Posts Tagged nihongo

You know what, maybe you should just join the new site. Go ahead. Fine. I’m sure it’s fine. Sure I’m sure. Fine for YOU. Me, I’m stubborn. (It helps as much as it doesn’t.) I’m doing good without it, and I talked about using Anki as pretty much the same thing. But there’s a few things Anki doesn’t really do at all that Smart.fm did and it’s not nitpicky style issues. But I’ve found a couple free sites that get close to the same thing.

Tests typing speed and quickness recognizing kana. I know my damn kana at this point but I would like to get better at typing. Eventually I should learn how to use the Japanese keyboard input system, but this seems pretty unrealistic right now. (I still use JWPce and c/p everything.)

Just kanji multiple choice flashcards. Maybe even better than Smart.fm’s speed drill game, but it’s a lot less game-like. There’s no timer, so there’s no way to lose but you can get your speed up. The best part is getting that instant feedback of the correct answer everytime you screw up, and you will. And when you get a good run going seeing that red flash on the screen is a lot better better punch in the gut than a low score at the end that does not even tell you what you wrong. This is not about getting your name on a leaderboard this is about inflicting maximum mental anguish. You deserve to— wait, what was this about again? Well, it’s what works for me. (This used to work within facebook but now it doesn’t? You might need to login to it through facebook. It’s legit.)

…To meaningless Pain! I mean, To Learning! With a purpose of some kind! I think. Maybe.

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The Japanese Learning Proficiency Test, or JLPT, is held every year on December 4th. Because the deadline is not midnight on December 3rd, I miss it every year. You’ve got to apply in September, and seats are limited. True, there’s been a number of years where I was barely studying enough to even pass the lowest level, but there’s been even more when I’m chugging along and suddenly it’s December and it’s like…well, I already know I screwed up. I’m not even studying the right things anyway. Advice I hear a lot in Jp. learning circles is simply “not give up and you will learn”. But it’s possible to not give up AND not learn. If you take a month or even a week off studying completely, it doesn’t mean you gave up, but it’s self-sabotage.

The Smart.fm/iKnow is based on some advanced SRS research. It got me on the right track, finally. I’ve had a deck of real paper flash cards for years, but it’s hard to keep track of which cards to study and when. It’s real easy to think you’ve learned a card and just put it in the ‘done’ pile and soon all the cards are in the ‘done’ pile so you look at them all again and you don’t even remember half. Anki, I think, is somewhere in between a fully automated system and a manual analog deck. In theory it’s the same kind of SRS (idea-wise) as iKnow, but the way it’s set up more depends on you. The social network aspect and public posting of progress helped (you’d have to resort to some kind of public…log…which could be potentially embarrassing…everyone knows learning a new language is about shielding yourself from public ridicule by fleeing to another country, and that the best way to become fluent is to not try too hard), but also the thing told you when to study what. If you were dumb enough to take on 40 lessons at once on Smart.fm it would be obvious you were making a terrible decision—at all times at least 30 of them would be telling you: Study NOW. Can’t do it.

Not knocking Anki, it’s just Smart.fm was more self-sabotage proof. I don’t think any one system is the best. I’m doing all this and naturally sometimes I get to thinking that maybe I can make the One Perfect System. Like, I’ve wasted all this time and maybe it gives me the insight to do that and it wasn’t all a waste. It wasn’t all a waste, but a whoooole lot of it was a waste and I’m not getting anything out of that. There was nothing wrong with any of the systems I’ve used (like Berlitz or Pimsleur) or that one is better than the other, it’s that I couldn’t stick to a schedule of repeated and prolonged public embarrassment. That’s the key.

But there’s also this article, which is about a study which maybe proves something I kind of thought already, which is that the number of hours learning (or the amount of study repetitions) is irrelevant. There’s just moments that the thing clicks into your brain for whatever reason. Going through the repetitions mindlessly alone isn’t going to do it. But I’ve lined up so goddamn many, I have to plow through. It’s pretty ugly, but even if I’m looking at a deck ten decks with an average of 800 cards, doing 20 a day on each will net 100 cards every 5 days. It can’t be done in one month, but it could only take 40 days. (I’m not doing quite that well, but I can easily finish those by December and will be well into the 6000 decks.) My main problem is deciding which test to take.

I don’t think there is One Perfect System for everyone or even any one person. (A Slightly More Perfect System for JLPT study are almost probably the decks designed for that test that are labeled by test level.) Going from system to system might (could) be best. In the end it’s one language that your using to communicate; acing the test isn’t the goal. (Would be nice tho.) All these learning systems top out at some point and you only get better from there by using the language in real life. (A decent JLPT score might help get into a situation where you use the language more in real life…) Unless you’re just in it to watch unsubbed anime. Which is fine. But it’s also not that fine. At some point. I don’t know if I’ll live there or anything but I’m into doing some kind of cross-cultural exchange that is a real thing. It’s becoming something that seems more important than continuing some kind of aesthetic from the 90s, which was really fueling me before recent events.

