Project To-Ki-YO #2: Immersion and Kanji practice

Hello there... or should I say,
こにちは皆さん、元気ですか？
(Hello everyone, how are you doing?)

What I have been doing

A lot has happened over the past few months, I've tried quite a lot of ideas and methods to learning Japanese. I've installed an app called "Anki" to help me with Remembering the Kanji (RTK) and I've got to say: it's pretty effective for making me remember. I have also tried to immerse in numerous media, mainly NHK news (the BBC or CNN of Japan if I'm not mistaken), NHK's easy Japanese which I've done more recently. Surprisingly anime and video games played a very minimal part into this immersion process, for reasons I'll detail later.

Remembering the Kanji

Since last time I blogged about this, I finished going through every singe Kanji and then installed an SRS (spaced repetition software) software called "Anki" which was far more efficient. The way Anki functions is that it is a digital flashcard application where you recall the flashcard's awnser. I think I should have started using Anki earlier because I had to endure a load of August trying to come up with the stories for all the 2000 Kanji again as well as having to write stories for 1000 more (which I did not go through on my way back home), all of which I could have started much earlier. You honestly did not want to be there when I was writing the stories, I spent long hours trying to work on ~100 of them a day on top of the labuor-intensive process of drawing & animating the sprites for my latest game Bounty Hunter II as well as having younger siblings barging in to my room and making an absolute mess out of it. I have a few of these stories presented here in these pictures.

Around September 14th was when I finished writing most of the stories for the Kanji and I could finally focus on trying to consolidate them in my brain.

Once it came to the consolidation process, things were only a little easier since I've had to memorize the stories I've created (some of which I had forgotten after I created them) and draw them out accordingly. Some of these stories I've also had to polish too. I reduced the cards that I reviewed to 25 per day.

The way I use Anki is that I tend to often press "Again" for the ones I do not know and try to recall them via drawing them on paint with my graphics tablet (A Wacom Intuos), once I'm more certain with them I press "Hard" which takes the card off temporarily. This is quite a good strategy since I can focus on the harder cards and later on be able to actively recall the cards that I pressed "hard" on so I can eventually press "good" which takes them off permanently for the day.

Around November or this month I reduced the new cards to 8 per day, so I can give myself less of a workload as well as allowing me to still have energy to memorize older cards I have done in order to consolidate them well. This would straighten the forgetting curve and allow for a larger amount of retention.


















Immersion - Do's and Don'ts

I've tried many things like video games and anime, I don't think these are particularly good places to start since I've had difficulty understanding what they mean. Especially with video games, because if it is something like a game that is more action-oriented I have found myself skipping long dialogue so I can focus on the more core aspect of the gameplay. Visual novels can be an exception to this as the plot is pretty much the gameplay, although I haven't tried much of them - this will be something I'll try out in the near future.

In terms of anime although I have watched only Jojo's bizzare adventure: Stardust crusaders, Beyond the Boundary and Delightful Moomin Family. The reason why the amount of anime I watched was so low was that it does a very poor job of helping me understand the syntax of the language, everything feels a lot more complicated - sure it could help me pick up a word or two, but it did not give me a way to attain things like conjunction and or what is what in a sentence. I had the first two in Japanese subtitles so I could follow in with the Japanese, however when it came to understanding the language I often found myself pausing and rewinding so I can understand the sentence or use something like google translate to get a feel of what the characters were saying.

Although I did make some sentence cards out of them with Anki, the sentences still felt far too complicated for me to comprehend. The dialogue was slightly easier to follow in the Moomin anime since it is probably meant for a younger audience than most anime is (and I did not even have Japanese subtitles for that anime) but I still found myself constantly pausing the anime to transcribe what I've heard. I don't know about you but I'd rather listen to the anime and watch it throughout so I can actually understand the story rather than stopping and switch tasking.

Okay, so if anime/manga or video games are not a good place to start, then what is?
My answer would be learning simple sentences out of something like Tae Kim's grammar guide or listening to something like NHK Easy Japanese or news. The former I will discuss in the next section.
Easy Japanese gives very simple sentences and conversations and the people in the program go through all the particles (things like は, の and を), verbs and sentences, thus easing you into the Japanese learning process and giving some insight into speaking Japanese. News podcasts are also something I can just easily listen to passively, whilst I'm doing something else or doing nothing without extra stimuli like images.

I'm not saying that I'm against playing video games or watching a show to learn a new language - what I'm trying to say is that they are not a good way to starting out with learning a language due to their unstructured nature in terms of language learning. It's better to start with something more simple.

Sentence memorizing

I mentioned about Tae Kim's grammar guide not too long ago, let me explain to you why I think it's effective to starting out. It is because it is a grammar guide and you would expect simple sentences to appear out of a grammar guide. This makes it easier to learn sentences without any complications, plus they give you the Kanji with its readings, wait- I'll talk about readings because that is what I struggled on at first and why it is a waste of time to memorize every single one.

