Tools I Have Used

So given my history (see previous post) here are some of my thoughts on what I've done up to now and what I plan to do in the future.

Teaching myself kanji with just paper and a print off was hard and ineffective. Later I would find little nuances in my kanji writing which I thought were harmless at the time but turned out to change the meaning of the kanji I was writing. This method also wasn't fun/rewarding which made it hard to stay motivated.

I used Kanji Gold for a bit, but something about it just didn't work for me. I think it was that some of the grade levels seemed to have too much kanji. I also seem to remember wasting time going over stuff I already knew well and not going over the kanji I didn't know often enough. I tried making my own, smaller lists of kanji but I kept having technical issues (apparently it's easy but I never figured it out).This was enough of a chore to discourage me.

I also think this program had an overload of information. Kanji Gold would give:
1)several example uses of kanji in phrases with hiragana or other kanji
2)the on and kun readings
3)radicals of other kanji found inside the one you were studying, etc ...
Although these are certainly useful things to know down the road, I think I spent too much time worrying about them and not actually learning the kanji themselves.

Next I made my own c++ program which worked in a similar manner to flash cards. Now this was good because I had complete control. I could change aspects of the software as I deemed them more or less useful/efficient through trial and error. However the biggest problem by far was getting the kanji into the device. I know it sounds just lazy but even copying images and text from external sources like websites seemed like A LOT of work for me (I probably just built the file I/O poorly). Needless to say this method of studying lasted almost no time at all.

Another important thing to note is that both of these programs weren't pretty. It sounds unimportant but if you're planning on spending hour after hour using and looking at this thing, it better be appealing. Now that I've tried some of the more successful things out there I can say that looking nice does give me an added amount of motivation to use a program.

About this time is I took a university course. As stated in my other post, it was great but didn't help with kanji. I think I would need to take 2 more courses until they even started on kanji and that just was never an option with my curriculum and lifestyle. Still I think it's important to state here how effective classes/courses were for me because I know many self-taught gurus like to downplay their value.

Next I came across http://nihongoperapera.com/ which supported using Mnemosyne which was a step up but it didn't come with kanji/sentence sets that were at my level. I tried making my own and downloading ones by other people (the site talks about benefits of both). Yet both methods became work and there would be careless mistakes that I or other people would sometimes make in the lists. This method also wouldn't let you work on the writing or pronunciation of Kanji.

Anyways, about a year after that I was about to work in Spain and needed to work on my Spanish. A friend hyped up the Rosetta Stone software claiming that it helped her a ton. I tried it and absolutely loved it! I clearly remember the intro video talking all about the "dynamic immersion" method they used and showed me how I could learn things like red, eat and plurals in Spanish before I even started the first lesson of the program! Soon my Spanish felt like it was quickly catching up to my Japanese. I wondered if this was because the language itself was just easier to learn. (Even today I concluded that there is SOME truth to this; especially with regards to the writing). Overall I decided this was not true. Japanese has pretty simple grammar structure and particle use compared to Spanish and English. (ie: "I am going to the store" is written"store to go" in Japanese). Also Japanese doesn't have the masculine feminine stuff I get so annoyed with with the romantic/latin based languages.

Another thing I have pondered was if part of the reason for this difference in progress was that I had all this old baggage from past experiences in Japanese where Spanish had me starting from a blank slate. Since I already knew some Japanese I kept getting put in places were things would seem either too easy and not interest me or too hard and would discourage me. I'll call it the Goldilocks problem.

However as I backpacked Europe before starting my job in Spain I tried to continue learning Spanish without my laptop. I had downloaded 3 different audio courses/programs on my iPod but the one that stuck out was Michel Thomas. He helped show me what the flaw was in the Rosetta Stone method I had advocated up to that point. The problem was that the the Rosetta Stone program didn't challenge your thinking enough. You never knew EXACTLY what you were saying. You always knew generally what was going on, but never specifics. Rosetta stone also wasn't super strict at watching your pronunciation where my iPod had me hearing Michel Thomas being super picky with the pronunciation of these other students that learn with you on the audio tracks.

