Today - June 22, 2011

So now that we've caught up to the recent date I'll go through some more of the details, successes and pitfalls.

• Using the heisig method with pronunciations has been working splendidly and I recommend it.
• I have recently gotten the first 2000 items learned in iknow.jp (it took longer than planned due to the change of structure of the smart.fm to ikow.jp, earthquake and other things)
• Below you can see the time spent and items learned for:

March. (notice the gap due to my earthquake vacation)

April (The last days are the start of my golden week)
May (The first days are the rest of my golden week)JuneAs you can see I'm not overly consistent, but I have been putting in a decent time. There's a lot of breaks due to parties and trips to Tokyo, but I don't regret any of that.
I almost never use the smart.fm app on my iphone. However I got anki for my iphone and I use it all the time for a pre-made deck based on Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar (called TK from now on) which you can download for free. TK has been AMAZING, I have recently just finished it and have started to make it into a software. (see the video at the bottom for what it looks like for now). The problem is that reading the app and using the Anki cards have problems.

I’ve also realized recently that even though I have decided to write the JLPT Lv2 in Dec. I haven’t really made any clear goals or planned my timeline to get ready in time. I’ve just been hammering the Tae Kim and Smart FM. And making really good progress. But I went with Nihongo pera pera and I’ve bought a phrases dictionary. Now that I’ve just recently finished Tae Kim’s and got my 2000+ words started I think my next step will be to follow that guy. Go through the phrases in the book add them to Anki, add an extra card with just the word I don’t understand. Here you can see a picture of the book. At first I was a little pissed off that the examples were not translated, but soon after I realized that is what I need. I do need to break out of the lazy habit. It would probably be even better if the examples didn’t have furigana.

• Recent things I need to start doing. 1)going into random restaurants/yakitoriya/izekayas(Japanese pub) and just starting up conversations with random people.
  

Catching Up Part 4 - June

Went to a co-worker's birthday party in Kiryu (桐生). Became friends with a Japanese DJ and some other Japanese people that speak little to no English. I was able to make them laugh on a couple of occasions. I think the ability to tell and understand jokes is a good sign.

I went to an Izakaya (居酒屋-Japanese pub) with a friend who has been in Japan for 4 years and is close to fluent. Some really drunk Japanese came up to us and started talking to us. I think I only needed to ask my friend to translate for me once or twice the whole night. Although again, it was mostly me being Izakaya fluent. The good news is, they ended up buying us drinks and insisting to pay for our Kareoke and drinks after we left the bar. Although I know we only got that treatment for being a novelty as a gaijin who spoke some Japanese in a small city. (I'm certain I wouldn't have gotten that in a more metropolitan area), it doesn't hurt to have another motivation to improve as soon as possible.

Talking with the same friend a week later I came across a mistake which I found quite annoying. She was going home, but I couldn't see her bike so I went to ask "how are you going home" and I used "nan-de"(何で) for "how are you" or "by what means are you" going home. My friend looked very shocked and explained to me that nan-de means "why". Once again, I should be more willing to believe someone who has been living, working and talking in Japanese for years, but I knew I had been taught that somewhere before and was hesitant to believe her. That night I looked up several sources. 1) Tae Kim's explains this and apparently 何で has two pronunciations. "nand-de" meaning "why" and "nani-de" meaning "how/by what means". However I guess I didn't read that part carefully since I found it easy and knew I had learned it before. I had a hunch that I had seen it in Rosetta Stone the wrong way and sure enough I found it. Anyways a good mistake to be aware of for all of you people studying out there. Apparently a better word than "nani-de" is "donoyou-de"(どのようで)

Catching Up Part 3 - May

A piece on my bike broke, I had to go to the shop and order a custom piece. I got a voicemail saying when it was coming in. I could understand ~40% of it but even my Japanese friends had to listen to it 3 times to decipher it. So apparently it wasn’t just my lack of skill.