There usually are two basic readings Onyomi and Kunyomi, the former is from Chinese readings used in joined up Kanji whilst the latter is from Japanese readings which are in single Kanji. That seems simple enough, but I'm not done there - since there are also exceptions like Kanji for names, multiple Onyomi/Kunyomi readings and using them in different contexts so it is not always a matter of just Onyomi vs Kunyomi. I learned that I was just better off just memorizing them as they are in one big bulk i.e. 図書館 (Library) which is としょかん in Hiragana.

Anyway, with the sentences, my goal with the sentences is not to necessary understand them but to learn new words without having to look up the readings. It's worked rather well for me as I can recall a number of words I've learned whilst having say the sentences out loud.


Conclusion & future goals for Japanese

I have done quite a lot over the past few months since the last post, the main focus has been on trying to look at basic sentences, basic passive immersion and learning Kanji. I will continue on that for a bit longer until I reach a more intermediate fluency.

In the future I plan to try and learn more about the tenses and syntax of the language and shift the focus away from memorizing Kanji. I could even try to play a video game or watch something in Japanese.

That's all from me!
さよなら！

Project To-Ki-YO!

Project "To-Ki-YO!" is oneof my non-game related side projects

The intention of this project is to learn and master the Japanese language, and be my first sort of language-learning experience. Well, not my first - my first was french back in my earlier high school years. And I wasn't that great at it, my french was terrible. I rebuked a while ago about how it wasted my time, and I still largely agree (even though I still know a few phrases).

Perhaps the biggest thing I got out of French was that it did not help me get a consistent knowledge of it; it was more of just write down new vocab, memorize them and regurgitate them for a nondescript test. Rinse and repeat.

Now, I don't need to study french - I have less on my plate (I only have History, graphics and photography), which allows me to learn Japanese. Why japanese? Why pick the most weeaboo language of all existence? You are just going to learn it to not need subtitles when watching anime aren't you?

Well maybe that might be a starting motive, but not the whole picture.
It's actually because I find the characters interesting; they look like odd symbols or something.

I first decided to learn Hirigana and Katakana - which I found out, was barely scraping the surface of Japanese. Filthy Frank (2011 - 2017) wasn't wrong when he made fun of Japan-obsessives learning Hirigana and claiming that they know plenty of Japanese.
Let me tell you why he did; they missed the completely brutal part of learning the language that would make them quit. It's not Katakana, it's Kanji. If you look at the majority of Japanese sentences, you will see at least one Kanji word embedded into it, it's so common that you've got to learn it, you don't have any other choice.
Worse yet, there's over 2000 of them!
Yes, I didn't make a typo there! Two-Thousand.

But, thanks to a few resources on the internet (namely MattVsJapan) it turns out there is a book called "Remembering the Kanji" which many Japaneses learners have used to learn Japanese in the most efficient way. The concept of this book is to create little stories to associated with the small Kanji strokes (known in the book as "Primitives"), which makes the bigger Kanji much easier to learn as you can just break it down into the aforementioned strokes. The Kanji with the least components are taught first so that you can associate them with objects (like "rice field" or "mouth"). This is also called "holistic" learning where you create links in your mind between two supposedly similar things (like, say mathematical concepts with programming concepts).

Lately (for about 2 or 3 weeks), I've been reading pages of this book (printed from a PDF format) every time I walk back home from school. I don't try to fully understand the Kanji but I try to cover as much as I can possibly do in the shortest space of time so I can spend more time trying to actually decipher these things. It's like speeding though a video lecture at 1.5x speed, you're just trying to get a basic idea of a concept rather than fully understanding it right away. Sometimes I have a freind assist me in coming up with stories - all in all, this gives me something to do on a tedious and drenching 1 hour and 30 minute walk back home.

I'm pretty sure people would be asking by now, "Do you want to go to Japan?"

Well, yes. I find the place quite nice-looking as if it were another London. However you can't guarantee these things happening, maybe my interests will change and it may have been some dumb pipe dream of mine meant to fill in some missing part of my heart at this point in time. Or Japanese politics may have gone down which would demotivate me from going there. I'm not too sure about this quite frankly.

But one thing I am sure about is that I'd love to keep learning Japanese, because if I just drop it, I won't see any benefits of learning it. You never know, it could definitely aid the learning of other things, or help with learning other languages efficiently or be a way to brag about knowing more than just English.

Perhaps I'll make a part two to this - once I have something to mention or say (like reaching a milestone). Maybe I'll do so when I have mastered most of the Kanji, I'm around 1,200 words into the coverage of Kanji so there could be some progress going on here.

That's all from me!