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If Something is Good, Is More Always Better?

Monday, May 12, 2008

We all have a tendency to think like this.  We find something and call it “good” and with that, we imply that it’s always good.

But we know that isn’t true.  Exercise is good, too much exercise causes injury.  Food is good, too much food will damage your health.  Water is good, but too much Dihydrogen Monoxide and you’ll kill yourself.

We know this but the temptation is still there.  It’s there because we like to measure things.  We like to know exactly how much progress we’re making.  How far we’ve come, how far we’ve left to go.

And because we want a little more progress, we want to go a little bit faster, we take that one “good” thing and run with it.

From a discussion on the RevTK forums:

I’ve had much more free time lately. So basically, what I’ve been doing is getting as much sentences as I can, and putting them into my SRS. The thing is, I add at least 50 sentences every day, with each sentence having a maximum of 2 new words in them. I’m finding that my reviews are taking a long time. I do about 100, and that takes 3-4 hours per day.

SRS Good.  Sentences Good.  More is better right?

Yes and No.  Yes, because you cover a lot of material. No, because the risk of burnout is high.

On top of that, you miss out on making the reviews more valuable by finding complementary activities.

For example, we say that eating is good but eating more can backfire.  But suppose we complement eating with exercise.  We swim, lift weights, play soccer, do yoga, ride bikes, go rollerblading and rock climbing.

By expending all that energy, our metabolism and our appetite go up - way up.  Now we’re eating more, but it’s still very much a “good thing”.

Eating drives exercise and exercise drives eating - a virtuous cycle.

If SRS’s, review, studying, drilling, memorization, and dictionary lookups are eating, what is the exercise?  And what is a good ratio between the two?  And how does that ratio change over time?

I think the exercise is anything you do with Japanese that you don’t measure.  Reading Blogs and websites, watching TV, having conversations…taking a cooking class. Really it’s anything.  Anything you can simply do in, with or around Japanese without tracking the time spent, or the number of Kanji covered, or scoring your performance, or recording every mistake.

It’s time spent doing what you already do in English, only in Japanese.  And why is that valuable?  It builds context and interest.  When you go back to studying you have greater context to associate with the kanji, words and sentences you review and more interest in their deeper meanings beyond the dictionary and grammar lexicon.

Because really, what does it mean to look up 50-100 new words every day for two weeks?  What does it mean to have looked up 1000 new words in two weeks?  An SRS will only lighten the load if you can ace that list of words.  At first, you’re just doing rote memorization of a huge list of words with limited context.

Pushing through lists like that is a recipe for hating Japanese and feeding the incorrect perception that learning Japanese, or any language for that matter, is too hard.

The enemy of learning Japanese, of learning anything for that matter, is not lack of discipline, or lack of immersion, or lack of time: it’s burnout.

But using study to feed activities in Japanese and using those activities to feed study will not only make both stronger over time, it will maintain or even increase interest as well.


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What is the Purpose of Study?

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

First off, my apologies for falling behind in posting.  I was doing some experimentation with learning Japanese.  But it all relates to the question at hand.  What is “study” for?

This question isn’t unique to language learning, we could ask it for anything that takes years to learn.  But it’s a question that, I think, is never truly considered.

The obvious answer is: You study to learn.  But what do we usually do with what we “study”? We regurgitate it on a test.  Is perfect recall the same as knowing and understanding?

I’ve taken a lot of physics and mathematics courses over the years.  I found that even when I could ace the exams, I didn’t understand the material until much later - sometimes years later.  Why? Because it was over the following years that I used, played with, experimented on, failed and succeeded with those principles and equations.

In class, I studied the answers.  In life, I learned the questions.

OK, that sounds pretentious. Let me try again.  The great minds in mathematics and physics made their discoveries by observing and trying to understand the world around them.  They wrote down what they discovered, and today, we study their conclusions.

What we don’t do, is attempt to observe the world as they did and arrive, on our own, at the same conclusions.

There’s a school called the VanDamme Academy that sells a physics course using a “Historical, Inductive Approach”.  The gist of it is that you learn physics in the same chronological order as it was originally developed.

