual output)
• listening (auditory input)
• speaking (auditory output)

Of course, there are lots of different ways of learning a language, but without a concerted focus on all four you end up with odd anomalies:

• a friend of mine spent his very early years in Japan before moving to the UK until after university. He could speak Japanese fluently but couldn't really read or write, except in hiragana.
  
• my son, now in the UK, watches Japanese TV and films, and listens to his mum in Japanese, but hasn't much cause to speak it, so he is receptive to Japanese only. This is common for kids in the UK where one parent comes from a country that doesn't have a strong in-country community (for example Chinese, SE Asian or Muslim).
• I'm far better at reading and writing Japanese than my dreadful spoken efforts would suggest.

The reason I've been ruminating on this is that I have been considering my language learning in light of the approach to developing training (my day job) advocated by Will Thalhiemer (amongst others, but Will is most passionate about it).

Will argues that any approach to training needs to focus on:

“What do learners need to be able to do, and in what situations do they need to do those things?”

But surely being able to read, write, listen to and speak a language is at the base of any language teaching?

Hmm, not really.

In schools the focus of language teaching is to pass exams. Vocabulary is taught in sets, small tests follow and on you go; group listening tests; paired communication exercises typically read out of a book. Rarely is there any ability to focus on those aspects that might encourage trying to embrace speaking it in a situation where the learner may find themselves.

In evening classes my experience has often been on blindly following a book. The pace will not match the abilities of the class and the learning benefit of in-class time is largely negligible.

My experience of the eikaiwa teaching environment is that the focus is very much on simply entertaining students and maintaining an illusion of progress, as long as the students return each week and pay their dues.

For the lone language learner there are patterns in the training material you are most likely to encounter that lead us away from the ideal:

• most traditional courses (Mina-no-Nihongo, JBP and so on) are built in precisely the same way, mostly around use of the book, with a variety of additional texts to boost takings (the CDs and practise books). While fans of each will argue the toss on the relative merits, they are mostly talking about the nature of the vocabulary taught, for in learning approach they are essentially equal.
• the JPod101 model, great though it is, is hit and miss. It offers far greater access to useful listening exercises, and even provides, as its subscriber service, access to written material. But in targeting lone students it excludes speaking practice almost entirely.

So, what's the alternative? Well, I'm going to save that until my next post. In the meantime, don't forget to ask yourself the following question as you learn.

"How will I benefit from studying this and how will I use it in practice?"

If you can't think of a reason for studying it, give yourself a break and try to find something useful to learn. Or else go out and engineer a situation where you can use it.

East/West Perception

Not sure this really fits on here to be honest, but it is fascinating.

Apparently Asians see the world in a different way to Westerners, according to this article from some science website I never heard of.

In summary, Asians pay more attention to the interrelatedness of things, while Americans of European extraction(the actual subject it seems) are more interested in bold features. This extends to conscious description of an image as well as studies of eye movement. Amazing.

May have greater relevance to Learning Rocks frankly, but I like this site.

Kana or Romaji - that is the question

Tony (my muse it would seem) posits a valuable question about learning Japanese in his most recent entry.

Is it better to study wholly in the target language, using only kana and kanji, or is it more effective to rely on the prop of romaji (spelling Japanese words in Latin alphabet).

My old chum Olly, now a resident of west Tokyo, seemed to work by this rule. He worked heavily in romaji and this meant that he was often waiting for me to catch up when we studied for JLPT4.

On the other hand, Nigel, a friend from Japan (I met him there - obviously with a name like that he isn't actually from Japan), swears blind that you should work wholly in kana if you want to make the breakthrough.

On a personal level, I feel it is hard working with kana. Counter-intuitively, it became much easier for me once I started learning enough kanji. Kanji allow you to make sense of a sentence far more quickly than is possible in kana. Consider this simple line:

私は英国人です。
わたしはえいこくじんです。
Watashi wa Eikokujin desu.
(I am British)

The top line, with its kanji, has some shape and texture, and with a little familiarity with the few kanji are instantly recognisable. The second line is all very samey and this problem is accentuated by the fact Japanese doesn't have spaces between words (though often they are when using kana).

Below the kana the romaji interpretation on the other hand is instantly recognisable - three decades of decoding the characters means I don't have to think for one second what is being said. The act of reading does not present a barrier for me.

But does it help me "get in the Japanese frame of mind"? Moreover, would relying on the romaji slow up my development of the ability to read effectively in Japanese. I think the answer to this second question would overwhelmingly have to be yes - but it depends very much on what you are trying to achieve.

Nigel studied Japanese at university. His aim was academic attainment and he would be tested on his written as well as spoken ability. It was imperative that he develop his skills on all fronts. Olly, by contrast, had little need for written language skills - he needed the language to speak to his wife, or more importantly to his in-laws.

My situation, much as I fantasise about being able to take up a bilingual position in a Japanese company, is much closer to Olly's. Perhaps I should take a leaf out of his book (he is, after all, a PhD) and ditch the kana and kanji and focus on building the vocab the easy way.

I look forward to following Tony's progress and seeing how he does and how he begins to benefit from the intermediate boost when you start being able to apply more kanji. Maybe in a few weeks (at the rate he is learning) we'll see. I'm curious to find out.