The reactions to the tsunami in Japan, good and bad, didn’t surprise me at all. I think the worst parts are part of a certain entrenched way of thinking that could be helped with more open exchange of information within the country and better international communication. On the other hand, the riots in England didn’t make sense to me. I’ve read some things that point out some of the complexities and what not and I can get it, but I don’t see how you’d fix any of that. Half of my ancestry is British/Irish (bit murky) and it’s not upper class. And I’m into a lot of UK pop culture, but I don’t really get it on a gut level like I thought I did. My point is you gotta focus on things you think you can change. I didn’t even know the UK was fucked up on that level and that’s a place I think about more than Africa, for example. Or Russia or the Middle East. I’m just trying to focus on what I understand. It’s about the type of society I think is a positive direction, not about race.

I could go off about weeaboos who are barely aware that Japan is an actual country but I need to get back to killing my brain with words.

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Continuing from June. (I should start tagging posts.)

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I said I was going to talk more about Anki vs. Smart.fm/iKnow the other day. This post on Nihongoup: The end of smart.fm tells you the whole story of what happened to that service. I’m not feeling to mad about it; it seemed to good to be true when I started to use it, and I feel lucky now that it got me back into more serious studying cause I was just screwing around. But it wasn’t perfect. It they had kept it just like was and made it, like, $5/month, I would have stuck with it. The $10-12 a month is not so bad, but the way they did it sucked. Instead I gave my money to Koichi Ko’s Textfugu. He had a perfectly timed sale for lifetime accounts. (Too perfect…)

Koichi had been using Smart.fm himself, putting up a ton a free lessons. He said to he would be switching to Anki. So did a lot of users in the various comments sections. One of these pointed towards the Smart.fm Importer (which no longer works of course). I’ve been able to continue all the lessons I had as decks. Don’t feel like you’ve missed out on too much because you can still get the main courses which have been uploaded wherever these things get uploaded. I started on Smart.fm with Core 6000, because I am an arrogant buffoon. I then went back and worked through the entire Core 2000, which I’m reviewing now on Anki. So right now I’ve got steps 1-10 of 2000 and step 1 of 6000 being reviewed. I’ve given priority to getting through the whole 6000 course but I’m also doing Textfugu’s Transitive & Intransitive Verbs. Then I’ve got these user-made ones which are vocab lists based on songs. A couple were from the Learn Japanese Through Music online classes, which I got into through someone on Last.fm weirdly enough. I wound up getting more out of the non-class material. I’m sure most people learn the opposite way better. (This course used to be on edufire, which I had completely forgotten about till just now…oh crap. I just never got into it.)

I think I’m learning most with Anki. I enjoy classes and videos and readings and whatnot, but I don’t retain enough. I feel smarter doing those things, but Anki makes you feel dumber and dumber. THAT’S how you know it’s working. The thing about Smart.fm was it was a lot easier to feel like you were learning more than you were. There was multiple choice questions; sentences were an option, a separate section with fill-in-the-blanks! It was more like a video game than studying. (There was also a straight up game that tested speed…damn I’m doing a pretty good selling this thing that doesn’t exist anymore…I don’t know how much they changed.)

Screw all the bullshit, I’m trying to track my damn progress. I took a screencap at the beginning of the month and one this morning:

Huh.

Ahh, fuck. This tells me nothing. Except I’m another day behind. I did get that down to only a week behind at some point in the month. It’s obvious I’m doing too many decks at once but I can’t undo that now. I thought the download option might go away entirely so I got every deck loaded in there. And the song decks aren’t nearly as big as the real ones, I should be able to “finish” them this month. (They never end, the review time just gets longer.) I should be able to clear out the new cards anyway. I’ve cleared out some of them already. Let’s make a list here and meet back here next month. [Why not cap the whole thing and put it behind a cut.]

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Since college, I’ve avoided using anything more complicated than Notepad for any offline writing whenever possible. Even if was trying to study a song I’d just set it up—kanji, romaji, english—in one long row and set it to print on 3 pages. Just lazy, and a waste of paper. Why can’t I stop being a dumbass and learn to use columns? I used to know things! I did. I’m sure of it. Yes, it was long ago…ok. So I’ve been doing (*not singing but “doing”) some Utada songs that had lessons on Smart.fm with Anki (more about that later). I started with Fight the Blues from Heart Station.

Sure enough some random Utada blog already had all 3 versions of the lyrics. After somehow crashing the program several times with some simple cutting & pasting and messing with the fonts I got it looking pretty good:

Can I get a blog post looking that good? I don’t know. This is just an quick example, I’m going to mess with this translation and do more from scratch now that I’ve got a formula. (Right away I see they’ve literally translated the idiom 「笑う門には福来る」 which Rikaichan has as “good fortune and happiness will come to the home of those that smile”. I’m sure there’s a way to make that…a little better.)

But the point is you can use this formula if you use Works for lyrics to get them in better order. Use ‘Meiro UI’ (which should be on there if you’ve got Asian fonts installed); set the kanji column to 10, the romaji column to 9, and the english to 8. (Get all the text in there first and adjust the sizes, then jiggle it around to fit in the columns.) Most songs should fit on one page like this, I’ve still got space on the bottom.

Well this was nice break. Going back to the decks, nearly only a week behind now. またね。

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