In doing so,  they’ve had students ask the same questions that the original discoverers asked and even make the same discoveries.  Many discoveries logically follow from previous discoveries, if you have the opportunity to make the same logical jump as the original scientist, how much greater will your understanding be?

Newton, Fourier and Volt didn’t have the answers.  They could not study to learn what they learned.  They had to play, to explore, to experiment.  And no one would dispute that they had a true understanding of the principles they discovered.

Now, to be sure, they did have the answers from what many scientists did before them.  They weren’t starting from a blank slate.  The point is that whether you are given the answer or not, true understanding takes exploration.

The herein lies the problem: When you are given the answer, do you continue the journey to actual understanding or do you check it off and move on?

I’m not arguing that “study” is bad.  It’s a tool for getting answers in your head.  But it’s not a substitute for the journey.

And when I read about others on this journey to Japanese fluency who say they stopped studying for a while and forgot almost everything, I have to wonder: Where was the play?

You can stop studying and keep watching Japanese TV. You can stop studying and keep reading Japanese websites or have conversations or flip through some Manga.  You can tire of study, but you probably won’t tire of comedy, drama, news, victory, defeat, triumph and struggle all at the same time.  Unless you plan to take a few months off from all of humankind, the journey can continue.

Study and Exploration are related, but exploration can exist without study.

The purpose of study, in my opinion, is to guide and complement exploration.  Study without exploration is a recipe for unnatural language production and burnout.  Exploration without study takes longer because some fundamentals are very hard to figure out without hints.

You explore what interests you - but while you’re out there, keep an eye out for these words.  Take note of this grammatical pattern.  Look out for this Kanji.

No matter what you’re learning or how hard you study, eventually you have to play and explore if you are ever to get true understanding.

How many people do you know who’ve taken a class for something but have no understanding?  Compare them to the people who played with the subject before class and continued to play afterwards.  The class, the study, was very helpful, but without the play and true understanding, it just fades away.

 


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Exile Catchy Best - Well Said.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Exile Catchy Best….Catchy….Catchy Best.  In English that sounds absolutely horrible.  No English pop group would dare put such a name on their album but there it is on a new best hits album from the J-Pop group Exile.Not so Catchy in English

Sometimes it seems like the Japanese are intentionally butchering English to make some crazy point.

In Japanese, “Catchy Best” is not only acceptable, it’s excellent!  Awesome, even.  Possibly the new Hotness.

The problem is simple: We aren’t seeing what native Japanese speakers see.

If you were born in Japan and in the age group that enjoys Exile, Catchy Best would make perfect sense to you.  But you weren’t and you aren’t.

The only way to see what they see, is to look at what they look at.  Walk a thousand miles in their shoes and you’ll begin to understand what’s cool, funny and boring to them.

I can’t imagine what ‘Beavis and Butthead’, ‘Ren and Stimpy’, or 50 Cent sound like to non-native English speakers.  How do you explain the jokes, the names, the lyrics?

If you really want to know, you’re going to have to watch a lot of English TV and listen to a lot of English music.

Curiosity and Appreciation

I pretty much listen to Japanese music exclusively now.  Not because I’m trying to immerse myself, but because I enjoy it.

And although my collection is small, I rarely go back and listen to my english collection.  Of course, at first, I couldn’t do this.  At first, I found it really difficult to find Japanese music I liked.

And the reason was simple.  I was looking for American music sung in Japanese instead of exploring Japanese music and learning to appreciate it.

And there are real differences between American and Japanese music.  The biggest difference? You can sing off-key on a Japanese Album.  This was hard to adjust to.

Singing off-key in English is for American Idol rejects.  It’s a reason to cringe and change the channel not raise your hand and ask for more.

And this is where curiosity and appreciation are so important.  While most Japanese music may sound strange or even bad to you, there are millions of Japanese who absolutely love it.  Are you curious as to why?

Are you willing to jump in and explore and learn to appreciate what the Japanese enjoy in their music?  And possibly even come to enjoy it in the same way they do?

Isn’t that what you want in learning Japanese as well?  To be able to appreciate “Catchy Best” in Japanese and have a feel for why it works in Japanese.

It’s certainly popular to point out all the crazy examples of Japanese using english, but for the language learner, how valuable is that?