Many things happened during my reading week. I stayed at my Japanese coworker’s parent’s house in Furakawa (古川-Sendai vicinity). It was really cool to have more a more authentic and traditional Japanese lifestyle. The parents didn’t speak any English, so it was a good practice for me and a good way to gauge my ability again. It really makes me wish I had done a home-stay forcing me to speak in Japanese. My speaking would probably be much better by now if that was the case. One noteworthy blunder was when the mother was doing work in the kitchen and I wanted to ask her if there was anything I could do. From iknow.jp I knew “youji”( 用事) meant errands and ”watashi ni”(私に) meant “for me” so I asked “watashi ni youji desu ka” (私に用事ですか) hoping that it would be clear that I was asking “is there a chore/errand for me?”. However this confused her and she asked me some questions. One of which was “who did you hear that from?”. In hindsight, I now know the “desu ka” sounded more like “there is. Right?” instead of “is there?” So by saying that question I was more of telling her that I heard she called for me. My co-worker explained “watashi ni nanika deskimasu ka” (私に何か出来ますか) would have been better. Although with my current knowledge I think even “watashi ni youji arimasu ka” (私に用事ありますか) would have been better understood. It’s hard to fully know the difference and when to use“だ”, ”です”, and”ある/いる”. I think I got it pretty well now, but something I highly recommend paying extra attention to understanding when you are learning.

I went to see another coworker's band play a concert. I ended up hanging out after with all the band mates and going to another bar with all of them after. Most of them spoke little to no English. I don’t know if it was because I was so tired or drunk but after 2AM I couldn’t even translate a simple sentence. There were also some other events that night which helped me realize that hanging out with the other gaijin is keeping me from meeting more Japanese people. I don’t want to have to pick one or the other, but realistically it makes sense. The gaijin not interested in learning Japanese have no interest in hanging out with a group of Japanese that don’t speak English and vice versa for the Japanese people.

About this time I had wasted too much time trying to find Japanese music I liked in order to have more immersion (like the AJATT method). Even to this date I have concluded it is impossible to find cool Japanese bands on the internet. Any charts, or recommendation software/communities have let me down. I’ve found some cool stuff I enjoy (and hopefully will be learning them on Kareoke soon) but it has all been found through friends recommendations.

May 17^th I reached 50 pages of kanji practice. (Today I’m at 68.) I'll write something later about exactly how I was practicing writing with iknow.jp and how it has changed over time.
Next an English teacher friend of mine and I biked to Tokyo (10 hours, ~100km). That night we ended up staying at my first capsule, meeting up with a Japanese guy and a Tourist. Again a good reality check to see how much better I was than a tourist and to see how much below my friend I was in conversation. (He has been here a little over a year.) We went to a hostess bar/cafe and I was mostly able to hold conversation for with the girls. However they kept switching in and out so I kept having the same conversation. Ice breakers, where are you from, how long are you going to stay in Japan, etc… About this time I had gotten to the point where I would call myself “Izakaya fluent” (居酒屋- Japanese Pub). I keep asking/answering the same questions. (work, weather, stuff like that) so I can understand and answer at high speed and people think I’m fluent. But as soon as we get into a real conversation it breaks down. I still haven’t figured out a way to get around this. I think soon I’ll just try and awkwardly force conversations with Japanese people. Kind of like toastmasters. Hopefully it doesn’t annoy them enough to stop talking to me…

Catching Up Part 2 - April

I started to cook traditional Japanese dishes via cooking with dog. This has been good way for me to learn the names of food and where things are located in my grocery store. This　also helped a lot with reading menus, which was something I struggled with when I first came here. It has also helped a lot for being a conversation topic with new Japanese friends. Most people I show are impressed and usually follow up by suggesting restaurants I should try and sometimes taking me to them. I highly recommend it as a fun way to improve your Japanese in a specific area.

This was also the month for Hanami season (花見-flower viewing). I went to a bunch of hanamis and made a lot of Japanese friends, most of whom are pretty much fluent in English. It has been great having them as Facebook friends since they will comment on my mistakes and make their own posts in Japanese. A lot of people recommend reading some Japanese Twitter accounts, but I feel more motivated to read posts by someone I know rather than a random person.

Also at one of the Hanamis, a gaijin I met convinced me that to try and aim to pass the JLPT Lv2 and looks for an Engineering job in the Tokyo region. So here is where I stopped sitting on the fence and officially decided to write the JLPT Lv2 in December and gamble my future plans on whether or not I pass that. If I do, I’ll look for a job here. If I don’t, I’m not sure what I will do. I don’t want to teach English too long and make it too hard to get back into Engineering. Another friend in my home city who works in Tokyo was happy to hear I was going to try for it. She helped me realize that I was being a wimp about it before sitting on the fence. Time to be hardcore!