The last thing that the Michel Thomas audios said that stuck was something along the lines "If you can control the verbs, you can control the language". He covered the modal verbs (would, should, could, can...) heavily, and showed how they were very useful for practical everyday situations. I would have to agree. It's easy to describe a noun to someone who has no idea what you are talking about (pointing or drawing can usually work) while concepts like "would", "should", "can" are much harder to get across.

I came back from my job in Spain (and their world cup win!) and still used Rosetta Stone as it was the best I had for Japanese. Another flaw I became aware of was that the Rosetta Stone gave equal attention to all parts of the lessons. Again I found myself spending more time than I wanted on the stuff I knew and less time than I wanted on the stuff I didn't.

I wanted something more. Something that focused more on writing, kanji and a deeper understanding of HOW TO USE the words I was learning but that still taught speaking, pronunciation and that had a fun and appealing aspect to it. Then luckily one day I came across a video that got me really hyped up about a website called smart.fm. I started using it and loved it even more than the Rosetta Stone. Just like in the Michele Thomas method, more emphasis is put on verbs or adjectives and less on nouns. Another exciting factor for me was the claims of scientists that were involved in the development of the program. This gave it a whole new level of credibility for me which I think has two benefits. First that this stuff probably was more effective than the other things out there but secondly that I think it gave me a placebo effect. Whether or not it actually was more effective I believed that it was and did not second guess committing to this method. I think that's a vital lesson: Your chances of succeeding in any method of learning are dependent on how much you believe you can succeed using that method.

However, smart.fm does still have it's laws. Although it tells you how to pronounce words, there's no way for it to check your pronunciation. It also conjugates verbs without explaining how/why to you. It's a lot easier to say one word at a time than to speak complete sentence with a smooth flow like the Rosetta Stone requires you to do. Lastly sometimes smart.fm is missing the stroke order of Kanji.

This reminds me of another thing that I learned from smart.fm: the importance of stroke order. Before I would ignore what sites told me and do what I felt was natural, but for some reason I decided I would follow the recommendations this time. I found several important things:

1) it made my Kanji neater. one example is the Kanji for exit or out (出). Before I would write this with 3 strokes. 1 vertical and 2-three sides of a box. however I noticed that my partial boxes would tend to become round, especially when I rushed. Changing to the proper 5 stoke method helped keep the lines straighter. Things like this would happen with MANY other kanji as well.
2) it helped prevent the nuances that would change a kanji's meaning. One example is the Kanji for husband (夫) and heaven(天). What would happen if you drew the vertical line in heaven after the horizontal ones and accidentally started a tiny bit above the top line? I'm sure most people would still know what you wrote but I find that the stroke orders are great at reducing ambiguities like this.
3) Sometimes I can remember a kanji by it's strokes. This is especially true if they are very different from what I would naturally choose like in Illness (病).

Anyways with all I have learned I have concluded: Rosetta stone and Smart.fm are the best things out there I have seen. Rosetta Stone is the best for learning pronunciation and is one of the best for learning USEFUL vocabulary. It focuses on high use words but at a cost of the depth of learning. It is better for nouns and I would recommend it to someone looking at VISITING Japan. Smart.fm however should be preferred if you are serious about learning the language and plan to go more in depth. It's ability to spend more time on the things you don't know is a benefit and it has a great design and fun games. However if you want to get the most out of it you really need to coach yourself. It doesn't force you to say words or check pronunciation or write. If you test yourself diligently and use smart.fm to check for answers you will be on a better path to fluency.

My current method has me spending about 85% of my time on smart.fm. I still use Rosetta Stone occasionally to make sure I can make my sentences flow and not sound like individual words. I also used it to pick up more nouns. It's also important as a means of taking a break. Despite how much I love smart.fm I will on rare occasions get bored of it. As my previous failures have shown, motivation is important and if you aren't careful about dealing with slight boredom and frustration it can build up and you will pay for it in the end. Keep the learning fun and enjoyable!

Some other tools I use are the Yamasa Online Kanji Dictionary when smart.fm is missing stroke orders and Tim's Takamatsu if I need to look up a verb conjugation or other rule used in the smart.fm example sentences. Google fills in any holes that are left.