They aren’t actually speaking english.  They’re throwing in english words while speaking Japanese.  They may even be using a definition for that word that you’ve never heard of!

Japanese people who hear or see it understand and don’t bat an eye.  Curious as to why?  Explore and you’ll come to appreciate that too.


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Keep It Moving

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

I ran across some interesting “rules” that accompany Ask Publishing’s Japanese Graded Readers:

１．やさしいレベルから読む
Start at an easy level
２．辞書を引かないで読む
Read without using a dictionary
３．わからないところは飛ばして読む
Skip any parts you don’t understand
４．進まなくなったらやめて、ほかの本を読む
When you hit a bottleneck, stop. Read a different book.

While I don’t think “rules” are necessary (and I do find it fun to read material that is far above my reading level) I do think that these provide an interesting way to look at reading Japanese: Keep it moving.

Sure, there’s value in stopping to look up words you don’t know or carefully parsing a selection to glean its meaning. And sometimes it’s worthwhile to push through something difficult if you think it’s worth it.

But at the same time, if you are willing to let go of knowing, right now, the meaning of every word you see, willing to accept that you don’t fully understand most of what you read, and not be discouraged when you read something you have absolutely no clue about, you’re on good footing.

To build a real feel for what any given Japanese writer is communicating, you’re going to have to read thousands upon thousands of pages of Japanese.

You can grind through that word for word, phrase for phrase, sentence for sentence, or you can enjoy the journey.

It means that reading Japanese isn’t about being “right” or knowing every answer. It’s about continually seeking greater understanding and learning to see the Japanese style of communicating: how they express themselves, use slang, metaphors, and word choice.

Given all the ways you could construct a grammatically correct Japanese sentence, how do the Japanese actually do it? Given all the words you could use to describe something, which ones do the Japanese actually use? How do they communicate fear, anticipation, hesitation or excitement?

You can build a list of these things and you can memorize it. Or you can be it. It’s one thing to know all these properties of Japanese and be able to recite them. It’s another thing to have absorbed so much Japanese that all these topics are internal to you.

It’s one thing to recite an answer, it’s quite another to be able to derive the answer off the top of your head.

It’s the difference between knowing the grammatical rule a sentence violates and getting a feel in the pit of your stomach that it just “sounds” wrong.

I’ve “mastered” English, if you will. But there are only two rules of spelling and grammar in English that I can recite. The first is: ‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ or in cases where the sound is like ‘ay’ as in neighbor or weigh. The second: ‘Good’ is a state of being and ‘Well’ describes an action i.e. Something is good if it is done well.

I keep these rules around because I sometimes forget them. Given the sheer number of spelling and grammar rules in English, having to keep two of them around seems reasonable, no?

And why would Japanese be any different? Dictionaries, Grammar lexicons and study lists are useful. But the real meat, the feel, the internalization, the effortless absorption comes from reading, reading and more reading.

Keep it moving.


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Who Cares About the Joyo Kanji?

Monday, April 14, 2008

A couple of thoughts on Kanji:

From the Reviewing the Kanji Forums:

I’m not quite finished [with Hesig’s Remembering the Kanji], I need about a month to finish, but it bugs me when I see kanji like 俺 not in the first book. This kanji is extremely popular and should have been taught a lot earlier. This makes me wonder, is 2042 not enough? Are there tons more out there like 俺? I wanted to quit once I finished but it looks like I may have to continue.

Learning a language is about communication - Not memorizing lists of words and Kanji. You learn to read Kanji to receive what others have written and how to write them to accomplish the opposite.

That Hesig has developed a technique to help memorize kanji writings doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself. It also doesn’t mean he’s an authority on what you need or want to know.

If you want to learn a character now, learn it.

Another from Reviewing the Kanji:

Does anyone have/know of a list of the everyday kanji that the average Japanese person would know which are not included in RTK1 (ie not joyo kanji)?

Do native Japanese speakers keep lists like this? Do Japanese learners who’ve attained fluency keep lists like this?

The only way to really answer the question of what non-Joyo Kanji you need to know is to read and read and read. The non-Joyo Kanji you run into repeatedly are the ones you need to know - Assuming you even bother to look up whether they are Joyo or not.