About this time is when I started to learn my first Japanese Kareoke song. It was Karma by Bump of Chicken which was the opening song for the Tales of the Abyss game I had enjoyed so much.

Shortly after, I was hanging out with a Japanese friend in my home city and I used some expressions I had learned from Pimsleur audio course. She couldn’t understand what I meant and said that the book was probably wrong. I found I was overly defensive of the course. I should naturally believe a Japanese person over a book made by non-Japanese, but I resisted it for some reason. (Looking back now with my much improved grammar and vocab knowledge I still can’t understand how my Japanese friend could not understand it. 失礼(excuse me) and しなければならないんで (I have to) are commonly used so 失礼しなければならないんで (I have to excuse myself) should have been easy I think.) I’ve also used this phrase with other people since then, so I think it must have just been my poor pronunciation.

Another interesting thing about this same friend is that she always speaks with relaxed grammar and slang which makes it much harder to communicate. I was still stuck in the always using –masu(-ます) form. For example one time she used “nanika ga aru no”(何かがあるの) when we were talking about me going to another city the following day. I now know that she was asking “Is there something there” as in “Is there something specific/special to do/see there?” but at that point I would only have understood “nanika ga arimasu ka”(何かがありますか) which is basically the same thing but in teineigo (丁寧語-polite form). From this and some other experiences I have learned to really dislike a lot of the courses that I have done for only teaching polite form. This includes Rosetta Stone, my own university course, Pimsleur, etc… I understand why they do it. Most of those courses are designed for people who expect to use what they learn only in a business setting, not a live in Japan and master the language setting. So if you could only learn one, then polite form is the way to go, so you don't go around offending clients and elderly. But for anyone who actually wants to learn and understand the language I highly recommend learning verbs in the order that Tae Kim does it. (I’ll speak more on Tae Kim later). Not only do you learn all of the levels of politeness, it’s also a an easier progression to move from normal to polite than the other way.

By now I had now been in Ashikaga for about 3 months. I went with some Japanese coworkers to dinner at their uncle's ramen shop. The food was great but several times they did not hold back on the Japanese and I got completely lost. Up until then I could usually follow a conversation well enough to know the gist of what was going on, but here I had no idea. They were talking way too fast for me. At the time I felt a little offended, but it was definitely a good thing. I realized most of the Japanese people I talk with speak more simply or slowly to accommodate me and had been giving me false illusions of where my skill level really stood. Another night I hung out with the first Japanese friend I made. She forced me to have a whole conversation only in Japanese and refused to help me. Usually I do my best and just switch to English for words I don’t know or things I think would be difficult to explain. Again I felt a little annoyed at the time, but I soon realized that's what I really needed. I think she knew what I was going through and was trying to help me since she probably went through a similar experience of having an inaccurate view of her own English skills until she moved to New York.

Catching Up Part 1 - March

Okay so it's been a LOONG time and so much has happened so I'm just going to use old facebook statuses as a guide. I'll probably end up forgetting a ton of things but I think this might be the better way for me to blog. I always felt that time spent blogging is wasted time I could have spent learning Japanese. Also this way people reading will only hear the really noticeable stuff in my learning experience rather than lots of detail and stuff that's probably not really relevant or needed. I think I'll try and get into a habit of just doing bigger posts every month or two. So anyways, let's get started.

First there was a big earthquake/nuclear disaster here you might have heard of. That threw my schedule off for ~2 weeks at least with regards to studying. I ended up traveling to Kyoto(京都), Osaka(大阪), and Nara(奈良) for two weeks after the earthquake for various reasons. One noteworthy event that happened over there was that I had a conversation with a Japanese guy in a bar in Kyoto for ~30min in Japanese. I struggled like crazy and didn't understand about half of the things the guy was saying, but he was very patient with me. It turned out he was an English professor in Kyoto. After finding that out we spoke mostly in English. It’s a long story but by the end of the night I made a goal to one day be good enough to read the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World(世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド) by Haruki Murakami(村 上 春樹). I find this goal a much more interesting one than knowing some number of kanji or words or so many hours spent on smart.fm.