I realize that I sound cynical here but my underlying point, I think, is quite reasonable: If you listen to and read enough Japanese, most questions about how much and what order become irrelevant.

Reading thousands of pages of Japanese and learning those Kanji as you go, you can’t help but build a feel for which are more common and you’ll inevitably see all the Joyo Kanji and whatever extra ones you need to know.

The real question is not, How much? or What order?, it’s: How can I find enough to read and listen to that captures my interest and furthers my desire to learn Japanese?


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What goes into an SRS?

Monday, April 7, 2008

From Nihongo Notes:

If you read or hear anything in Japanese add it to Anki. Everything! Names, places, sentences, signs.

Keep it up. Try not to miss a day or you will begin to forget the cards. You don’t want to end up with hundreds of cards to review as it will only demotivate you. Try to practice small amounts but often.

Given the dangers of burnout in language learning, what and how much can go into an SRS? - or any review system for that matter?

The idea of putting “Everything!” in there seems reasonable, but only if you don’t read or hear very much. If you consume hours of Japanese every day through watching, listening and reading, collecting everything becomes a daunting task.

Not only because of the effort required to input all that data, but because acts of entertainment, discovery and play are reduced to work.

If an SRS is the core of learning a language, then everything else, including enjoyment, must submit to the time and effort it demands.

The reality is that an SRS is a tool to complement memory, not replace it. So let’s change the question, instead of asking what to put in an SRS, let’s ask, “What do you want to play with?”.

What words, kanji, patterns do you want to explore? What did you hear or read that you didn’t understand and want to spend more time developing an understanding? Not, what do you feel obligated to study; Not, what do you think you have to review - What do you want to play with?

By its nature, an SRS will push away what you understand, what you “know”. If you don’t want to play with what’s left, you’re in for a boring ride.

So how do you “play” with the material you don’t know or understand? This question, to me, represents the weakness of most language learning resources (and a lot of classroom learning in general). What we don’t know, we need to study, study, study.

In Physics, trying to learn what isn’t understood is called experimentation. In Astronomy it’s called exploration. In Marketing, it’s a test. In Finance, it’s called speculation. In life, it’s called living.

A lack of understanding is a reason to go out and explore, not a reason to buckle down and study harder.

And if an SRS helps you to focus your efforts on what you don’t understand, it’s really giving you starting points for further exploration. Topics to read about, blogs to find, short stories to uncover, podcasts, movies and TV shows to enjoy - All these can be found through exploring what you don’t understand.

So, what goes into an SRS? Whatever you want. Just be prepared to adjust if you find the SRS dumps a steaming pile of boredom on your plate every day.


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Which Comes First: Study or Play?

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

A quote from a discussion over at Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum:

What can I do to review Japanese at this advanced level? Reviewing grammar is painfully boring now — heck even have most of the guide and the grammar books that I read memorized –, and the only other option for any real growth is watching dramas and stuff, and recording and analyzing what is said. But this is tedious, as i have to post(sic) every 10~20 seconds to type down whats been said.

On top of that there are no 日本人　around here to practice with.

So what can I do that is fun and stimulating?

Running out of things to study is a very strange statement. You aren’t learning Japanese just so you have something to study. There is something you want to do and you need to know Japanese to do it.

You want to watch Anime in Japanese with no subtitles and get every joke. You want to read Japanese newspapers without a dictionary and see world events from a different perspective. You want to talk to native Japanese people on the phone and speak so well, they assume you’re Japanese as well.

I had a conversation with my younger cousin this past Easter Sunday. He’s learning Spanish in his High School classes. I asked what his teacher recommended that he do outside of his class assignments.

She recommended watching some Spanish TV, reading something, or speaking to a fluent Spanish speaker. Wonderful.

Here is my question: Why doesn’t learning a new language begin with watching, reading and listening?

Why don’t we first cultivate an interest in the culture? Wanting to get more out of the books you read and the shows you watch is a great motivator for study.

It also provides context for everything learned in a textbook or a classroom. There are many words in every language that have no need whatsoever for an SRS or any kind of review. They are spoken and written so often that the only reason you would study them is if your only interaction with the language was studying lists of words.

Why do we look at new vocabulary and then go hunting for examples? Why aren’t we consuming so much of the target language, that plucking out new words for further review is almost effortless?

How do we come to think that watching TV, reading books and newspapers and simply enjoying them without analyzing every-single-phrase is a privilege for those who’ve mastered the language?

How is taking a day off from study to relax and read a book for a couple hours a lack of discipline? Even if your reading pace is slow and you have to skip whole sentences because you don’t know the Kanji or the grammar - Even if you don’t understand 90% of the conversation during the movie, you’re making progress.

You get more of what you reinforce.

If you think, “study, study, study”, that’s what you’ll do and that’s what Japanese will become: something you study.

But if you think, “explore, explore, explore”, you will constantly find things to drive your interest in the Japanese language and culture. The greater your interest, the easier it is to take a break from smelling the roses and do some studying.


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The Problem With SRS

Monday, March 24, 2008

For those who don’t know, an SRS is a Spaced Repetition System. It creates longer and longer intervals between reviews when you get the answer correct. The idea is to review just before you forget, to encourage long-term memory retention.

And in this technical statement from supermemo’s Theoretical aspects of spaced repetition in learning, you’ll find both the value and the problem with Spaced Repetition Systems:

In a long-term process, for the forgetting index equal to 10%, and for a fixed daily working time, the average time spent on memorizing new items is only 5% of the total time spent on repetitions. This value is almost independent of the size of the learning material. [emphasis mine]

It’s saying that in the long term, most of your time is devoted to pushing items further into memory, to making progress - And this is good.

But note that for modeling the memory performance of the human brain as an equation, or modeling anything for that matter, when you find yourself with too many variables, you take most of them and fix them at some value so you can solve a simpler problem.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “All things being equal” or “Ceteris paribus”, what they mean is, “There is too much change for me to understand what’s going on so I’ll just assume that everything is frozen except the one thing I want to measure.”

And this is quite reasonable. We know because the SRS model is proven to be an effective memory tool.

But that’s not the whole story. The reality is those other variables do change. Which begs the question: How much do those changes matter?

Let’s take the assumption of a “fixed daily working time”. Is this true? Of course not. Most people don’t spend exactly the same amount of time studying everyday. And even if we allot and use 1 hour, everyday, our pace, focus, concentration and motivation vary from day to day.

Fixed time has been useful for modeling the SRS methodology and proving its value, but less useful for implementation. Why? You implement in reality, not in the model.

The reality is that users skip days, their motivation wanes, circumstances consume their time, they get bored, they burnout or they forget.

And when they come back, what does an SRS do? For today’s fixed working time, it globs together the work from the previous 3 days you missed. So much for the fun of language learning, you now have real, bonafide work to do.

Which is more important: The discipline to use an SRS everyday, or the discipline to have meaningful interaction with Japanese everyday through reading, watching, listening, speaking and writing?

SRS is a powerful methodology, but it can be completely undone with a simple case of burnout.


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Burnout and Language Learning

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Burnout is the greatest enemy of learning any language. It takes a goal like fluency that motivates you, that drives you, and turns it into something you hate.

I think most of us have had that moment when we’ve worn ourselves down trying to memorize as much as we can in as little time as possible and for just a moment, you hate the language, you hate learning the language and you want to throw the whole project out and find something else to do.

Or worse, the amount of time you spend with the language slowly slips over time and before you know it, you haven’t touched it in a couple months!

Given my experiences with burnout, I’ve been trying to nail down what it is so I can deal with it directly.

I think there are 3 elements:

  • Demanding Perfection too Soon
  • Lack of Context
  • Excessive Reviewing

I’ll start with context. Without context, all you have are Kanji and word lists. Long Kanji and word lists. We don’t use words out of context, why try to learn them there?

In my earlier kanji experiments, I tried using a list of the most commonly used Japanese words to provide context for learning kanji. Whenever I added kanji, I also computed what common words I could now read that only included kanji from my list.

This way I could build my vocabulary while building a feel for each kanji based on the words it appeared in.

It was horrible. The words added context for the kanji and that helped, but the words were out of context! Drilling the words to practice reading the kanji was absolutely mind numbing.