Soon after I had to deal with the train staff at my city JR station because I left my backpack on the train. I had a pillow in it and I couldn’t think of what the word was, but when the staff said “makura”(枕) I remembered it from Rosetta Stone. The exact same thing happened with me trying to explain there was a Canadian flag (旗) sewn onto it. I.M.O. there’s lot of vocab (mainly nouns) that Rosetta shows a few times and never goes back to like “flag” or “pillow” while others are shown too much of. (Common/more useful words being the ones that appear more often.) Personally I like the iknow.jp/ smart.fm idea of making all items appear equal on your study (but even that’s not even true if you look at the words used in their example sentances). Anyways, my friend was with me (an English teacher for 2 years in my city) and he was impressed with my English level for my short length of time in Japan. That compliment meant a lot to me since I feel that every compliment I get from a Japanese person is them just being polite. Anyways, back at home I had to answer my first phone call in Japanese with no help from anyone. It was with the staff at the train station my bag ended up at. I was able to pull it off, but they kept asking me what the contents of my bag were and I could tell only from the tone that they meant “was it a mistake?” or “was it wrong”. I realized later that they must have just been looking in the wrong pocket so it didn’t match the description I left at the station. Either way, important word(s) to learn: mistake=machigae/machigau(間違え/間違う)

About this time I decided to buy a manga book. I went into the book store not really knowing what to look for and figured I would just ask the staff for something easy. Although after looking in what I think was the “easy” section, it looked far too babyish and boring. And there was so much in just hiragana/katakana, which I felt was something I didn’t want. It just felt like doing it that way would mean I would have to learn the words twice. However the other ones seemed too weird/difficult or expensive. I wanted something I would be interested and motivated to get through yet cheap enough that if I didn’t follow through, it wouldn’t be a big waste of money. I was about to ask for help, or give up, or something at this point when I came across “Tales of the Abyss”. I ended up choosing that since “Tales of Symphonia” was one of my favourite games and I had always wanted to play Tales of the Abyss, so I figured it would be interesting. (I never even imagined the tales series would have a manga.) Anyways here's a point form description of how that worked out for me.

• It was hard
• I found out that it was pretty much identical to the videogame's dialog
• I found out that my computer could handle a PS2 emulator
• So I made a plan to read the book first while doing my best to understand it, then play the game in English up to that point, then go back and read that section of the book again
• The game was too fun
  
• It was easy to play first, read after
• This soon became just me playing the game and no reading.
  
• I ended up beating the game which took A LOT of hours that could have been spent studying. (It's a loong game)

So it definitely was not a good thing for my Japanese but two good things did come out of it.

1. I loved the game, so much so that it might be my new favourite game (here’s a demo for anyone interested) )
2. It eventually led me to learn my first Kareoke song in Japanese. (more on that later.)

Much delayed post from February

So I've decided after a LONG delay to post a bit more. I expect this motivation will dies out again in a couple of weeks, but we'll see. First I'll post something that I started writing in late February but never finished. Tonight or tomorrow I'll try to summarize/ fill in the gaps since then.

18/2/2011 aprox
"So today I finally got my alien registration card, so very soon I will be getting a cell phone. Today while picking up the card from the city office, the woman working the desk had a long conversation with me, mostly in Japanese. It was probably about 25 minutes (good thing I wasn't in a rush). I found this extremly exciting to know that I could communicate on so many subjects, although I'm sure I sounded like a retarted yoda; messing up order and misusing particles. But the point was I was mostly understood. I was constantly using key words from my smart.fm/iknow.jp lessons so I've decided I'm going to stick with it and pay for the service once the free period is over. I'll briefly go over the converstation and try to bold words that I used from the smart.fm lists.

First I asked her if I could have a space put in my name on my health insurance card to separate my middle and last name and explained to her that a coworker said I needed it. (currently it has my middle and last name together in katakana). She explained to me how Japanese only have two names in so the software wouldn't allow for the space. She then asked what school I taught English at. I was able to explain to her that I had 4 schools: one in north Ashikaga足利, one in the south and two in Tatabayashi館林. She asked how I traveled to all of them and I answered by walking and train (for some reason I forgot what "train" was in japanese was and took a while to remember it. I actually was saying it correctly in my head but I started thinking "no that's not right..." and doubting myself). We then talked about the weather in Canada compared to Ashikaga, eating salmon in Canada and the proximity of various cities to the ocean, and how much nature and wilderness I see in the two locations. Next we talked about the sizes of the cities Burlington, Toronto, Ashikaga and Tokyo in terms of distance, population. She asked me if I had ever seen the northern lights. I told her that you can only see it in certain places but I wanted to see it, although I keep trying to use hoshi (欲しい) for "want" instead of the -tai(~たい) verb conjugation. That's a bad habit I'll have to break out of. (PS I often get asked about the northern lights by the japanese, so apparently it's something we're famous for. However they always call it the "aurora" which is next to impossible for japanese to pronounce like an Engish speaker due to the placement and combination of the R's and A's.)

Then after that I was walking to work and an older man started speaking to me in English. He was the best English speaker out of all the Japanese I have met so far. And he explained that he could teach me. I might take him up but I don't know if he's quite my vibe. We'll see..."

22/2/2011 aprox
"I'm confused about when to use hiragana vs kanji. for words is it like the englsih "3" and "three"?"

A revelation on readings/pronunciations

So I've been doing a lot of smart.fm/iknow.jp to try and get back to where I was before I stopped it and to decide if I want to stay on that route once it becomes a paid service.

Before I thought I liked it because of the science terms they throw around claiming to have the optimized method of retention, but really I think I've come to realize the reason I like it because it seems more challenging than a lot of the other applications I've seen out there. Nothing else I have seen has gone to differentiate president of a company, and of a country and a prime minister and company from corporation. Maybe it's flawed logic, but it just seems like a harder tool is more designed for people whose final goal is fluency, not just basic knowledge of the language.

Anyways, so I've caught up now to where I was in Oct/Nov and I've started learning some new stuff (core 2000, step 4) and I was getting frustrated that the progress was so much slower for remembering the pronunciation of words compared to the writing using the RTK1 book. I can remember the kanji very well and that takes 10% of the brain power that it did before doing RTK1. So if going between English written words and Japanese written words, or vise-versa it's easy, but I found myself having to review the pronunciations over and over again. I was also having problems where I would mix up the pronunciations and the words and then I came up with an idea...

I decided to apply the Heisig method to the pronunciation. I would make up stories based on similar sounding English words. Here are some examples:

manufacturing/production= 加工＝かこう＝kakoo
sounds kind of like gakkoo, which I already know is school. You go to school so you don't get a manufacturing job. Even though I already know ka(加) from kaeru (加える）and koo(工) from　koojoo (工場) I can't seem to remember it from 加工 easily, but once I made this story, I never stalled more than a second thinking about how to pronounce it.

drastically=大幅＝おおはば＝oohaba
I already know oo(大) as big then I think of the drastic change in health my baba (Ukrainian for grandmother) had right before she passed away.

success= 成功＝せいこう＝seikoo
sounds like "say code", so I think of a computer hacker who finally successfully breaks in and says what the code was.

directly=直接＝ちょくせつ＝chokusetsu
I think of "choke sets you" and have a mental image of going directly to a set of Mafia bosses and choking sets (or groups) of them instead of wasting time trying to talk with them.

graduation=卒業＝そつぎょう＝sotsugyoo
sounds like "so you go". I think of a valedictorian speech going "so you go out into the world..." also I already know gyoo.

I like this because like with the heisig method, it builds on the readings I already know. This allows me to reinforce what I already know at the same time as learning new ones. Otherwise stated, I don't need these stories for the kanji I already know the readings for, only with the ones I don't. Yet it saves me the time of having to go back and review the old ones specifically. (hopefully that makes sense)

Also once I figure it out from the story I always say it OUT LOUD. just to make sure that I say it correctly and not "so you go". I also suspect it just helps with the muscle memory.

So far this has helped me a TON and quickened my speed in iknow.jp but I'm still a little nervous about committing to it. I have a gut feeling that it may cause problems later on. One big thing that makes this different than RTK is that the book was made knowing what all 2042 kanji would be. This way Heisig could lay them out in way to avoid learning 然 before 犬. Where here I don't know all the words I will be learning and I don't feel like going through the effort to look them up and try to calculate some systematic approach of learning these words efficiently.

Either way, time to try it out for a week or so and we'll see how the experiment goes.