Wherever context is lacking, burnout is lurking.

Next up is excessive reviewing. This is simply a case of prioritization. What needs to be reviewed and what doesn’t?

Spending hours reviewing material that doesn’t need review is asking for burnout. Spaced Repetition Systems or SRS’s in their various forms are a great tool for dealing with this. Material that is easy for you is reviewed less and challenging material is reviewed more.

But even an SRS can blow up if you put too much in it too quickly. Then it doesn’t matter how well you’ve prioritized what to review, you’re spending way too much time reviewing.

Variety is the key. Reviewing/studying is one of many things to do to learn a language. When time spent studying pushes out reading for pleasure, enjoying a good TV show or conversing with a pen pal, burnout is bound to happen.

Lastly, Demanding perfection too soon. This one’s subtlety is what makes it more insidious. Kanji, words, grammar, pronunciation, listening comprehension, reading speed: All these things take time to learn and are learned at different rates.

Some kanji come easy and some are hard. Some grammar patterns are easy to read but harder to hear. Everything is learned at different rates.

So, to force yourself to study and restudy the words or kanji that challenge you, is fighting your own brain. Your mind wants pictures, sound, patterns to associate information. Subjecting it to more review and study for what your mind hasn’t built a pattern for is busy work.

See the kanji being used. See the word being used. Your mind will create imagery, uncover patterns that will be the basis for your memory.

The implication is that when you get an answer wrong, note the correct answer and move on. Subjecting your self to “extra” review is a recipe for burn out. Then, not only won’t you recall the information, but you might not even want to.

Learning a new language is a fun process. Eliminate sources of burnout and you can keep it that way.


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How long does it take to learn 1 Kanji?

Sunday, February 10, 2008

All the tools I’ve seen out there are about learning Kanji Now! Fast! Locking it in your brain forever! Special mnemonic techniques! Learn hundreds of Kanji in a few days, remember them forever!

While it would be lovely to flip a switch and immediately understand another language. These things take time. So I’ll ask the question - what if it took 2 months to learn 1 Kanji?

Not 2 months for every Kanji, just some of them. Some you pick up immediately. Some take weeks. But suppose one took 2 months. Is that bad?

What if taking 2 months was the best way to learn that Kanji? What would that mean for all the special memory techniques out there?

Consider this. You use a special method and get that Kanji in your head. Great. Now what? What can you do with it? How would you use it? How do the Japanese use it?

When you see that Kanji, what do you want to pop into your head? Its English meaning? An English keyword? An English story? All of its ON and KUN readings? A memorized list of Japanese compounds? A photograph from some learning software?

This is a question that I don’t think we ask as language learners. We want the map, the list, the key. We want the Kanji in our head now.

Meanwhile, we don’t do any of that in our native language. We understand the meaning of the words we use because we’ve seen them used six-ways-from-sunday.

We effortlessly use words like “up” and “set” that have hundreds of definitions without a second thought.

Did you memorize all the uses of “set”? Can you even name 20 of them? 10? And yet you can understand every one of them.

You know what pops in my head when I hear the word “set”? Nothing. Not a thing. There is no context. It doesn’t mean anything until a person gives it meaning by putting it in some context. Without context, it means nothing so I think of nothing.

When I listen to someone speak, when I read, I don’t think in words and characters. There is a thought in that person’s head, he wants to get it into mine. The characters, words and grammar are just the carrier signal, nothing more.

So. Why hang so many “things” on each Kanji? Is recalling all that information at will somehow more special than wasting time memorizing all the definitions of “set” and “up”?

Well, I need to know 2000 Kanji to read a Japanese newspaper. No you don’t.
Well, if I’m reading a book and I see a word with Kanji I don’t know, I have to look it up. No you don’t.
I can’t just read any book if I don’t know every word. Yes you can.
I have to read books that are at my reading level. No you don’t.

I built my intuitive unthinking feel for “set” and “up” by reading and hearing those words used. How can I build the same feel for Kanji, for Japanese vocabulary, for Japanese grammar, by avoiding reading until I’ve “learned” all this stuff?

Intuitive unthinking feel. That is what we have in English. That is what we want in Japanese.


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